Greener Fram: Future Visions - A World Beyond Oil

This Saturday March 27 Greener Fram will be holding an event centered around the key Transition topic, peak oil. This event will provide an exploration of what oil depletion could mean for Framlingham and the surrounding area, and how we can respond to these changes to create a brighter future.

- For every barrel of oil we discover we now consume three
- Oil production is already falling in sixty counties
- At some point global oil production will start to fall - FOR EVER

How can our communities adapt to changes that will come about through energy depletion and climate change?
How can we secure our future food supplies when at present every calorie of food takes 10 calories of oil to produce?
A report produced recently by UK industry, with a foreword by Richard Branson, warned about The Oil Crunch - a wake up call for the UK economy.

The Speakers will include:

Simon Weeks, Cookpole Energy Action; a community wind-power project near Halesworth
http://www.energyaction.org.uk/

David Strahan is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary film-maker who specializes business and energy. He is a trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, fellow of the RSA, and an honorary researcher at the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre.
http://www.davidstrahan.com/

William Kendall, Maple Farm, Kelsale; “One hundred years ago Maple Farm, along with its neighbours, would have been producing all of the fresh food that the local town and villages needed. We hope that this can be the case again.”
http://www.maplefarmkelsale.co.uk/

Tim Waygood was born and raised on Church Farm. All his family farmed when he grew up, now he's the only one. It has been a lifetime of interests and passions that have led him to start up the family farm again and to found the Agrarian Renaissance.
http://www.peopleand/

We will also have a range of stands, and local food and drink for refreshments, plus an informal opportunity for everyone to feed in their ideas and ask questions about this very important topic. Tickets: £4, £3 concs. Time: 1-6pm. Venue: Thomas Mills High School, Saxtead Road, Framlingham.

For more information contact http://www.greenerfram.org.uk/.

Norwich: Food,Inc.

This must-see film tells an unwholesome story of big American agri-business, where working conditions, animal welfare, the livelihoods of farmers and consumers’ health are all held hostage by the drive for ever bigger profits.

The film highlights how a mere handful of companies control most of the food production business. One such company, Monsanto, has teams of detectives out scouring the countryside for farmers daring to save seed from one year to the next – or those that could be said to encourage such practice through their offer of services, like seed cleaning.

The film illustrates how ‘corn’ (maize to us) is turned into beef in the notorious feeding lot (with not a blade of grass in sight) – how corn indeed forms the basis for so many products in what seems on the surface to be an almost infinite choice in the modern American supermarket; how chickens (with echoes here of recent TV programmes by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & Jamie Oliver) are crammed in their thousands into spaces where they can barely move around – and if they could, they’re so weighed down by grossly fattened bodies that their legs can’t carry them more than a few paces.

Don’t miss this film! Catch it at Cinema City on Monday, 29th March, 8.30 pm. Peter Melchett – Policy Director of the Soil Association and North Norfolk organic farmer – will be present at the end of the film for a Question & Answer session. The Soil Association is the official charity partner of the film.

Suggested links: http://www.foodincmovie.com/; and ‘Why Food, Inc. should make us all retch’ by Charles Clover in The Sunday Times: www.timesonline.co.uk/news.

(Sarah Gann/Transition Norwich Food Group)

REPORT: Transition Talk Training (Colchester)

Twenty of us met at the Old Library in Colchester Town Hall for a useful day of learning how best to spread the T word. In essence it's the art of instilling in your audience the gravity of the dilemmas we all face without scaring them rigid; guiding people beyond that 'Peak Oil Moment' and giving them something solid to hold onto once Pandora's box has been opened - conjuring a good ship Transition to climb aboard and not leaving just a soggy plank to cling onto.

There was plenty of inspiration and energy in the room as folks from Bedford, Broxbourne, Colchester, Debenham, Norwich, Waldon, Wivenhoe and Woodbridge (plus Kevin all the way from Cornwall!) shared ideas and strategies. It was clear that it's not just a presentation of facts that wins peoples hearts and minds (although getting those facts right is crucial), it's the passion and conviction of a messenger speaking from their personal experience. The most infectious way of spreading the word and getting people involved is by displaying the momentum of Transition schemes in action and examples of success.

(Andy Croft/Transition Norwich http://www.transitionnorwich.org/ ).