Green

1 April 2011News

Anyone heard of the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC)? No, neither had we until recently. It’s a Whitehall quango created to fast-track planning applications for projects “of national importance”. So what? Well, incinerators – dirty, environmentally unfriendly monstrosities that risk the health of surrounding communities – are not deemed “of national importance”. But airports, ports, and “energy from waste” (EfW) power plants are.

An EfW is essentially an incinerator –…

1 March 2010News

The Green Party is focusing its attention on three constituencies where it has a reasonable chance of electing a Green MP in this year’s general election: Lewisham Deptford, Norwich South and Brighton Pavilion. Britain is the only sizeable European country never to have had any Green national legislative presence.

Brighton Pavilion represents the Greens’ best chance at achieving this milestone. With nine councillors, the Greens have more representation than the other parties in…

1 March 2009News

Low Impact Development (LID) is an approach to creating homes and livelihoods that works with nature, using natural construction materials, renewable energy, and Permaculture design principles. Since its formation in August 2005, Lammas has sought to create an exemplary LID in Wales to demonstrate what the approach has to offer: building affordable homes, boosting rural economies and increasing biodiversity. As well as nine smallholdings and a community hub building, the Lammas Eco-hamlet…

1 November 2007News

`Tara is, because of its associations, probably the most consecrated spot in Ireland, and its destruction will leave many bitter memories behind it'. Those were the words of WB Yeats and others in a protest letter to The Times in 1902, when the Hill of Tara was last threatened. Over a century on, it seems little has changed as the Irish government pursues its plans to build a motorway though one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe.

There are already forty known…

1 November 2007Review

Green Books, 2006, ISBN 190399876X; 160pp; £10.95

I must declare a bias here: I hate cars.

Hate what they do to the environment, hate the way they destroy our communities, hate that my three-year-old isn't safe even on the pavement, hate the hours I spend waiting to cross the road whilst streams of cars shoot past, belching out filthy fumes and deafening me with their roar.

Lynn Sloman clearly isn't keen either (and manages to live in rural Wales without a car), but she has managed to produce a readable - not ranting - book…

1 September 2007Feature

I was born in Leigh Park, a council estate just outside Portsmouth, the second-largest housing estate in Europe. I lived there until I was 17. My father was a bus driver for 32 years, and my mum worked as a school dinner lady.

The lovely thing was, there were fields and trees and a big reservoir as part of the estate. At the infants school I went to, they had big oak trees. I was quite a day dreamer, and I'd always be mesmerised by all these trees.

Living in that environment…

1 September 2007Feature

Bicycology is a cycle activism and education collective that formed after the 2005 G8 Bike Ride. Bicycology is run non-hierarchically through regular meetings rotating around the country.

Roadshows

In 2006, Bicycology organised a cycle roadshow from London to Lancaster, then went on to the Camp for Climate Action near Selby.

This year Bicycology did a tour of south-west England. Around 20 of us cycled from Aylesbury to Exeter over two weeks, stopping in towns to promote…

1 September 2007News

In February, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (the Western Islands Council) approved plans for a giant “wind factory” with 181 super-size 140meter-high turbines on the north west of the Isle of Lewis.

With another planned 57 turbines on the island, this would mean a 40-mile stretch of wind turbines across the island, making it the largest wind farm in Europe.

The top-left-hand corner of the British Isles might seem like an ideal spot in which to tuck away such a wind farm. But for…

1 September 2007News in Brief

Vigil outside Russian Embassy for Ilya Bodoraenko, 21, an anarchist and environmental activist from the group Autonomous Action, who died in hospital after being brutally attacked by Russian fascists at an anti-nuclear camp on 21 July. The environmentalist camp, organised by “Ecological Wave of Baikal”, was a protest against the nuclear enrichment plant in the Siberian city of Angarsk. More than 15 neo-nazis attacked the 21 campers with iron bars, knives, and pneumatic pistols, and burnt…

3 May 2007Comment

One statement Noam Chomsky made in his interview in PN's April issue struck me forcibly: “[Iran] is independent and independence is not tolerated [by the United States]”.
It's an interesting concept, independence, and I take it for granted that independence of thought and action is common to PN readers. But enough flattery.
Chomsky's interview made me think again about self-sufficiency. The desirability of using alternative sources of energy to counter…

1 March 2007News in Brief

On 17 February, around 100 people marched through Aberystwyth in protest against the proposed issuing of DTI licences to explore for oil in conservation areas off the Welsh coast.

Local campaigners SOS called the march, hot on the heels of handing in a 2400-signature petition to Downing Street on 6 February. According to the campaign's website, the petition was presented to tell the government that the people of mid and west Wales will not take the granting of licences to explore…

1 March 2007News

Campaigners have been in Antarctic waters in recent weeks, monitoring - and attempting to disrupt - the activities of the Japanese whaling fleet.

While they will not actively cooperate - due, publicly at least, to tactical differences in relation to interpretations of nonviolence - Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd have both had vessels in the area, and both campaigners and whalers took a few physical and verbal knocks in mid-February.

Search and rescue

The drama began on 8…

1 February 2007News

Waste disposal and pipeline developments seem to be the bane of environmentalists the world over. Permanent damage and destruction of the land follow wherever dumps and terminals are sited.

So far, 2007 has seen the development of two relatively new campaigns: to save Radley Lakes in Oxfordshire from toxic ash, and the Brecon Beacons in south Wales from a high-pressure pipeline.

Save Radley Lakes Two lakes, Thrupp and Bullfield, in Radley near Abingdon in south Oxfordshire are…

1 December 2006Feature

Fifteen years on from the start of the modern environmental direct action movement, awareness about the state of our planet is higher than ever before. However, those who have grown up as a part of the movement tell a different story about corporate and government action and the pace of change.

A lot has changed over the last 15 years. We now live in a world ravaged by Climate Change, a world where the World Health Organisation estimate that 150,000 people die every year and the development charity Christian Aid estimate that 182 million will die in sub-Saharan Africa alone by the end of the Century, as a result of diseases exacerbated by climate change.

Here in the UK we're told that we've never had it so good. Social inclusion, community involvement and environmental…

1 December 2006Feature

Rebecca Lush reflects on the rebirth of the anti-roads movement as the Labour government continues to backtrack on promises to cut carbon emissions and pushes ahead with a significant number of new roadbuilding schemes across the country.

Why is road building back on the agenda after the infamous protests against road building in the 1990s forced a dramatic turn around in government transport policy away from building roads? Why is the government following yet again a “predict and provide” model, and allowing for massive traffic growth, when road transport contributes 20 per cent of UKCO2 emissions? What is being done about this?

In the 1990s the then Conservative government launched what they termed “the largest road…