All posts by nereeve

Events

Air Quality Around Schools

Join us in the morning of Saturday 16th November 2019, for a presentation by Andrea Carnevali, the driving force behind Chiswick Oasis, a project instigated to drastically improve the air quality of St Mary’s School, Chiswick.

St Mary’s is situated directly next to the A4 and had one of the poorest air quality assessments in London. Thanks to Andrea’s energy and enthusiasm, the school was transformed: it now has a living green wall filtering the air from the nearby road, an air purifier and low VOC paint inside the school, and a “no-car Friday” scheme in place to reduce traffic.

We are thrilled that Andrea can join us on Saturday. There should be much to discuss – to inspire and encourage us to tackle this problem in our own schools in Ealing.

Meeting: Saturday 16th November 2019 @ The Polygon, St Mary’s Church, Ealing, W5 4RH – 10.00am to 11.45am (doors open at 9.45am).

This event is in addition to our “Need to Grow” film screening taking place on Sunday, 17th November 2019.

Events

Sunday 17 November 2019 7.30pm: A film Screening of “The Need to Grow”

In November, we will be screening “The Need to Grow” – an award-winning documentary from 2018, directed by Rob Herring and Ryan Wirick, and narrated by Rosario Dawson. The publicity notes that the documentary “delivers alarming evidence on the importance of healthy soil — revealing not only the potential of localized food production working with nature, but our opportunity as individuals to help regenerate our planet’s dying soils and participate in the restoration of the Earth”. We will be truncating the film slightly to fit it into our usual meeting time, and to allow space for discussion afterwards.

The film offers a timely reminder, in view of the rewilding movement and National Park City movement that the most effective and efficient solutions to our problems can involve working with Nature rather than against it.

Events

Ealing’s Climate Emergency Plan

In April 2019, Ealing Council declared a climate emergency. We have now received the draft strategy paper drawn up by the council, and a version of this is available for download here and here. Please do review the council’s draft proposals and let us and/or the council have any feedback.

You can email us at steering@ealingtransition.org.uk and Jo Mortensen from Ealing Council here.

Many of the initiatives recommended by the council will require further development into projects, with specific resources and timescales allocated to them. This part of the process is expected to begin in earnest in the first half of 2020.

Ealing Transition are assisting the council in the role of an interested stakeholder. We are pushing for the council to be as ambitious as possible in its local recommendations to address global heating and to go carbon neutral by 2030, and stand ready to support the council in the actions that it proposes. We will be holding further events on the council’s emergency plan in the coming months.

In the meantime, if you are still thinking “it’s all very well declaring a climate emergency, but what happens next?” you might want to check out the resources provided by Ashden and Friends of the Earth that ask and answer that very question.