Camden's Culture and Environment Scrutiny Committee will be considering this issue on 16th April. Its an opportunity for people to put in deputations and make some suggestions. I am keen on a proper public debate on what we can do for our high streets, followed by some meaningful action!
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Safeguarding our high streets
In times of recession, our high streets are even more vulnerable to decline adding to the difficulties that they have been having over many years as a result of out of town shops with parking and now with internet shopping as well. In Hampstead we see small independent shops like Pure Fruit under threat. In Highgate, we have seen the high street taken over by estate agents. This is however not an issue for the well-off of Hampstead and Highgate alone but for all of us. Having healthy vibrant high streets helps ensure that there is a heart to our communities and it also means we are not locked into a system which means we need to drive to distant large impersonal shops. That is why the Greens have for a long time called for action to safeguard our high streets and why we support the demands of Hampstead traders and of the Highgate Society for action.
The Mary Portas report comes up with some interesting ideas, and we are calling for the Council to form a high streets team to put together a plan in response to the report. In particular, we will be supporting the request for Council rents on commercial accomodation to be frozen and reduced where necessary. The Council has powers to promote sustainable development and does not always have to push for the highest rents it can get. It needs to think about the shops and services that support the local community and safeguard high streets over the longer term. I will also be calling for a review of parking policy which means that people get free parking if they drive to the 02 Centre or Tesco but find it impossible and expensive to park if they want to shop at a local high street. We would also like to see the potential to use the neighbourhood forums as the basis of strong local groups to work on protecting high streets. This would mean development of the forums so they worked in partnership with Council officers, traders associations and others to develop effective strategies.
There is much that can be done to protecty our high streets which is essential for our local communities and for our local economies, and Camden Green Party is calling for a strong and effective action to achieve this.
The Mary Portas report comes up with some interesting ideas, and we are calling for the Council to form a high streets team to put together a plan in response to the report. In particular, we will be supporting the request for Council rents on commercial accomodation to be frozen and reduced where necessary. The Council has powers to promote sustainable development and does not always have to push for the highest rents it can get. It needs to think about the shops and services that support the local community and safeguard high streets over the longer term. I will also be calling for a review of parking policy which means that people get free parking if they drive to the 02 Centre or Tesco but find it impossible and expensive to park if they want to shop at a local high street. We would also like to see the potential to use the neighbourhood forums as the basis of strong local groups to work on protecting high streets. This would mean development of the forums so they worked in partnership with Council officers, traders associations and others to develop effective strategies.
There is much that can be done to protecty our high streets which is essential for our local communities and for our local economies, and Camden Green Party is calling for a strong and effective action to achieve this.
Saturday, 28 January 2012
Talking to young people - Green politics
I had the pleasure of talking to the bright young girls at South Hampstead High School just last Friday about green politics. They were clearly knowledgeable about the environment as well as about current affairs. The Euro-zone crisis was top on their minds. But I soon realised that there is still a big gap between the idea of the environment being important and seeing it as a political issue.
To them green politics is about an issue that all accept is important and has to be dealt with - but what has it got to do with real politics? That's about real issues like the threat of insolvency to countries, jobs, growth etc. A resident made a related point to me at my surgery - that our talk about the environment is perceived as talking about trees and plants rather than people!
How far from the truth! I should have pointed out that wanting to put the environment to one side and talk about the pressing issues is a bit like wanting to talk about saving your new TV when your house is about to be washed away.
But its clear that we also need to explain better why action is necessary on the environment now and why it is interconnected with everything else. We need to explain why green politics is important not just some work on the environment as an add on.
To many of us it seems obvious. People live within an ecosystem - without it we cannot survive. For the 6bn people ( and expected to be 9bn by 2050) on a planet that is already exploited to its full, which suffers from water scarcity, fuel scarcity and real threats to food security to avoid conflict or famine or both we need to live very differently. Otherwise our fragile ecosystems will collapse.
And there is a way that does allow us to bring things into balance but it is one that challenges consumerism and the idea that owning more and more is the ultimate aim of human existence. It has a different perspective of human beings - as creative and social beings that achieve real well-being through friendship, family, community and creativity.
It places a high premium on a fair distribution of resources so that we don't need enormous amounts of growth so that just a little trickles down to the very poorest. It also places a high premium on respecting the world we live in and depend upon.
This means changing things so improve our democratic structures to challenge the power of the big corporations which are unable to look at the world through a different lens. It involves people coming together to say they want a different approach.
It means managing our economy so that we can ensure high enough levels of employment but without making the economy all about growth driven by advertising and a manic need to buy more and keep up with the neighbours. It means addressing a financial services sector that seeks higher and higher returns without an interest in the longer term, and ensuring that banks aren't so big that we have no choice other than to prop them up and we need a fairer system nationally and internationally. That's essential if we aren't going to be on a constant search for growth.
Thats' not to say that growth isn't needed for Africa - it is - nor that we don't need it now in the UK. We do need it to get out of recession.
So still more work to show why we need green politics and a green perspective not just an environmental policy as an adjunct to business as usual (or at least seeking to save business as usual).
Saturday, 14 January 2012
Visit to India
Just back from Goa (and a day in Mumbai). On a superficial level, at least, much has changed since my last visit 4 years ago with large amounts of construction - apartment blocks where not seen before and new roads some in slightly surprising places.
On the positive side, people do not seem unduly worried about finding work - hope I was talking to the right people as based on a slightly small sample of friends, people I bumped into, drivers, and the odd shack owner. At least in the tourist business all looks good. Now very often Russian tourists as well as Indian and western tourists. And some of the tourist areas despite like the Palolem strip though jammed from end to end (or almost because there is one protected area with amazing forest coming almost to the shoreline) seems reasonably well organised and the water clean.
There is also a new vibrant community of artists, writers and others. I went to a book launch at Litterati by a world renowned photographer Dayanita Singh, who now lives in an old house in my mother's village - and in fact previously the family house of her great uncle's family. It was a great setting outside in the garden at the back of another old Goa house - this one crammed with books and not just the old moth eaten, monsoon battered books that we would read as children in our parents house. The reading was attended by a collection of writers one even all the way from West Africa, another who is a well-known biographer of Graham Greene, but also architects (one of whom arrived in his electric car) and an assortment of the new Goa intelligentsia. And it’s an intelligentsia from all of India and from Goa too - cosmopolitan and breaching all those sectarian divides.
The old city of Panaji is now better protected and Fontainhas always a pretty part of the town near the old Rua D'Ourem reasonably well looked after but without being a dead village of holiday homes as we see far too often in the pretty old towns of the West. We visited architects here as well as going to a lovely little tea shop and outdoor restaurant. The old Portuguese Secretariat, previously the palace of Adil Khan an earlier ruler of Goa, is to be restored as well bringing this landmark building back into public use.
That was all the good part - and of course much much more! But there are also lots of challenges which it seems as if Goans are seeking to tackle but they are not easy to resolve. The constant talk is about corruption and a political system which operates through people building up vote banks by buying people over - jobs, money etc! How to break out of this system is the intractable problem that none of us know the answer to. Whilst Sri Anna Hazare goes on hunger strike for the whole of India, Goans struggle to figure out how to deal with this issue locally. My feeling is that we need political parties with a real clear mission, and by that I don't mean the BJP, but people who are putting forward a real platform not simply to be less corrupt than the last lot. In that way, perhaps they can build up a real following not simply one based on how much money one has to pay out. But we also need the people who constantly complain about the politicians not to expect them to bend the rules in their favour. So two limbs here - new political parties and a social compact amongst ordinary people. How much easier it is to say things than to get them done!
As you would expect, I noticed the environmental challenges too. The most obvious not surprisingly is the waste issue with huge amounts of waste strewn all over the place sadly even in some beautiful spots like the lake outside Karmali station where we went for some early morning birdwatching. Though there are some collection systems this doesn't seem to be the case in all places. And though there are some signs of waste being scavenged and recycled there is still a lot that isn’t. I wonder whether Goa doesn't need to be taxing plastic bottles or at least seeking to bring some sort of plant that uses recycled plastic as a resource into the area. Or otherwise even a waste to energy incinerator would be better than burning plastic in the fields! Lots of opportunities here and Goan politicians are aware of this - a very long serving politician who had been an Environment Minister said to me a few years back that he had tried to commission a waste to energy incinerator many years back but there had been too much opposition! It looks as if the NIMBY issue is a worldwide one!
I also worry about the water quality even in the sea especially on the long tourist strip in the north. It seems to be affected by the large number of boats in the area and possibly poor infrastructure in the surrounding area. But it’s still beautiful - and I’m sure action can be taken to improve it.
The destructive open cast mining system is temporarily halted as a result of public interest litigation. So well done to campaigners here and good results from the court system as well!
The other issue is highways construction which seems to continue – too much to gain here for the politicians with the potential for cuts and lots of contracts to award. The most worrying is widening of a national highway that cuts across this populated coastal strip. I fear that it will bring HGVs along this route cutting up villages and towns. Surely we don’t need a large highway through such a densely populated area! Local people have mixed feelings because of congested roads with some being keen and others worried about devastation to their areas.
The plans for additional smaller roads cutting across fields is also a worry to people who fear losing the last quiet tracts of land – and these can be beautiful with coconut trees and paddy fields, kingfishers and herons, mango and cashew blossom etc. I hope that just as with how waste can and should be dealt with, Goa leapfrogs the Western world and goes for a system of clean and quiet trains and maybe folding bicycles for journeys at either end. I fear this is a yearning for a quieter more peaceful era of my childhood holidays, but it will be so much more pleasant and safer too.
So I hope with courage, determination and imagination Goa manages to leapfrog the West in terms of systems of transport, waste, energy use etc. It has all the potential for doing so – with an educated and aware middle class, entrepreneurship, capital availability etc – and being at that crossroads where it is possible to take the path that avoids being locked into a system of high energy needs and other serious environmental problems.
On the positive side, people do not seem unduly worried about finding work - hope I was talking to the right people as based on a slightly small sample of friends, people I bumped into, drivers, and the odd shack owner. At least in the tourist business all looks good. Now very often Russian tourists as well as Indian and western tourists. And some of the tourist areas despite like the Palolem strip though jammed from end to end (or almost because there is one protected area with amazing forest coming almost to the shoreline) seems reasonably well organised and the water clean.
There is also a new vibrant community of artists, writers and others. I went to a book launch at Litterati by a world renowned photographer Dayanita Singh, who now lives in an old house in my mother's village - and in fact previously the family house of her great uncle's family. It was a great setting outside in the garden at the back of another old Goa house - this one crammed with books and not just the old moth eaten, monsoon battered books that we would read as children in our parents house. The reading was attended by a collection of writers one even all the way from West Africa, another who is a well-known biographer of Graham Greene, but also architects (one of whom arrived in his electric car) and an assortment of the new Goa intelligentsia. And it’s an intelligentsia from all of India and from Goa too - cosmopolitan and breaching all those sectarian divides.
The old city of Panaji is now better protected and Fontainhas always a pretty part of the town near the old Rua D'Ourem reasonably well looked after but without being a dead village of holiday homes as we see far too often in the pretty old towns of the West. We visited architects here as well as going to a lovely little tea shop and outdoor restaurant. The old Portuguese Secretariat, previously the palace of Adil Khan an earlier ruler of Goa, is to be restored as well bringing this landmark building back into public use.
That was all the good part - and of course much much more! But there are also lots of challenges which it seems as if Goans are seeking to tackle but they are not easy to resolve. The constant talk is about corruption and a political system which operates through people building up vote banks by buying people over - jobs, money etc! How to break out of this system is the intractable problem that none of us know the answer to. Whilst Sri Anna Hazare goes on hunger strike for the whole of India, Goans struggle to figure out how to deal with this issue locally. My feeling is that we need political parties with a real clear mission, and by that I don't mean the BJP, but people who are putting forward a real platform not simply to be less corrupt than the last lot. In that way, perhaps they can build up a real following not simply one based on how much money one has to pay out. But we also need the people who constantly complain about the politicians not to expect them to bend the rules in their favour. So two limbs here - new political parties and a social compact amongst ordinary people. How much easier it is to say things than to get them done!
As you would expect, I noticed the environmental challenges too. The most obvious not surprisingly is the waste issue with huge amounts of waste strewn all over the place sadly even in some beautiful spots like the lake outside Karmali station where we went for some early morning birdwatching. Though there are some collection systems this doesn't seem to be the case in all places. And though there are some signs of waste being scavenged and recycled there is still a lot that isn’t. I wonder whether Goa doesn't need to be taxing plastic bottles or at least seeking to bring some sort of plant that uses recycled plastic as a resource into the area. Or otherwise even a waste to energy incinerator would be better than burning plastic in the fields! Lots of opportunities here and Goan politicians are aware of this - a very long serving politician who had been an Environment Minister said to me a few years back that he had tried to commission a waste to energy incinerator many years back but there had been too much opposition! It looks as if the NIMBY issue is a worldwide one!
I also worry about the water quality even in the sea especially on the long tourist strip in the north. It seems to be affected by the large number of boats in the area and possibly poor infrastructure in the surrounding area. But it’s still beautiful - and I’m sure action can be taken to improve it.
The destructive open cast mining system is temporarily halted as a result of public interest litigation. So well done to campaigners here and good results from the court system as well!
The other issue is highways construction which seems to continue – too much to gain here for the politicians with the potential for cuts and lots of contracts to award. The most worrying is widening of a national highway that cuts across this populated coastal strip. I fear that it will bring HGVs along this route cutting up villages and towns. Surely we don’t need a large highway through such a densely populated area! Local people have mixed feelings because of congested roads with some being keen and others worried about devastation to their areas.
The plans for additional smaller roads cutting across fields is also a worry to people who fear losing the last quiet tracts of land – and these can be beautiful with coconut trees and paddy fields, kingfishers and herons, mango and cashew blossom etc. I hope that just as with how waste can and should be dealt with, Goa leapfrogs the Western world and goes for a system of clean and quiet trains and maybe folding bicycles for journeys at either end. I fear this is a yearning for a quieter more peaceful era of my childhood holidays, but it will be so much more pleasant and safer too.
So I hope with courage, determination and imagination Goa manages to leapfrog the West in terms of systems of transport, waste, energy use etc. It has all the potential for doing so – with an educated and aware middle class, entrepreneurship, capital availability etc – and being at that crossroads where it is possible to take the path that avoids being locked into a system of high energy needs and other serious environmental problems.
Sunday, 6 March 2011
Encountering Gaia
Its Sunday today and finally some time to do some thinking and writing - mainly the Green view on Camden Council's environmental proposals: a new Sustainability Plan and a Transport Implementation Plan. Both major planks of a path to turning Camden into a greener society with a lighter footprint on this earth. We mustn't lose sight of this whilst the battle to protect the post-war welfare settlement continues.
But first, I look for some spiritual sustenance and pick up Stefan Harding's book on Gaia. We met him last year at a book festival in Keswick and I remember still his ability to marvel at the mountains in front of us and the flight of a bird of prey above us. His thesis is the Gaia hypothesis - the physical world and the biological world are not seperate and distinct but part of a system and it is by being in balance and the biological world sustaining this equilibrium of gases that the whole earth lives on.
He goes beyond James Lovelock and asks us to recognise this in our lives. He refers to the original Greek ideas, not so different from Indian (vedic) theory which see all matter as one.
"Gaia, mother of all,
the foundation, the oldest one,
I shall sing to Earth.
She feeds everything in the world.
Whoever you are,
whether you move upon her sacred ground,
or whether you go along the paths of the sea,
you that fly, it is she who nourishes you from her treaure store"
There are even better lines and words:
"From the eternal voic, Gaia danced forth and rolled herself into a spinning ball. She moulded mountains along her spine, valleys in the hollow of her flesh. A rhythmn of hills and stretching plains followed her contours. From her warm moisture She bore a gentle rain that fed her surface and bore life".
I like Harding's recommendations for one's personal life: "..find a special place outside where you can go on a regular basis to connect with the animate Earth....search for a place where you can spend time exploring and deepening your relationship to the great living being that is our planet. ...It might help to have several Gaia places, some less wild perhaps, closer to home, and otehrs further out in wilder country for extended visits and overnight communion under the sparkling light of the stars".
I resolve to walk up to Waterlow park when I am done and to sense nature once again, and to look for a summer holiday place that allows one some overnight communion under the sparkling light of the stars!
But first, I look for some spiritual sustenance and pick up Stefan Harding's book on Gaia. We met him last year at a book festival in Keswick and I remember still his ability to marvel at the mountains in front of us and the flight of a bird of prey above us. His thesis is the Gaia hypothesis - the physical world and the biological world are not seperate and distinct but part of a system and it is by being in balance and the biological world sustaining this equilibrium of gases that the whole earth lives on.
He goes beyond James Lovelock and asks us to recognise this in our lives. He refers to the original Greek ideas, not so different from Indian (vedic) theory which see all matter as one.
"Gaia, mother of all,
the foundation, the oldest one,
I shall sing to Earth.
She feeds everything in the world.
Whoever you are,
whether you move upon her sacred ground,
or whether you go along the paths of the sea,
you that fly, it is she who nourishes you from her treaure store"
There are even better lines and words:
"From the eternal voic, Gaia danced forth and rolled herself into a spinning ball. She moulded mountains along her spine, valleys in the hollow of her flesh. A rhythmn of hills and stretching plains followed her contours. From her warm moisture She bore a gentle rain that fed her surface and bore life".
I like Harding's recommendations for one's personal life: "..find a special place outside where you can go on a regular basis to connect with the animate Earth....search for a place where you can spend time exploring and deepening your relationship to the great living being that is our planet. ...It might help to have several Gaia places, some less wild perhaps, closer to home, and otehrs further out in wilder country for extended visits and overnight communion under the sparkling light of the stars".
I resolve to walk up to Waterlow park when I am done and to sense nature once again, and to look for a summer holiday place that allows one some overnight communion under the sparkling light of the stars!
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Resurgence: A Green Agenda for the Copenhagen Climate Summit
The Resurgence Event held in Camden on 3rd October was an inspiring event with a whole range of knowledgeable and well-informed commentators, activists and politicians.
Crispin Tickell, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, opened with the worrying if not new mesage that the world was crossing the boundary in a whole range of areas: from Climate Change to the nitrogen cycle, water availability and population. He spoke of the need leadership and bemoaned that feature of US politics where naked self interest still affects debate.
There was some optimism too - about the gains that China and India bring to the table as they are beginning to face the problems of climate change already.
He spoke of the importance of continued public pressure in the run up to Copenhagen, but wondered whether benign catastrophes would be necessary to push things along. Unfortunately, as Crispin Tickell pointed out it may take "benign catastrophes" to provide the impetus for change. It may take the actual expereince of the consequences of climate destabilization where we can see the link to climate change to help us address these grve issues.
He asked how we will cross the long and rickety division between science and policy? The key to this in his view are the Kyoto modalities or requirements, reviewing and reforming our energy systems and also our, water systems from reservoirs to drainage.
John Sauven, the head of Greenpeace bemoaned the fact that mainstream politicians and journalists don't have developed view of how to green our economies. Though some like, surprisingly enough, Adair Turner, ex-chief of the CBI, and Nick Stern, ex-Chief World Bank economist, do recognize that we need radical change and that we need to be moving away from pursuit of growth of GDP.
He made the point very clearly and forcefully that our current system based on the pursuit of self-interest by business and debt fuelled growth was is not in society's interest. The irony of the situation is that Gordon Brown, Greenspan and others, he explained, continue to retain their faith in this flawed system. And thats an important point that needs to be picked up on - its our current system with risk takers with a "I'll be gone, you'll be gone" attitude that needs to be changed. When will the leaders of the mainstream political parties wake up to this?
Later in the day, we had some excellent discussion about how we achieve this change. Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, spoke about the Green New Deal as well as the need for a positive vision of a post-climate change world. George Marshall gave us environmentalists some real insight into how the ordinary person views the climate change debate and responds to this threat to their way of life by denial. It was obvious to all, if not already clear, that we needed to think much harder about how we get a much wider section of society seeking and pushing for change. Stephen Hale spoke about Green Alliance's 10 manifesto proposals which seek to develop a "common cause" across all the political parties.
I'd like to finish with Tony Juniper's excellent campaign which he is working on, on behalf of the Prince of Wales Rainforest project. A package has been put forward for addressing deforestation which leads to 1/5 of the worlds emissions - a massive contributor to climate change.
The aim of this is to address the deadlock which is expected in respect of the negotiations on Reducing Emissions from Climate Change (REDD), under the auspices of the UNFCC. This emergency package asks OECD governments to pledge action irrespective of what happens in Copenhagen. It would involve about £15 - 20 bill being spent over 5 yrs which should lead to 25% reduction in emissions worldwide. That is more than total emissions of UK and France plus others. It is apparently the cheapest way to get a big hit. Some OECD countries have alreadybought in: Norway, Brazil.
We should all sign up on line to persuade world leaders to do this in time for Copenhagen. http://www.rainforestsos.org/ or see http://www.princesrainforestsproject.org/blog/category/deforestation
Add links: Resurgence and REDD
Crispin Tickell, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, opened with the worrying if not new mesage that the world was crossing the boundary in a whole range of areas: from Climate Change to the nitrogen cycle, water availability and population. He spoke of the need leadership and bemoaned that feature of US politics where naked self interest still affects debate.
There was some optimism too - about the gains that China and India bring to the table as they are beginning to face the problems of climate change already.
He spoke of the importance of continued public pressure in the run up to Copenhagen, but wondered whether benign catastrophes would be necessary to push things along. Unfortunately, as Crispin Tickell pointed out it may take "benign catastrophes" to provide the impetus for change. It may take the actual expereince of the consequences of climate destabilization where we can see the link to climate change to help us address these grve issues.
He asked how we will cross the long and rickety division between science and policy? The key to this in his view are the Kyoto modalities or requirements, reviewing and reforming our energy systems and also our, water systems from reservoirs to drainage.
John Sauven, the head of Greenpeace bemoaned the fact that mainstream politicians and journalists don't have developed view of how to green our economies. Though some like, surprisingly enough, Adair Turner, ex-chief of the CBI, and Nick Stern, ex-Chief World Bank economist, do recognize that we need radical change and that we need to be moving away from pursuit of growth of GDP.
He made the point very clearly and forcefully that our current system based on the pursuit of self-interest by business and debt fuelled growth was is not in society's interest. The irony of the situation is that Gordon Brown, Greenspan and others, he explained, continue to retain their faith in this flawed system. And thats an important point that needs to be picked up on - its our current system with risk takers with a "I'll be gone, you'll be gone" attitude that needs to be changed. When will the leaders of the mainstream political parties wake up to this?
Later in the day, we had some excellent discussion about how we achieve this change. Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, spoke about the Green New Deal as well as the need for a positive vision of a post-climate change world. George Marshall gave us environmentalists some real insight into how the ordinary person views the climate change debate and responds to this threat to their way of life by denial. It was obvious to all, if not already clear, that we needed to think much harder about how we get a much wider section of society seeking and pushing for change. Stephen Hale spoke about Green Alliance's 10 manifesto proposals which seek to develop a "common cause" across all the political parties.
I'd like to finish with Tony Juniper's excellent campaign which he is working on, on behalf of the Prince of Wales Rainforest project. A package has been put forward for addressing deforestation which leads to 1/5 of the worlds emissions - a massive contributor to climate change.
The aim of this is to address the deadlock which is expected in respect of the negotiations on Reducing Emissions from Climate Change (REDD), under the auspices of the UNFCC. This emergency package asks OECD governments to pledge action irrespective of what happens in Copenhagen. It would involve about £15 - 20 bill being spent over 5 yrs which should lead to 25% reduction in emissions worldwide. That is more than total emissions of UK and France plus others. It is apparently the cheapest way to get a big hit. Some OECD countries have alreadybought in: Norway, Brazil.
We should all sign up on line to persuade world leaders to do this in time for Copenhagen. http://www.rainforestsos.org/ or see http://www.princesrainforestsproject.org/blog/category/deforestation
Add links: Resurgence and REDD
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