BY mhor

G8 protest camp organisers outline plans
20 June 2005 17:58
http://scotlandtoday.scottishtv.co.uk/content/default.asp?page=s1_1_1&ne...

(see website for tv news report)

The organisers of a massive G8 protest camp near Stirling spoke about their plans for the first time today. As Scotland Today revealed last week, an alliance of groups is trying to set up a site with enough room for 5,000 people, 20 miles away from the summit at Gleaneagles.

The protesters say the camp beside the River Forth will offer a glimpse of a better world - an environmentally friendly eco-village. The site at an old farm could take up to 5,000 people.

Camp organiser Phil Batchelor said: "We consider ourselves to be very responsible organisations, we're trying to build a very peaceful site here to demonstrate positive alternatives to the G8. We really don't expect any trouble or anything that would disrupt the lives of people in Stirling."

The camp will also be a base. On its website, one of the main protest groups says: "Dissent! feels it is possible to gain a major and inspiring victory against global capitalism by directly shutting the G8 down by blockading the roads...while other groups go over the hills to enter Gleneagles."

The same site says the final tactics would be worked out within the camp. This site would bring thousands of G8 protesters within 20 miles of Gleneagles. The hotel is over the Ochil hills there to the northeast. To the police, it also has the distinct advantage of there being only one way in and out of the sight. They will be able to monitor the protesters as they come and go.

The organisers Scotland Today spoke to today played that down, saying they did not know about what else was being planned. They do have an ally - the chairman of the nearest community council is a former member of CND.

Alistair Raeburn from Cambuskenneth Community Council said: "I think it's going to be in somebody's yard, and why not? In a personal level I have some sympathy with what they're doing, so I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be here. What strikes me though that if Bush comes into Prestwick airport, he's on the flight path to Gleneagles from here, so so he might very well see the village from the air and appreciate what he's coming to."

The local council will decide whether to give the camp the go-ahead on Friday.

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Stirling set to host temporary campsite for G8 protesters
15 June 2005 17:58
http://scotlandtoday.scottishtv.co.uk/content/default.asp?page=s1_1_1&ne...

(see the weblink for tv news video)

Twenty acres of publicly owned land beside Stirling Albion football ground is set to become a temporary campsite for 5,000 G8 protesters. Stirling Council has reached and agreement in principal, to lease the land to an alliance of campaigners.

The protesters are calling it a rural convergence centre - to everyone else it will be a temporary campsite and a base for their activities during the G8 summit. The potential site lies behind Stirling Albion's Forthbank Stadium. An alliance of environmental and peace groups want to set up an eco-village with room for 5000 people.

The land on Borrow Meadow Farm belongs to Stirling Council, which has agreed in principle to lease it to the protesters. Its chief executive said the protesters had been close to signing deals with private landowners but twice their plans fell through at the last minute. They came to the council asking if they could help.

Keith Yates, chief executive of Stirling Council said: "We're aware people will be coming in any case. The issue is, is it better to have a planned site where 5000 people can spend time during the summit than a series of random camps around the area. I think the feeling is it's better to have a camp on a planned basis."

Councillors will decide next week if the camp should get the go ahead. If it does, the protestors will travel from the site to demonstrations round Scotland and 20 miles away at Gleneagles. Today veteran peace campaigner Tarqi Ali backed protestors who want to march past Gleneagles on the opening day of the summit, saying: "There have been massive demonstrations against the Iraq war, a million and a half in London. No violence at all, absolutely nothing, no tension with the police. And the same thing could happen here."

It is being claimed that police opposition to the march is political. SNP leader Alex Salmond said: "It's my belief that the decision was taken by the Foriegn Office and the Home Office, not by the chief constable himself."

Tony Benn, the chairman of Stop the War, said: "It would be a very dangerous thing to say we can't have a demonstration because of the inconvience."

In Stirling the protesters will have to meet a series of conditions before the camp is given permission. Inevitably there will be concern about this plan, opinion in Stirling will be divided. But the chief executive of the council clearly believes that this single site is the best option not just for the protestors, but for the public as well.

How the environment and eating "Local Organic Food" is linked to Gandhi's ideology for transforming the world.
June 5, observed annually as World Environment Day, turns the spotlight on issues like deforestation, pollution, climate change and global warming, but these discussions seldom make a connection with Gandhian ideology which offers a simple but powerful answer to the environmental ills that beset the earth today. Now validation of what Bapuji advocated, comes from an unlikely source -- the Worldwatch Institute, a research organization based in the USA.

Although Gandhi is remembered for his espousal of non-violence as an effective strategy for conflict resolution, his philosophy covered a much wider canvas and included a vision of development based on small, self-sufficient communities that grew their own food, in a sustainable model with decision-making vested at the grassroots level. The same idea of local self-sufficiency, particularly in food, is the central theme of the Worldwatch Institute's publication titled "Eat Here", which describes the enormous environmental price that modern societies pay, in terms of transport costs (and the pollution that millions of trucks and lorries cause, leading to widespread increases in respiratory illnesses around the world), the tons of chemical preservatives that get added to food products to prevent spoilage in transit across long distances, and the health costs that the community ends up paying under this global supermarket pattern of development.

Only 6 per cent of what one pays for a supermarket loaf of bread, Eat Here points out, goes to the farmer who actually grows the wheat.The rest goes into the pockets of middlemen, transporters, and oil companies. It is the same with perishable fruit and vegetables hauled over long distances. No wonder farmers, who feed the country, remain impoverished and contemplate suicide, while mammoth agribusiness corporations rake in earnings greater than the GDPs of some nations.

It is considered an 'improvement in the quality of life' if a community can enjoy out-of-season fruit or exotic vegetables imported from thousands of miles away, but what about the costs involved in packaging, refrigeration, the huge amounts of waste and pollution? Who pays? Also, if the availability of Washington apples (or Australian butter) in Bangalore is construed as 'progress', what about accountability when problems arise? An outbreak of mad cow disease saw millions of cows being burnt on massive pyres in England recently (causing dioxin scares from the smoke) and the slaughter of millions of chicken worldwide in the wake of a fear of bird flu. When food comes from far, it becomes impossible to trace the trouble spot in the long chain from producer to importer to retailer to buyer. Whereas, with food grown locally, consumers know what they get, where it was produced, with what inputs, and who sold it. The supermarket model of food retailing defaults on accountability and dehumanizes the community links between buyer and producer. The non-quantifiable costs are huge.

No wonder then, that initiatives for small community level food production and sales, are growing all over the West, as part of a "healthy, holistic model of living'. "The food tastes fresher, it is tastier, there is less processing and less of additives, and less chance of contamination between farm and plate, so it is healthier," say members of this growing movement for 'eating local'. It is described as "food democracy" (because there is less dependence on huge companies that can dictate monopolistic terms, to suppliers as well as buyers) and a movement against "culinary imperialism" (protesting against mass promotion of invariant fast food items that over-ride the attractions and advantages of local, culture-related eating traditions in the name of 'novelty' or 'modernity' especially in the developing countries).

Gandhi's protest was against another kind of imperialism, but his ideology encompassed a pattern of local self-sufficiency that is exactly what members of the 'local foods' movement in Europe and USA are promoting. Some of the shelf food is actually described by these groups as "embalmed food", because of the enormous amounts of synthetic chemicals that go into them.

Food trucks account for 40 per cent of road freight in the UK. In the US, food travels on average 2,400 km from farm to plate. That calls for enormous amounts of oil for transport - and oil becomes the reason for even going to war, because without oil the nation starves. Under the Gandhian model of local self-sufficiency, not only is dependence on extraneous factors (oil imports) reduced, the costs too get reduced. Imported foods, Eat Here estimates, costs four times as much as local food if the environmental costs are added. There are also the additional bonuses of better human relations within the community, cultural cohesiveness, and the dignity of individuals that comes with self-reliance that Gandhi valued so highly.

From consumer activist Ralph Nader, to the president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in the US, and professors of bio-ethics and nutrition at Princeton and Columbia, praise for Eat Here's focus on 'reclaiming homegrown pleasures in a global supermarket' has flown instintedly from different quarters of the West. Farmers' markets are burgeoning, and even American school cafeterias are choosing locally grown foods. While we, in the developing countries, scurry to adopt the dehumanized, cost-ridden, environmentally unsound models of supermarket retailing of food, in the name of 'progress'.

by Sakuntala Narasimhan
Snail Mail: 217, block 3, 27th cross, Jayanagar,
Bangalore, India 560011
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Eliminate Hunger:
http://www.thrive.org.uk http://www.greenthumbnyc.org http://www.yesmagazine.com/article.asp?ID=576 http://www.communitygarden.org http://www.permaculture.org.uk http://www.camphill.org.uk http://www.neemfoundation.org http://www.treesforlife.org http://www.livingnutrition.com http://www.carbon.org http://www.growingsolutions.com http://www.emnz.com http://www.acresusa.com http://www.growbiointensive.org http://www.tilth.org http://www.naturewise.org.uk http://www.echonet.org http://www.biodynamic.org.uk http://www.healthmasters.com http://www.wattsgardenclub.org
http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/ppatch Luke 10:29 http://www.seattletilth.org http://www.greengridroofs.com http://www.ecoroofsystems.com http://www.miller-roofscapes.co.uk http://www.zinco.de

Organic Farming will Feed the World:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2005/06/92739.php

Organic Technology for Gardeners and Farmers:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2005/06/92738.php

Waste not, Want Not:
http://www.wormwoman.com http://www.zeri.org http://www.oceanarks.org http://www.wolvertonenvironmental.com http://www.emtech.org http://www.bokashi.co.nz ..

Allotments UK:
http://www.organicallotment.co.uk http://www.allotments-uk.com http://www.allotments4all.co.uk http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/allotmentkids.html ..

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA):
http://www.cuco.org.uk/index.php?page=3

BY Tim Winton

Peak Oil and Permaculture explains the dynamics of the impending peak in global oil production and the implications for Australian society. Declining energy availability will spell the end of global economic growth and the consumerist culture it supports. Permaculture is introduced as one of a number of related, radical cultural alternatives that can be adopted for the transition to a post-consumer world.

Peak oil: you may have heard the term a few times lately or this may be a first, but it is unlikely to be the last time you come across the idea that global oil production is about to start its terminal decline. In the last two or three months this issue has left the confines of a small but committed community of peak oil analysts and leapt into the mainstream press. Analysts are warning that peak oil will be the defining event of this century, that it will rival climate change as the focus of sustainability, and that the world as we know it will change beyond recognition in a very short period of time. How could an event of this magnitude have remained outside mainstream awareness for so long?

If you think back to the first time you heard about global warming, it probably didn�t register all that highly on your list of impending global catastrophes. But, once the concept was explained as the �Green House Effect�, where increasing concentrations of industrial gases like CO2 turned the atmosphere into a gigantic hothouse, it probably became a little clearer. Peak oil, the dark twin of climate change, has no such easy metaphors, however it does require understanding a few unfamiliar concepts.

The first concept to understand is that our whole way of life is dependent on cheap, abundant hydrocarbon energy sources, mostly oil and natural gas. Not only are many of the things we take for granted made from oil and natural gas feed stocks, but more importantly almost everything we depend on contains high amounts of �embodied energy� sourced from these hydrocarbon fuels. Embodied energy is the amount of energy it takes to make something. The materials we take for granted in modern industrial economies, like concrete, steel, plastic, rubber and the products we make them into like cars, roads, factories and houses all take extraordinary amounts of energy to produce, transport and operate. Thanks to fossil fuels, we are now living in an era of enormous energy availability, embodied into historically unprecedented amounts of material wealth. This state of affairs is a recent development, but already it has become the norm and expectation of nearly everyone in the industrialised world and the desire of increasing numbers in the developing world.

The second thing to understand is that global oil production is about to peak and then forevermore slowly but inevitably decline. Shortly after, so will natural gas, the only other widely available energy source comparable to oil. It took the dedicated work of a small number of retired oil geologists and industry analysts to expose the impending peak in global oil production. Up until they started publicizing their work, the conventional oil industry wisdom was that supplies could continue to grow at 2-3% per year, just like they always had, for many decades to come. It turns out that this conventional wisdom is getting harder and harder to justify. The peak oil advocates are increasingly seen as being accurate and the figures coming out of organizations with vested interests in helping big oil companies protect their image as good investments are increasingly seen as unreliable and unlikely.

Both the US Geological Survey and the International Energy Agency have used suspect methodologies to make predictions consistent with oil industry expectations. Highly regarded retired oil geologists like Colin Campbell of The Association for the Study of Peak Oil (www.peakoil.net) have taken years, accessing the best data available, to painstakingly demonstrate beyond doubt that the peak in oil production will come much earlier than expected. It could even be happening now, and will most certainly occur within the decade. Part of the reason for the interest in peak oil lately is that financial markets are looking for reasons for the high price of oil. If its supply can be increased, why is the price staying so high? Increasingly now the interpretation, even by large conservative financial institutions, major banks and Wall Street investment houses, is that global oil production is indeed reaching its peak.

What about alternative energy sources? Can�t we just switch over to solar or wind or even nuclear power? This is the most difficult concept in understanding the importance of peak oil. Not all energy sources are created equal. What makes oil and gas so attractive is that they have very high �energy returned on energy invested� or energy/profit ratios. Every energy source requires an investment of some energy to make it available. Oil needs to be located, drilled for, pumped, refined and delivered to the petrol station to be a useful form of energy. All this activity takes energy. Oil has historically had a very high energy/profit ratio. Until recently, it took roughly 1 barrel of oil�s worth of energy to make over 20 barrels available at the petrol station. This is an energy profit ratio of over 20:1. The reason for this is that oil and gas are very concentrated forms of energy. Essentially they are fossilized sunlight in the form of dead plants, concentrated into hydrocarbons by the work of immense geological pressure and temperature over long periods of time. The energy profit ratio of oil is now dropping sharply as the biggest and easiest deposits are being depleted. The energy profit, or �net energy� availability, determines the potential material wealth of a society, not the technologies which burn that energy.

I recently saw an ad for a device promising �free energy from the sun.� It costs $1000. I already have one--it�s called a solar panel. I have invested in a �free energy� machine for my house. The catch is that I have to �invest� in a technology that took an awful lot of fossil fuel energy to produce. The universe is full of free energy, but we must always invest some energy to make it available. It�s like the old business adage: �you have to spend money to make money.� If I spend 100 units of energy to make my solar panel and over its 40-year life it pays me back 400 units of energy, then the solar panel has an energy profit ratio of 4:1. Solar energy is abundant, but diffuse, and so are other alternatives like wind and tidal power. After 30 years of research and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, solar energy has not increased in efficiency by more than a marginal amount. In economic terms, if we were to switch to solar power tomorrow it would be like taking an 80% pay cut.

It takes 1500 regular-sized solar panels to provide the energy needed to power my four wheel drive utility at full speed for one hour. It takes less than 15 litres of petrol to do the same. One barrel of oil (200 litres) contains an amount of energy equal to the energy expended by 60 people working every day for a whole year! Wind and solar currently provide less than a ½ of one percent of the global energy mix and even at record growth rates they are not predicted to grow at more than 10% per year. The International Energy Agency recently issued a report stating we must start creating an alternative energy infrastructure 20 years before the onset of peak oil to avoid severe economic dislocation. Things do not look encouraging.

In 2020 there will be the same amount of oil available as there was in 1985. This doesn�t sound like a catastrophe; however, economic growth is dependent on energy growth. If peak production takes place within the next five years, then by 2020 it is clear that energy descent will be well under way. The corporate global economy cannot function without economic growth- the whole system is dependent on growing energy availability to support growing material wealth to support growing money supply. When oil and gas production peak, total global energy availability will start its terminal decline and so will the global economy.

As long as we can adjust our consumption then things could be all right. Studies show that people are happiest when they have enough wealth to meet their needs and a few of their wants, but no more. Energy descent may not be so bad, if it removes a few of the things that are making us unhappy, while leaving us in a position to meet our needs. The challenge lies in learning to change our expectations and take on a whole new set of understandings and behaviours necessary during the coming era of decreasing energy availability.

This is where permaculture comes in. Permaculture is the only discipline that has been created to deal with the energetic aspects informing sustainability. From a permaculture point of view, peak oil marks the end of the growth phase of global industrial society. This is a natural part of the life cycle of any dynamic system. First there is a growth phase, and after the concentrated, high-grade resources have been used up and total resource availability starts to drop, the system starts to decline. Permaculture is about learning the principles and practices that allow us to work with natural energy flows rather than relying on fossil fuels.

Permaculture is only partly about growing food and living more self-sufficiently. Permaculture is a design science that uses the patterns of nature to mimic ecological systems. Natural systems have evolved for millions of years to maximize the energy available from the sun. If we are to live well in the post-fossil fuel world, we will have to learn to do the same. Permaculturists have organic gardens because it is a way to grow good food on a low energy budget. They use clever design to make life easier and agriculture more productive. When the oil is gone, permaculture will offer some of the best strategies we know of for maintaining high levels of well-being. Permaculture is undergoing a renaissance as a set of principles and practices for the post-oil world where individuals and communities can learn to live well while we ride the downside of the energy availability curve.

How far off are the major effects of peak oil? It depends on a number of factors, but it is very unlikely to be farther out than a decade. One could argue that we are feeling the effects now, it�s just that we are telling ourselves a different story about why we went to war in Iraq, why we are bullying the Timorese over offshore gas fields, why people try to bomb us and why we have to work harder and harder to stay afloat financially. If peak oil is the story then a lot of these events start to make more sense, and then we can start to understand how to prepare in order for the �energy/culture� transition to be a much more positive experience. In every challenge there is opportunity.

Tim Winton is the founder and managing trustee of The Permaforest Trust, a not-for-profit sustainability education centre on the far north coast of New South Wales, Australia. The Permaforest Trust offers Austudy-approved Certificate 4 and Diploma level programs in Accredited Permaculture Training (APT �). More information is available at www.permaforesttrust.org.au

the vast majorty of people in stirling support a peaceful protest !

as do the vast majorty of scottish golfers at gleneagles ! go in peace

BY me

Get a life and join the real world