Green

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 –…

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…

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…

`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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

The drama began on 8…

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…

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…

Congratulations to local campaigners working to stop the planned Stansted airport expansion. At a packed local planning meeting on 29 November, Uttlesford District Council voted unanimously against the plans of airport operator BAA, which would have seen an additional 80,000 flights per year. Speaking after the decision, Peter Sanders of the Stop Stansted Expansion campaign said, “BAA's plans would have had an appalling impact on this predominantly rural area, as well as generating the…