Last Sunday, the doorbell rung. Turned out to be a French camera crew wanting to film the allotments from our flats. I was the only one in our block who had answered the buzzer.
“Entrez,” I said. It was a random meeting but I recognised fellow media-types.
When the director came into my flat, I noticed he had a copy of The Spark under his arm.
“Tiens, voila,” I said, and introduced myself as its guest editor for the summer 2009 issue.
I gave him a copy of The Source, explaining I was now its food editor. (Never one to hold back on networking opportunities, moi. Even on Sunday morning).
He laughed. “I have just been reading that.”
He said he had really liked our features on local food:
Rachel Fleming’s take on UK food security policy and my review of Local Food, the great new practical action book by Tamzin Pinkerton and Transition co-founder Rob Hopkins.
Guess what? It turned out Nils Aguilar, the director, and his cameraman, Jérôme Polidor, were filming a movie on Transition. People in France are asking: how shall we eat when the oil runs out? Industrial food production relies on oil-based chemical fertilisers and long-distance transport.
The film is to introduce la belle France to Transition, the vibrant international green movement. Transition encourages practical grassroot local solutions NOW – rather than waiting for the proverbial sh*t to hit fan – and works with existing green groups to achieve it.
Fortuitously, I had just seen the movie In Transition, premiered by Sustainable Redland. I liked it because it shows an amazing range of sustainable projects for food, transport etc which are already up-and-running.
The director agreed: good to be positive.
I had seen The Age of Stupid the previous Sunday at Coed Hills festival in Wales. The human stories were heart-breaking but seemed to link more in my mind to the destruction caused by oil wars and pollution rather than climate change. I can connect them in my head but not in my heart. (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth woke many up but made me go to sleep – all those graphs).
Is it because – despite my green beliefs – I am in denial too?
What I am trying to say is my meagre grasp of the science does not affect my drive to save the planet.
It is common sense to save our precious non-renewable resources and reduce CO2 emissions to stop the ice caps melting – to search for another way of living.
To paraphrase a comment on George Monbiot’s post about climate change denial:
If you believe in climate change, you end up living in a just and caring world. If you don’t believe in climate change, it’s business as usual: exploitation, pollution, disease and oil wars.
Or as climate change campaigner George Marshall says: the facts are not enough to effect change. You need belief too.
Stop press: I just read a comment on the Transition blog from a woman in Wales whose spring is running dry for the first time in over a hundred years.
Climate change is not an intellectual debate.
Wake up. We need to wake up.
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6 responses so far ↓
Phil // October 7, 2009 at 3:05 pm |
Mon Dieu! Talk about serenpidity. The film crew came to the right place.
Choclette // October 15, 2009 at 7:10 pm |
Yes indeed we need to wake up, but it was good to see In Transition (which I did a couple of days ago) just to hold onto one’s sanity. It’s not that I’m in denial, far from it, I just get so depressed if I dwell on it for too long. Wake up first and then try and do the best we can and work with others so we don’t feel as though we are the only ones who care.
Choclette // October 15, 2009 at 7:18 pm |
My partner is desperately trying to get some resilience into the food we grow by breeding different sorts of root crops that will end up coping with our climate – simple reliance on the potato which is so susceptible to blight is a bit of a worry. Check his blog out at http://radix4roots.blogspot.com/ I know I’m biased but it’s well worth a look.
realfoodlover // October 16, 2009 at 8:37 am |
Hi Choclette – what a lovely organic chocolatey blog you have. A great resource for baking moments.
And I had a peek at your partner’s blog which looks fascinating – I confess I know nothing about oca, mashua and ulluco plants, but this looks the place to start.
It makes complete sense to breed different sorts of root crops, in our changing, uncertain, warming climate.
It’s great to have alternatives to potatoes. As you say: susceptible to blight. Look what happened in the great Potato Famine, when Ireland grew potatoes as a cash crop monoculture – this over-reliance on one crop was disastrous.
Plus potatoes are not my nutritional favourites – not everyone find them digestible perhaps because they belong to the deadly nightshade family. Apparently potatoes are cooked for over 12 hours in central America to make them more digestible.
Thanks for responding to my meditation on denial. It is a balancing act between knowing the depressing facts but not getting overwhelmed by them, or dismissing my own small green acts.
As Tony Benn says: “Hope is the engine of change.”
I’d like to add both blogs to my blogroll. Thanks again.
realfoodlover // November 6, 2009 at 1:43 pm |
This latest piece of news (5 November 2009) is interesting.
An executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.
http://bit.ly/3lJDCw
Ecological Internet, commenting on this case, says: “Climate change not a religion. Connecting with Gaia, Earth system, biodiversity & ecosystems is, though.”
Choclette // November 6, 2009 at 2:35 pm |
That’s really good to hear.
Am always rather worried when I say at work that I won’t fly for ethical reasons and keep waiting for the moment when they tell me I have to.