Page Aim
This Forum brings together a selection of articles, letters, queries and other materials produced for and by people working on S&P concerns.
Articles and other lengthier contributions will go directly into the Documents Store.
Outline Contents
What’s New to Visitors Forum? and a regular Editorial will precede this webpage’s Letters and Queries sections.
Document Store
Keynote Themes
Is Community Empowerment Leaving Community Groups Behind?
Why Does Our Third Sector Have its Head in the Sand?
Matching Up Funding Availabilities and S&P Work.
Forum Articles: 2010
Summer:
Campaign for Honest Money.
Ethical Consumerism.
Community Empowerment, Community Voices.
Spring:
Locality Working and the Sustainability Imperative.
Unsustainable World, Untenable Politics.
Will Double Devolution Empower Communities?
The Credit Crunch, Sustainability and Participation.
Democracy and the English Regions.
Archive
Debating Chamber
Talking Points
Queries
Adverts
Credit, Climate Change & Badges.
Dear Grandparents
The Freedom Formula
new articles
November 2010 Document Store Update
Is Community Empowerment Leaving Community Groups Behind?
Matthew Scott, Director of Community Sector Coalition, says that "collective and independent principled action has never been more urgent" in this article that first appeared in Urban Clearway issue 64. See page 12’s Documents Store.
Unsustainability and Empowerment
Leafleting, petitioning, literature sales, letter writing - are all well established ways of raising concerns in order to effect change. But there is now a broad raft of new working methods available for all those of us involved in sustainability organisations. These openings will bring the role of participatory democracy to the fore in local policy making.
Some of the new participation opportunities are summarised and explored in page 08’s Helpful Lobbying Tools. To appreciate the key role of National Indicators also see page 17’s Local S&P Opportunities in this site's Case Studies Section.
Third Sector Assemblies – How These Can Promote Sustainability Concerns
Just see what it's possible for you to now do to bring sustainability into local decision taking where you live.
How can we help them respond to initiatives such as those being rolled out by the Fairtrade and Transition movements? See page 18 for an insight how they’re rolling out in two localities.
editorial
This site’s been established to inform, aid and urge participation in local decision making processes by:
·1 Bringing key sustainability concerns to the fore in local decision making processes,
·2 Bringing together news about topical sustainability and participation developments,
·3 Providing a reference resource,
·4 Offering a networking opportunity.
Until now sustainabilitylinks.org has been something of a pilot version of what it is to become.
Page 01’s Contents features are to give visitors an idea of the website’s layout and scope, while page 02’s International Initiatives explains where we’re coming from and why we think a means to bring together global concerns and local decision making is something long, long overdue. You may’ve already noticed that the Home Page flags a few pages it’s useful to visit first.
It’s hoped that the site can help organisations, communities of interest, neighbourhoods and individuals help promote sustainability in our dangerously unsustainable world.
“You have to work through local and sometimes national governments, but probably more important is to empower local communities. The people affected are the immense majority of the population.”
Ricardo Navarro. Chair, FOE International, 2002.
letters
Still Sustaining Confusion?
The Sustainable Funding Project is encouraging third sector organisations to embrace market principles by generating income from trade in services. This trading is being encouraged to help organisations not only secure, quote “self esteem” (what have they been up until now then, work shy drains on the national purse?) but, more importantly, establish their ‘sustainability’ in market terms.
Used here, the words ‘sustainable’ / sustainability and their derivatives clearly have the same sort of doublethink meaning as they do when used in phrases such as ‘sustainable’ communities (new building developments) ‘sustainable’ housing (not council owned) and 'sustainable' third world aid and trade (continued economic exploitation).
This perverse usage makes everyone think that the Government’s dealing with the national impacts of our global unsustainability – but such a cruel deception has more to do with political parties desperately trying to ‘sustain’ their own role in government.
'Gordon
Orwell'
Please can real contributors include contact details.
I'm a bit concerned about the emphasis on 'sustainability'. I mean, it’s a term that seems to have no urgency about it (though of course it is crucial to a solution). As climate change threatens to wipe out millions of people - and thousands of other species by extinction - I feel you need something which conveys this urgency a bit more. Large-scale survival is at stake.
I shall certainly be dipping into the website from time to time. It'd be nice to have, say, a bi-monthly update of the latest key developments, a sort of survival newsletter? I've a soft spot for the printed word myself, but I can see it would be quicker and cheaper to do it on the website or via email.
Carl
G
All Saints, Wolverhampton.
Hidden Agenda
Locality working? It's almost as if national policies are preparing communities for the eco hell-hole that's to come but, rather than spell it out, leave us all to join up the dots.
'Jack
Lovelock'
Please can real contributors include contact details.
EA and Cynical Misrepresentation
Since the exposé of malpractice within the University of East Anglia's climate change unit, the bulk of 'I told you so' criticism has come from vested interests, all anxious to deny the human causes of climate change - or some even that it's happening.
These voices aren't raised to reason the science against or to defend the integrity of enquiry but simply to protest against any suggestion that anyone should give up their oil profits, gas guzzlers or air miles. The implications of peak oil aside, these 'vested interest' sceptics should really consider the genuine scientific evidence that we humans are changing the planet.
For example, a low profile - but immensely significant - development took place this year when geologists had to give our era a new name in order to reflect the extent to which our lifestyle has changed natural systems (the previous, pre-industrial era had existed for over 10,000 years). It would be predictably perverse for climate change dissenters to discount the geological studies showing that human behaviour has changed not only the earth's weather and carbon cycles but also such things as ocean acidification, soil composition and patterns of erosion.
Biologists can also point to ways industrialisation is affecting our own bodies - for example in the UK between 350 and 500 artificial chemicals are now found in the human foetus.
Such findings really do serve to contextualise the desperation of those sceptics who deny any correlation between human activity and climate change.
Paul
Galley
Park Road, Bedworth
You condemn "predictably perverse climate change dissenters" for discounting studies showing how human behaviour has modified the biosphere.
Predictably perverse? How empirically determined? By whose moral compass? By those studiously fabricating academic fairytales for gain?
What "dissenter" anywhere maintains building eco-towns on green belt land has zero environmental impact; mercury isn't hazardous; or unprecedented commercially driven deforestation for biofuels etc, won't drastically modify the biosphere?
Surely it's the global warming cabal of integrity-challenged politicos, academic opportunists and specific corporate vested interests relishing huge new tax handouts (to fund carbon market largesse for insider advantage) that stands exposed as data fiddling fraudsters, not sceptics?
Cynically misrepresenting critics via Orwellian linguistic loading, eg Miliband's "saboteurs" epithet, means that few authentic environmentalists now dare deploy "green" as credible ID.
Martyn
Gittins
Greenfield Road, Birmingham
queries
Earlier queries are being collected in the Document Store’s Debating Chamber.
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