Growing Campaigns

By Mark Crutchley

Norwich and the surrounding region is very well blessed with campaign groups covering a wide spread of activities, from those groups with a specific focus such as Norwich Stop the War coalition and Transition Norwich; to the broader organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth which campaign on a changing roster of issues. The Green Party too is active in many areas and organisations like the Women’s Institute (WI) also promote a positive social agenda.

Too often though as groups we operate in our own areas and have relatively little contact with many other organisations that contain like-minded people who might be interested in getting involved with our campaigns, but just don’t know about them. We need to expand our reach and bring together all the groups which are working for a better society and reach out to those individuals who are not members of any group but would support individual campaigns.

It’s precisely this idea which is behind the creation of Visions for Change (VfC) Norwich. VfC has been set up to provide a resource for groups and individuals in the area who are working for a just and sustainable world. Its objective is to improve communications about campaigns and events happening in the area, hopefully helping increase the numbers involved and the impact they can have.

The website is still in the early stages of its development at the moment, as is the gathering of interested people, but readers of the One World Column are precisely the sort of people we want to connect with and encourage to get active with more of the local campaign groups who so desperately need your support.

So if you are interested in protecting the environment, social justice and a fairer society then please visit the site and sign up; either as an individual or on behalf of any group you may be involved with. And once you have signed up, please pass on the message about Visions for Change and encourage others to join too; the more people who get involved the more we can achieve together.

Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

Meanwhile over in America scientists, politicians, climate activists, celebrities and ordinary people are coming together – and getting arrested together - to call on President Obama to stop the Keystone pipeline. If built this would deliver tar sands oil to refineries in Texas and open the way for a much larger exploitation of the Canadian tar sands.

This is a crucial battle for the environment because if we exploit all the tar sands available in Alberta, then not only is keeping the rise in global temperatures below 2C going to be completely impossible; but even keeping it below 4C is going to be very difficult. We have to hope – and give whatever support we can – that those opposing this scheme in America and Canada can carry the day and chalk a victory up for the people and planet against the oil industry.

A Load of Rubbish

By Rupert Read

How Norwich shows the way: Regular food-waste collections renders Pickles’s bribe to Councils to abolish Alternative Weekly Collection a white elephant

Eric Pickles’s recently-announced hare-brained plan to incentivize local authorities to bring back weekly collections of rubbish-to-landfill is an anti-localist move by an allegedly localist Government; an extraordinary waste of a quarter of a billion pounds at a time, allegedly, of austerity; and a measure that has been proven by the Government’s own research likely to decrease recycling rates by at least 5%. (‘Alternate-weekly collections’ have tended to increase recycling rates by between 5 and 15%:

Things are however even worse than that, in at least two respects:

It is an integral part of Pickles’s Department’s plan to seek to damage-limit the dangerously negative impact on recycling rates of this measure by encouraging Councils to ‘commingle’ more recyclate, to help increase recycling rates. As I have shown previously it can actually be a move in the wrong direction to increase headline recycling percentages, if the quality of the recyclate is lowered by so doing. And this is exactly what happens under commingling.

And secondly, the main premise of the drive to bring back weekly rubbish-to-landfill collections is, in Pickles’s words, that ‘It’s a basic right for every English man and woman to be able to put the remnants of their chicken tikka masala in their bin without having to wait a fortnight for it to be collected.’ .

But this premise is fatally flawed. For, here in Norwich City Council area, where I am writing from, as in various other parts of the country, we Councillors added a food waste collection component into the job of dustmen

In Norwich, which is among those Councils to have consistently year after year increased recycling rates over the last decade (in rough correlation with the increased numbers of Greens on the Council…), recyclate is collected every fortnight (alternating with rubbish-to-landfill), but food waste is collected every week. Anyone’s tikka masala remnants are collected regularly without stinking out the neighbourhood – and without the vast additional expense and negative impact upon recycling of abolishing Alternative Weekly Collections.

Once this is understood, the case for the bribes that Pickles is seeking to introduce is entirely eliminated.

'Never mind’, though: We’re all bin this together, as they say…

This is an updated version of an article first published in Left Foot Forward.

Pandering to the m****s

By Mark Crutchley

At a time when services are being cut across the board, who in their right mind thinks it is a good idea to spend £250 million to enable a return to weekly bin collections. Money which could have been spent on supporting the most needy members of society, such as those with mental health problems or the elderly - see the Norwich Evening News story on Age UK's concerns about funding - will instead be used to allow people to avoid the arduous task of separating out their glass, plastic and paper for recycling. The government's own figures suggest that this will lead to a reduction in recycling, with 1.5 million tonnes of recyclable materials being sent to landfill instead.

The UK is already below average in the European recycling league, with a rate barely more than half the best practice achieved by Germany and we are set to get worse with government approval. But if we are to address our excessive carbon footprints we not only need to recycle more, even more importantly we must re-use things and reduce our overall levels of consumption. These though are messages you rarely hear from government because they run counter to the whole consumption led structure of our society.

Consume less and growth will fall, making governments look bad - but will we actually feel worse. Most research seems to indicate that ever higher levels of consumption have done little to make us happier, if anything the reverse has been true. So maybe it's time for us to get off that treadmill.

Maybe it's time we all started buying more second hand things, re-using others' cast offs rather than throwing them away and making new ones instead. In that vein it's nice to see that here in Norwich there has been a surge in the number of vintage clothing shops around the city in the last year or two. Maybe it's also time we rediscovered a degree of community spirit and borrowed more from our friends and neighbours. Nowadays most people have tools and other things which they use very infrequently, it would save us all money, and the carbon emissions associated with producing the goods, if we bought fewer things and shared more with others whenever they needed something.

Excessive consumption, and the waste it generates, is behind controversial local issues such as the proposed incinerator at Kings Lynn. Instead of planning to burn millions of tonnes of waste we should be seeking to avoid creating that waste in the first place. Build the incinerator and the incentive to reduce waste is removed - the council will be locked into providing a stream of waste to the operators and will have a vested interest in ensuring that waste stream isn't reduced.

The incinerator too raises one of the other absurd facets of modern government - the consultation process. Undertaken because it is the "right thing to do" rather than because the government, local or national, really wants our opinions, these consultations are a sham to legitimise a course of action already decided upon. Whether building an incinerator, new nuclear power stations, or it would appear, raising the speed limit on motorways to 80. We need to reduce our carbon emissions, so the government proposes a measure which is bound to increase them and lead to more deaths as a by-product. It brings me back to where I started: who in their right mind ....?

You may have thought the missing word in the title of this piece was masses, possible, but I was more thinking of morons.

NDR: It’s the Ecos, stupid!

By Andrew Boswell

All this week, there’s been a debate in the Eastern Daily Press over whether the Government should fund the Norwich Northern Distributor Road – a £112.5m scheme on which the Council has already spent at least £15m of local people’s Council Tax. The arguments can get very technical – too complicated for many people to bother with. It’s my job to engage at that level day-to-day, and I have spent literally months poring over calculations of projected congestion levels, consultation responses, planning policy statements etc but I often feel we all just need to stand back and look at it all much more simply.

The issues really come down to what sort of future do we want – how do we want to live, work, play, eat? And crucially, what will future people feel about these fundamentals of human existence. That sounds a bit like Ecos – the root of the words economy and ecology.

What is on offer with the road proposal and the associated plans for Greater Norwich is massive housing growth in North East Norwich that is pure and simple ‘business as usual’. This was clear when the County Council’s PR offensive hit the EDP front page on 9th September with the headline “NEW BID FOR ‘£1.3bn’ ROAD”. No, I hadn’t got all my decimal points wrong on the cost of the road above – it turns out that this bigger number represents the benefits: the County are hanging their bid to Government on the road “adding £1.3bn” to the Norfolk economy. That’s £1,300,000,000 if you like lots of noughts. But has anybody at Norfolk County Council tried really defined what “economy” means?

I never tire of Satish Kumar’s wisdom having first come across him and Resurgence at the first Schumacher Lectures in Bristol in, I think, 1977 – an event that started to change my view on the world. Satish has written widely on what real economy means, here he is recently in Brazil:

The word ‘economy’ is made from two Greek words ‘ecos’ and ‘nomos’. ‘Ecos’ means the earth household and ‘nomos’ means the management of it, so I want to ask the world leaders, are you managing the earth household or are you managing only the financial capital? True wealth is not money, money is only a measure of wealth, true wealth is land, animals, forests, clean water, human communities and human intelligence. If we have lots of money but the natural capital is diminished then what good is that economy so please understand the true meaning of economy and manage it properly for all people now and future generations and create a system which is harmonious for all living beings.

However, I don’t think that is quite what the Norfolk officialdom folk mean with the £1.3bn claim. Even from the mainstream, rationale point of view, I am very sceptical, in the best sense of the word, about this claim and what it means. If you build 37,000 houses and then create lots of jobs of business parks and out-of-town retail centres for the inhabitants … and, if, the economy suddenly goes back to what it was in the last decade before 2008, and that is a big IF, then, sure, you must add something measureable to the ‘size’ of the economy. But that’s not adding something to the current economy – its actually saying if you replace Norwich over twenty years with a city like Nottingham, you have something bigger and, yes, it generates more business.

The £1.3bn claim keeps making me think of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where a computer is invented to discover the answer to the “Question of Life, The Universe and Everything” – the good old computer comes up with 42. Somehow, those folk at County Hall seem to have come up with a computer into which you pour lots of concrete, carbon emissions, lost landscapes, congestion, future human stress and found it comes up with the answer £1.3bn.

We all know too that some of this calculation involves adding up the fractions of time that a new road might shave of journeys and places a value on time - see references 8 and 9 in this article by George Monbiot for a good expose of this. Of course, this is not real money – not many people will be able to say “well, I saved 5 minutes each way of my commute since that brilliant road opened, and that’s enabled me to grow my business 50% this year”.

What is really disturbing is that the Council are still trying to tell people that all this growth, and the huge number attached to its value, will bring us a veritable land of milk and honey. In fact, they have been telling Norfolk people for years, that it is the ONLY way to the Promised Land.

Lots of big questions come to mind. The most obvious one that I don’t need to spell out for Transition and One World Column readers is ‘is it at all likely that this sort of economic growth vision will actually happen?’. Well, as I write, the latest ‘Markets plunge’ story is on all the newsfeeds, the Greeks are striking against extreme austerity measures, and all commentators are talking about a double-dip UK recession, and possible “contagion” spreading around Western European economies. And, yet, people are still thinking that this sort of business as usual model is going to continue and that it is the only vision for the future.

There is a much deeper question. Even if, our economies recover from the current situation, is this what people want? Everywhere that this sort of urban sprawl has been built, it hasn’t benefitted the local people. The main beneficiaries are the retail park owners, the likes of Tescos and B&Q, and the businesses like Aviva. For the ordinary person, high carbon transport brings lack of choice, greater conformity and greater dependence on the car leading to isolation for some people. Money is sucked out of the local economy to London, Chicago, Beijing as fast as you can say ‘N D R’.

And then there is personal happiness and fulfilment. One has to be careful with this nowadays because despite all the years of good work by the people of Bhutan and the New Economics Foundation, the Government and David Cameron have suddenly latched on this. Wellbeing and happiness are the latest words due to have their meaning corrupted like sustainability and, yes, economy.

When you look at real wellbeing and real economy in the way Satish Kumar suggests, then it is hard to see how the road and its associated way of living will bring us any closer. It might be convenient for a few often, and convenient for others occasionally, but that’s not wellbeing. And the costs of that are landscape destruction, congestion and high carbon emissions. It’s clear that carrying on trying to pursue the business as usual, growth at 3% a year, is not just going to not give us happiness and wellbeing, but its actually going cause more harm and damage.

Transition and One World readers, and many others, are already working day to day for another vision. One based upon the true meaning of economy and ecos: an ecological society based in social justice. The challenges for this century to tackle climate change and resource depletion make concrete trophies like the NDR an irrelevance to real progress as they steal vital resources from social and environmental welfare. The economy needs stability and diversity not endless growth – a steady state economy is quite possible. Many of us are already downsizing to help economic and climate stability.

By the way, if you need any convincing that a shadowy “Yes, Minister” world occupies the corridors of powers at County, check out these two links: Link 1 and Link 2.

It is important for us to challenge the shadowy world of economic hallucinations that try to take us further down a destructive path – the growth-at-all-costs machine and its cogwheels like the NDR. Over the next few weeks, it is vital that many people write to the Department of Transport and ask them not to fund this road.

The public has an opportunity to comment on the bid until October 14. Comments can be made to the DfT by emailing development.pool@dft.gsi.gov.uk

If you wish to send a letter please email the campaign against the road on i_oppose_the_ndr@fastmail.co.uk and we will send you some guidance notes on the key issues that we hope people will tell the DfT. The postcard image above gives some headline points too. Many thanks. Andrew

When the Chips are Down

By Charlotte Du Cann

It’s noon on Saturday and a small and buoyant crowd of people are gathering for The Spuds Don't Work rally outside the Forum. Activists from France, farmers from Norfolk, campaigners on bicycles with placards saying Stop Gambling with our Chips!, children riding small red tractors piled with red and white tubers from Wales. A waitress from The Greenhouse is handing around (delicious) organic chips to passers-by. I’m taking pix and speaking with Brenna and Tierney and Christine from Transition Norwich, Becky and Hayley from GreenGrow outside Bungay and the people from Growing Communities in Hackney. We’re all here to champion the potato, that key staple veg of all our allotments, gardens and fields and protect the land from the invasion of GMOs.

For the last ten years the Sainsbury laboratory at the John Innes Centre has spent £1.7 m of public money researching (so far unsuccessfully) a potato that is resistant to blight. During this time the UK has successfully resisted the introduction of GM food into its stores and supermarkets. But the laws in Europe are now changing, making it easier for GM crops to be grown and the debate is back on the table for both growers and consumers. Already the seed merchants and pharmaceutical companies are pressurizing farmers in East Anglia to adopt them and this event is bringing this into public awareness. At 1pm a red tractor will drive through the streets of Norwich to the John Innes Centre and deliver a load of conventionally bred blight-free potatoes in protest at the research and trials taking place there.

“It’s becoming impossible for farmers in Canada to be organic," reported one of the speakers (last week a farmer in Australia is suing a bio-tech company as their seeds have entered his crops and he has lost his organic status) as we listened to speeches from the Soil Association, local farmers and national campaigners outlining the main reasons why public money should be spent elsewhere.

“It’s complex,” said Josiah Meldrum of East Anglia Food Link before he went on BBC Look East to discuss the GM potato trials at the Centre. Scientific research and the debate around it is complicated, but the decision to allow GM trials is simple. You either believe that it’s OK to radically interfere and manipulate the structure of plants and sow the land with these invasive artificially-bred organisms.

Or you know it isn’t.

The real complexity here however is not this decision, but in arguing from different paradigms. One where corporations seek to control and exploit the natural world for profit and to drive the industrial food machine to every corner of the globe, and the other (of which Transition is part) where individuals and groups seek to establish a small-scale agriculture that works with the natural world, to prevent waste and relocalise the food chain. Josiah who has worked with local growers for years (including FarmShare) and knows his potatoes (as well as the research behind them), faces the same difficulty all of us do in facing that argument.

The people who push for GM are smart and aggressive and have little conscience about these matters. Their decisions are based on conquest and profit. They also fund the academics who can argue cleverly on their behalf. Those who oppose GM have gut instincts, a knowing in the core of themselves that bio-tech crosses a certain line and a feeling they do not want to eat food grown in this way, anymore than they want to eat cloned animals.

The majority of people in the UK have those same unacademic feelings and instincts and do not want to put “Frankenfoods” in their shopping baskets. Corporations seek to persuade everyone to buy bio-tech by claiming it will banish the spectre of future World Hunger, mostly in Africa. The reality is that there is already famine in Africa, as there are massive land grabs by UK bio-fuel companies (a main cause of rising food prices). There are also studies that prove growing organic crops is a far better solution to food security than global industrialised farming which dispossesses and exploits people, drains water tables and destroys local eco-systems. The “opposers” are in fact not so much against GM and its consequences but for everything it takes away, including social equity.

The difficulty is that it is not really an argument we need to be having. Arguments reduce issues into black and white boxes and exclude the ur-complexity, which is not the Byzantine line of scientific reasoning, but the richly-woven web of life, the way everything on the planet is connected and in relationship. The dominating “left-brain” mindset of Empire goes way too fast for this complexity to be seen or heard. It deliberately compartmentalises each issue, so that its contradictions never confront each other. It reduces communication into superficial feel-good spin whilst keeping the depth discussion of real-world ethics and social responsibility at bay. It reduces the globe to a soundbite. A few short moments on a television broadcast.

GMs have been in use in North America for years now. The crops don’t give the great yields that are promised (and sometimes fail), use more pesticides, and the seeds (which farmers can no longer keep themselves) have increased dramatically in price. Economically many farms are struggling. In spite of all the scientific research there has been no study on its effects on people’s standard of health (the US has one of the worst in the Western World). There are plenty of good reasons why we are outside the Forum today in defence of the real potato. But the underlying force that brings us all together has been the subject I’ve wanted to pay attention to this week on This Low Carbon Life.

Because ultimately there is a decision that we all have to take at some point down the line, as the Artic melts, as the environmental storm brews all about us: whether we follow the reason of the mind or the logic of the heart. This ultimately is a question of allegiance. Not just to the beating engine of our bodies, to the profound feeling intelligence of our beings that informs every great thing that we do, but the heart that is the natural order and organisation of all life.

The earth is not made of the human mind. Cities and civilisation are constructed of the human mind, but the natural world and everything we depend on for life is not. Air, water, plants, pollinators. Our minds tell us we can control what gives us life, in spite of increasing evidence to the contrary, and forget one essential fact. The earth is a creation of heart.

We just have to reassemble the letters.

The gathering outside the Forum; potato farmer from Sarpo in Wales; chips from the Greenhouse; Brenna on her bike; Jack from GreenGrow with the red tractors (small version); already blight-free potatoes from Wales.

Original article published on Transition Norwich blog, This Low Carbon Life

An End of Year Story of Decay and Hope

By Marguerite Finn

Yesterday, I walked down Copeman Road in Little Plumstead. It is a pleasant road with trees and a row of nicely spaced houses. ‘A very desirable place to live’, you might think, until you realise that seven houses are empty of inhabitants and have been left to fall into decay and ruin.

I was told that they have been like that for about eight years.

This is at a time when we are being told by Norfolk County Council (NCC) and Broadland District Council (BDC) that the need for houses is currently so great and so urgent that we must cover the North East Triangle of Norwich in 10,000 or more new homes. It is then hard to see why the houses in Copeman Road are being left wantonly to decay.

These houses were well-built council houses, whose infrastructure is still sound and which could be repaired and brought up to current standards for much less than the cost of building new houses.

However, a developer might not see it like that: there’s not enough profit to be made in refurbishing houses that are well spaced and have good-sized rear gardens. The real money lies in demolishing them and building as many houses per hectare as possible.

The empty houses in Copeman Road are just begging to welcome families again. And they are not the only empty buildings in the Norwich region. In Norwich city itself office blocks stand empty and deteriorating. The Norwich Evening News ran a feature on 24 December, saying that the “empty sites are ghosts of our city’s past” – in which, apart from one or two houses of historic interest like Howard House in Kings Street, the recommendation was that the houses and office blocks should be demolished to make way for new development. It is rarely argued that some buildings could be converted into flats for human habitation. One of the sites mentioned was Sovereign House, which overlooks (one might say ‘overhangs’) Anglia Square. I worked in Sovereign House for years when it was Her Majesty’s Stationery Office and employed about 800 people there. Would it not be possible to convert this building into flats? The infrastructure of roads, transport, energy and water are already laid on. Another huge, almost empty office block in the same area– Gildengate House – has also received permission from Norwich City Council to be demolished. These are just a few of the empty buildings in Norwich. It surely makes more sense to make use of existing empty buildings in the city, where transport and jobs are accessible, than to encourage people to settle in new houses on the fringes of the city where they will have to travel into Norwich for jobs - even though there is no satisfactory public transport system to support them? It will encourage the further use of the private car in an era of climate change and diminishing oil reserves.

Yet there is a marked reluctance amongst developers to take on an empty building and refurbish it as a dwelling. They prefer to work with ‘greenfield sites’ such as the Thorpe Woodlands in the developer’s ‘triangle’ to the north–east of Norwich. There are plans to build between 600 and 800 houses over the woodlands of Belmore, Racecourse and Brown plantations near the garden village of Thorpe End. This is yet another case of a developer wishing to clear perfectly healthy and environmentally valuable woodland in order to build houses – and this is at a time when we are being urged to plant more trees for the future. The respected naturalist and author, Richard Mabey, said of this proposed development: ‘the loss of such a large area of semi-mature woodland would significantly damage our attempts to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. The government has stressed the importance of trees in sequestering carbon, and is committed to increasing our forest cover, not encouraging its depletion for development. When the woodland in question is also valuable as a biodiversity reservoir the threat is doubly worrying’. The Friends of Thorpe Woodlands has been formed to fight the threat and they have the support of local councillors, local people and conservation bodies. These three woods are contiguous and although they have been called ‘plantations’ they are far from being full of conifers as the title suggests. In fact they are largely made up of semi-natural broadleaved species with an impressive array of ecological diversity. This fact has been recognised by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust who have had all three woodlands designated as ‘County Wildlife Sites’. Together they form the largest area of woodland within several miles of Norwich and boast a large selection of animal and plant life, including red deer, sparrow hawks, nightingales, and the white admiral butterfly. Many of the oaks, beeches, and sweet chestnuts found in the woods are between 100 and 150 years old.

So what is going on? The answer was plain to see in the three weeks plus of the Examination-in-Public (EiP) into the Joint Core Strategy (JCS) of the Greater Norwich Development Partnership (GNDP) last month. The debate was not whether material growth and development should happen – merely where and how it would happen.

As long as material growth remains a given by our overgrown human species on an already over-exploited planet, our future as a species (and that of many other species too) remains very doubtful.

Uniting the Kingdom - the Great Norfolk Anti-Cuts Demonstration 4/12

By Charlotte Du Cann

"What was that phrase?" asked the student. “United we stand...”
“Divided we fall,” we chorused.

There were a thousand of us at least standing beside the bandstand in Chapelfield Gardens, stamping our feet against the bitter cold. The last time I stood here it was a sunny autumn day, and I was listening to a song by Seize the Day dedicated to the striking wind turbine workers on the Isle of Wight. In 2009 at a Zero Carbon concert this had struck me as unusual. Most of the protest songs were about the environment or the war. Now there’s a change of mood in the wintry air. The Great Norfolk Anti-Cuts Demo in Norwich on Saturday marked a social shift, as hundreds of marches and demonstrations break out in Britain’s cities and occupations take place in 30 universities across the country, creating a new ferment and new alliances.

The shock tactics of the cuts are a standard part of an economic doctrine that is being administered for the second time in Britain. The present Coalition cabinet have been called the Children of Thatcher and the dismantling of the welfare state is a hallmark of the Friedman School of Economics, widely embraced by the last Conservative government - a deliberate break-up of unionised workforce, privatisation of the public sector and deregulation of the markets to create a society of extreme wealth for the few, corporate control and a vast and voiceless underclass.

Only these present cuts are happening in a very different climate in a very different decade. This is no longer the boomtime of the 80s when Britain was able to export oil and gas and the majority of the population could find credit to go on a shopping spree. There is economic collapse in Europe, an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, 388PPM of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and perhaps more crucially a growing sector of people throughout Britain waking up to the fact that life is not the fossil-fuelled consumer dream they were once promised.

The key strategy in the shock doctrine is to keep people separated and unable to communicate. To make changes so quickly and brutally across the board that it is hard to grasp what is happening and retaliate. Confused, isolated and afraid, people give up. However after decades of individualism, different sections of society that have been out of touch with each other are beginning to connect up. I’m walking alongside the fiery-red banner of the Communication Workers, as we swing up Gentleman’s Walk, past the merry-go-round outside the Forum. I’m remembering the last time I joined a march with union banners was in Birmingham in 1976 when I was a student. Can it be that long ago? The Saturday shoppers stop and stare. But they are not divided as once they might have been. As we walk past the fire station the firemen come out and cheer.

We’re linking up. We’re joining up the facts in our minds and deciding how to act. We're meeting up as individuals and as groups and coming out of our houses. When this column was cut by the EDP after six years, the six writers did not go their separate ways. We decided to make the OneWorldColumn blog a focal point for all the activities that were taking part in the region; to start a conversation that would not only bring the organisations and disciplines we represented together (Green Party, Greenpeace, the peace movement, Transition movement, Campaign against Climate Change, international development), but to unify all the different strands within the local progressive community.

On the bandstand speakers from the public sector unions, the universities and the NGOs were advocating a clear alternative to the cuts that include scrapping Trident, stopping tax evasion, curbing banker’s bonuses, bringing troops home, introducing financial levies and creating a million green jobs and apprenticeships that would enable us to downshift into a low-carbon economy.

Cath Elliot, a Guardian blogger, is talking about the huge rise in unemployment for women, how equality has now been dubbed “a dirty word” (You can find her speech on the blog Too Much To Say For Myself). We all know that the 18 millionaires who are in the cabinet are not all in this together with us. That in the choice between people’s welfare or bankers' profit, the latter has been taken. And that knowledge brings a certain sobriety and solidarity within the crowd. None of us seem confused or afraid. I am standing next to a group of deaf people who are watching the speeches being signed by a woman in a white wool hat. “We’ve never had it so bad.” said the slogan.

The disabled and those who care for them will perhaps fare the hardest in these cuts. Crucial grants and benefits that make people able to live independent lives as human beings are being taken away. Many are being forced into unsuitable low-paid work. In another era I might not have been able to talk with them. Now we have something in common. We are realising that even though we face a global economic recession, we can come together, reorganise and redistribute amongst ourselves. And in a time of structural collapse, coherence and communication are perhaps the most vital things we can share.

Oh, the big society is happening all right. But it may not be the one the Government is banking on.

www.http://www.http//www.www.norfolkcoalitionagainstcuts.org/

Personal Space

By Marguerite Finn

I was sitting in the garden last Sunday, enjoying the sunshine and listening to the birds, when suddenly my ears were assaulted not so much by the 'sound of distant drums' as by the deafening 'boom-boom' of music coming from a house several doors away. It made me realise that people choose to use their personal space in very different ways. How important is 'personal space' in our culture? How sustainable is it?

Like population growth, personal space has become the truth that dare not speak its name and must not be mentioned in polite society. Yet Western society is becoming more anti-communal and, in effect, anti-social. Growing children spend increasingly longer periods of time in the virtual worlds of their computer games. Older children play virtual tennis with a machine rather than interact with real players down at the tennis club. Is this is at the core of our problems – both domestic and foreign – that our species is losing the ability to interact peaceably?

The Eastern Daily Press reported on 25 May that modern life is leaving people feeling increasingly isolated and lonely. According to research carried out by the Mental Health Foundation more people are living alone with the percentage of households occupied by one person doubling from six percent in 1972 to twelve percent in 2008. Yet all this personal space has not made us any happier. One in ten people say they often feel lonely and 48 percent believe that people are getting lonelier in general.

I received a letter this week from Broadland District Council preparing me for "significant growth in Broadland". More trees perhaps? More crops? More Broads? Not a bit of it; just 10,000 more houses within a few miles of here.

Although it is obvious from housing lists that we need more houses, nobody I have spoken to on the subject could tell me why we need anything like this many. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) suggests that population growth is one critical factor, but so is the trend towards smaller household sizes as people choose to spend more of their lives living alone. CPRE suggests that as a nation, we should start asking ourselves "whether the fall in average household sizes is socially as well as environmentally sustainable".

The Community Parish Plan that includes my village shows that the number of residents per house in Little Plumstead comes out at 1.6. To get the average that much below 2 means that a lot of our bungalows have only one person living there. Even Thorpe End, with its many family houses and ideal commuter position for Norwich does not get above 2.6, kept down by the many one-person households.

Do an increasing number of people choose to live alone? Could the social 'alienation' of their youth have anything to do with it?

The plans to cover good agricultural land around Hethersett, Cringleford and the North-East Norwich triangle in houses suggests that - as population growth goes on and other nations need the food we presently import from them – we may have to decide between eating and having so much personal space. My partner and I live in a four-bedroom bungalow. It could easily be converted into two dwellings, and the social, ecological and demographical benefits of doing that are extremely disconcerting, because neither one of us would want to do it.

Yet, as low-lying nations begin to be submerged by rising sea levels and migration increases, I hope the media will begin to explore ways of dealing with the inevitable decrease in our entitlement to so much personal housing space. One thing is certain: as the numbers on this island continue to swell, untrammelled countryside to breathe in and share will become even more valuable, not less.

Food for thought

By Charlotte Du Cann

Once food was about personal choice: now it’s become social. A year ago I might not have noticed a newspaper article about children being locked in schools to stop them buying take-away 'junk food', or that within the new millionaire' cabinet, Caroline Spelman, whose career in agri-business began as a sugar beet commodity secretary for the National Farmers Union, is now in charge of DEFRA.

A year ago I would not have stood on the terrace of the Norwich Playhouse before a table covered with plants – tomatoes, beans, edible flowers - taking part in a seedling swap. Or gone to a Bungay garden, hammer in hand, to prepare a hive for the queen bee of England's first bee CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).

But these seemingly unrelated events demonstrate the pulls that are going invery different directions in our 'one nation' right now. Pulls we contend with every time we sit down to a meal.

A pernicious craving for sugar, fat and salt is one of the consequences of a globalised industrial food system. This is a system that relies on subsidised commodity crops, factory-farmed meat and a science that disguises its poor nutritional quality with addictive feel-good tastes. It relies on people being alienated and unaware.

The Transition events are part of a growing community culture: people coming together to grow vegetables and forge relationships between farmers, neighbours and local shops. This informal distribution network relies on people being intelligent, good-hearted and far-seeing. Who know, for example, that Spelman has for the last decade co-owned a food and biotechnology company (Spelman, Cormack & Associates), lobbying the very department she now heads.

When the East Anglia Food Link's Food Plan was publicised last month in the Eastern Daily Press, Richard Hirst of the National Farmers Union dismissed its vision of small-scale organic farming and local milling as "dangerous". However it is a 'business-as-usual' attitude towards our food supply that is dangerous. We live in unusual times. If we are prepared to invest in low-tech solutions and switch to a vegetable-based diet we could all become more self-sufficient and resilient.

While we demonise children for eating fast-food and ignore the unhealthy links between the bio-tech industry and government, we are not considering our future. We are not taking climate change into account, nor the damage our cheaply-produced food wreaks on nature. Nor are we considering the escalation in energy costs in the coming years. Our current food system is only efficient while energy costs remain low. What will happen when they rise? When the resources – water, nitrates, phosphates - on which monoculture relies become scarce? When the oil that fuels tractors, trucks and tankers becomes increasingly difficult to extract and costly?

It's widely believed that agriculture must double its output to feed a hungry world. Behind this 'truth' however lies multinational agri-business which stands to profit from the ownership of seed and increased pesticide production. Companies like Monsanto and BASF, who have pushed for GM production in Europe after a 12 year ban.

The real truth is our food system produces twice as much food as we actually eat and a good proportion of it is thrown away in the waste bins of supermarkets, restaurants and our houses.

"You like wheat, rice, corn?" asked a commercial beekeeper in the documentary film, Vanishing of the Bees. "Well, that's all you'll be eating." Last winter a third of America's honeybees died. For the growers of Californian oranges and Vermont cranberries that depend on pollination by bees, this is a serious concern. And it will be ours if we keep reaching for the OJ without thinking. Time to focus on neighbourhood apple trees and the small plants now growing on our windowsills in this late, very late, May sunshine.

World Water Day

By Marguerite Finn

Supposing our only water was what we could carry in a bucket from the nearest source two miles away, would we wash our car, the baby or our food? A good question on World Water Day (22nd March).

Although World Water Day usually passes without much comment in the UK, some countries have a three-day celebration of this increasingly precious resource. The theme for this year is "Clean Water for a Healthy World". Clean water has become scarce and will become even scarcer with the onset of climate change. Water affects every aspect of our lives, yet nearly one billion people around the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and 2.6 billion still lack basic sanitation.

UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, issued a statement today highlighting the fact that more people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war. He made the point: "Our growing population’s need for water for food, raw materials and energy is increasingly competing with nature’s own demands for water to sustain already imperilled ecosystems."

We have assumed for too long that water is freely available and we take it for granted. We have made some bad mistakes along the way. One such mistake was the introduction, in 1966, of the so-called “Green Revolution” in India. India's food security depends on the Monsoon. Recent monsoon failure and consequent widespread drought have impacted two-thirds of the country.

As Vandana Shiva, philosopher and authoress, explains: "the monsoons recharge the ground-water and surface-water systems, but since the introduction of the Green Revolution model of water-intensive chemical farming, India has over-exploited her ground water, creating a water famine. The chemical monocultures of the Green Revolution use ten times more water than the biodiverse ecological farming systems."

Humankind's hubris in thinking they have got the answer to everything brought about this situation. In the 1970s, the World Bank gave massive loans to India to promote ground-water mining. It forced states like Maharashtra to stop growing water-prudent millets, which needed 300mm water and to shift to water-guzzling crops like sugar cane, which needs 2,500mm of water. In a region of 600mm of rainfall, this is a recipe for water famine. Indian aquifers are now dangerously depleted. But that's not all – not only has chemical agriculture mined the groundwater, it has also mined soil fertility and contributed to climate change. Chemical fertilisers destroy the living processes of the soil and make soils more vulnerable to drought - as well as binding the farmer into the system of buying more fertilizer. Science did not get it quite right that time – and have bequeathed damaged soil and empty aquifers to the coming generations.

We are in danger of making a mistake of similar gravity and proportions in Norfolk.

A lot of development is planned for an area to the North-East of Norwich. The greater Norwich Development Partnership (GNDP) has big plans. There is to be an 'ECO-Town' at Rackheath comprising 4,000-5,000 new houses (built on agricultural land). Plans have also been floated for a £300m conference and tourism complex, complete with Jacussi, saunas and swimming pools. Norfolk, being one of the driest counties in England, is least well placed to absorb this level of growth. Despite that, Broadland District Council is determined to go ahead with the ECO-Town.

Broadland District Council leader, Simon Woodbridge, says that engineers will find the water that is needed – as though fresh water is an infinitely available bolt-on 'gizmo'. This is "flying by the seat of your pants" as one of my HMSO bosses once said to me – not best practice!! Fresh water is a finite resource, and using expensively purified tap water on the garden and to flush away our faeces is not living in the real world.

For further information / relevant maps see snubcampaign.org.

One planet community kitchen

By Charlotte Du Cann

After Copenhagen the citizens of the world have found themselves with all the cards. Their nations' leaders, unable to make a deal about carbon emissions, are sticking, while a powerful corporate lobby, in its relentless ransack of the planet, pushes the stakes higher and higher.

The question now is: knowing these things how do we proceed? Though we might be justified in calling the global elite and the "polluter" corporations to account, we've got work to do at home. Governments are locked into an economic growth model which demands three planets' worth of resources to fulfil. Their hands are tied whilst ours are free. We might not feel very free but we are able to act. And nowhere can we act more imaginatively and decisively than in the kitchen.

Everything we eat is intimately connected to other lifeforms, to plants, places and people. It's linked with the suffering of cows, the fate of migrant workers, the bulldozed rainforest, the desecration of the oceans, the pollution of the atmosphere. When you look at your plate you gaze upon the abundance of the earth and our great wasting of it. So if you share a resolution to keep within the limits of one planet living in 2010, here is a good place to start.

Right now, it's hard to look at the decade ahead, or even outside the door, where there are plans to turn beet fields into biofuel production, build distributor roads and tanker ports, flood supermarket shelves with mammoth amounts of imported sugar, palm oil and soya. However the moment you take practical steps in the kitchen, you're preparing for another future - planting corn for the harvest, planting fruit trees which one day your child will pick.

In 2010 if we are smart, we need act on what we know about the industrialised food system. We need to eat plants grown without pesticides, eat radically less meat and dairy, stop throwing a third of what we buy away. Although we are used to operating within a highly aggressive, competitive society, revved to the max on factory food, we're not made to live individualistic, isolated lives. We're configured to work in co-operative teams, swapping knowledge and stories and seeds, enjoying life in common.

This is the logic behind many local food initiatives that have sprung up in villages, towns and cities in the last decade. Aware of a coming decline in oil supplies (on which modern agriculture depends) as well as the knock-on effects of climate change, people are renovating allotments, organising city farms and community kitchens, creating woodlands and orchards, food co-ops, garden share schemes, baking bread. In Sheffield communities are gleaning fruit from the city's trees, in Hackney raising 70 different salad leaves, in Norwich pioneering a CSA scheme, school market garden and flour mill to produce bread made from Norfolk wheat.

To engage in food production is to remember the bargain all human beings make with life, which is we give the best of ourselves for our time here. While the industrial barons are in charge of our reality we can give nothing because all our energy and attention serves to uphold the Chosen Few and the make-believe world they control.

We have to take that energy and attention back. Not just for ourselves, but for the land we live in, for the disappeared honey bees, for the herring shoals, for our apple orchards. And no matter how powerful and greedy and apocalyptic those barons become, they will not be backed by the planet as we are backed in our small actions. A weak agreement was reached in Copenhagen because the deal governments make with life, with the life-affirming citizens of the world, is weak. Because the real future of the earth does not belong to them. We hold it right now in our hands.

To find out more about local food projects in the UK read Local Food – How to Make It Happen in Your Community by Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins (Green Books); for Norwich food projects contact Tully Wakeman on tully@transitionnorwich.org. Charlotte Du Cann is a member of Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay.

Leaving the pleasuredome

By Charlotte Du Cann

Last November at an Energy Fair in a Suffolk village John Gummer MP declared how people like us were making a difference and how that lady in the front wearing the woolly hat had the right idea about keeping warm. He then went on to say how frightfully important it was he kept his five cars and in particular the 4x4 outside in the car park.

In another era I would have spent this column denouncing the politician. But the fact is my attention has shifted. The times have shifted. Because all across the region ordinary people are doing the extraordinary. Though they have been educated to believe the top of the world is the place to be, they are discussing how to proceed down the mountain. They have not yet turned their heating on. They are walking to work and darning their socks. They are swapping clothes and vegetable seeds, showing The Age of Stupid in their village halls. And I'm not writing as an observer. I'm one of those people.

Whatever happens in Copenhagen next month a wave of low-carbon communities and Transition initiatives across East Anglia are already cutting their carbon emissions. We're not doing it because the government have told us to, but because something like conscience has entered our field. And even though, like everyone else, we have been dazzled by the pleasuredome of the Western World, we know that no matter how many buttons we push or planes we take the walls that have allowed us not to see or feel the consequences of our daily actions have become thin. We can only live this way by exploiting the natural resources of the planet and millions of our fellow human beings. And it's not just the trees and animals and people who suffer. It is ourselves, in our rages and our depressions, our children who run crazy in the schoolroom instead of running free, our parents who lose their minds instead of becoming elders.

Today people from 27 Transition initiatives across the Eastern Region are converging in Diss to discuss how to co-ordinate this downshift into a low-carbon world. They are engaged in a movement that began in Totnes in 2005 in response to peak oil (the imminent decline of oil supplies) and climate change that enables communities to make active steps towards energy descent. Their hardest task is to communicate the fact that to reverse the downward spiralling of eco-systems and resource wars, we can’t hold on to our fossil-fuelled life-style. At some point you have to stop eating the disappearing fish in the ocean. You have to put on your woolly hat.

To see the reality of our situation beyond our fairy stories of heroes and saviours is to see that we live in a world run by a corporate machine that is munching its way across the green earth, like a vast voracious caterpillar. For things to change that caterpillar has to transform and become something utterly different. What grassroots movements realise is this is not just a top-down political decision that can be agreed in a climate change summit, it's a personal task for everyone. Because when you dissolve your old world, that's when you start to dream of the butterfly.

If you had told me I'd be writing a column about not turning on the central heating 17 years ago, I would have laughed. I was a consumer journalist, finding meaning and solace in little black dresses and designer chairs, jet-setting to Tokyo and Madrid without a qualm. Now I'm part of a response to the greatest challenge people have ever faced, creating a culture that can live in synch with the planet, one amongst millions of ordinary people doing the extraordinary thing. Walking down the mountain together. Dreaming of the butterfly.

The Transition East Regional Gathering is taking place in Diss on 14 November 2009. Charlotte Du Cann is a member of Transition Norwich and Sustainable Bungay.


When the boat comes in?

By Juliette Harkin

I went to watch a film about fish this week at the Garage Theatre in Norwich. I am not really interested in fish and I don't eat fish. But, the screening of The End of the Line gripped me from beginning to end, with its breathtaking underwater filming and powerful messages. It told us in no uncertain terms that, as leading scientists all agree, we have drastically depleted our supplies of large fish such as bluefin tuna. The filmmakers ask us to consider what a world without fish would really be like. They convince sceptics that it will affect me – as I swim on a beach that is infested by jellyfish because we have eaten all their natural predators.

On current projections we will run out of most sea fish by 2050. Yet the EU has run shy of introducing – and adequately policing - tough but essential quotas for the massive commercial fishing industry, which uses the most obscene methods to make big profits and strip our oceans of sustainable stocks of fish.

The related costs of massive over-fishing are movingly and beautifully potrayed in this film, through the story of traditional fishermen on West Africa's coast line. A young father explains how the sea used to be full of fish and how his father and his grandfather encouraged him to fish. Using more traditional fishing methods, these coastal villagers relied on the sea for a living. Yet they are forced into mere subsistence as the big European trawlers encroach on the African shores. At the end of the day the catch for the Senegalese fisherman barely covers his fuel costs. He contemplates the difficult decision of trying to travel to Europe to make a future for the daughter he holds in his arms. He knows how dangerous the sea can be and that he would risk his life trying to reach Europe. If he is lucky he will make the journey and, as one of the fisheries experts so poignantly said, he will not be as welcome on our shores as his fish is in our restaurants. But it is the practices of large-scale European trawlers that are decimating his livelihood.

The film is a call to action: ask where your fish is coming from before you buy it, put pressure on politicians to 'listen to the science and cut fishing fleets', and then let's campaign for marine-protected-areas and sustainable fishing.

We should start in the North Sea, right here off the Norfolk coast. The North Sea has been horribly over-fished by big business: our cod has been hugely depleted. We need to learn from Newfoundland where their cod stocks have completely disappeared – this in spite of a long-term ban. The cod never recovered. You can't suck up 50% of all the fish in the North Sea into your nets, and still expect to have a viable livelihood in the following years.

We should also do something about the damage caused by offshore dredging to the fish and other creatures that live there. So long as we go on allowing the East Anglian coast to be dredged for building supplies like sand and gravel, we are condemning our fish stocks to decline.

The alternative is marine reserves or National Parks for the ocean. Places where commercial fishing – and dredging – would be banned, and our fish can finally start to recover. The National Parks movement has been successful on land - we have the Broads National Park - it is time for the movement to enter the hidden frontier, the most terribly exploited place on this Earth, now: the sea…

As John Ruskin said: "There is no wealth but life'. Without life, without fish, our seas are nothing but a desert.

The End of the Line will be screened at 10pm on More4, on Tuesday 20th October.

Re-imagining our future

By Marguerite Finn

On 6th September I attended the Charities Day at Mannington Hall in support of the Wulugu Project. As I wandered around enjoying the many attractions, I found myself thinking how difficult it would be to explain the anomaly between an English, moated, stately home and the problems experienced by the children in Northern Ghana – for whom the funds raised at Mannington were destined.

On the surface, there would seem to be a vast economic and cultural divide between 'them' and 'us' - but this apparent difference is currently being shown to be false.

For the past 300 years, science, from Newton and Descartes onwards, idealised separateness. According to Lynne McTaggart, writing in Resurgence Magazine, "from the moment we are born, we are told that for every winner there must be a loser – and from that constricted vision we have fashioned our world".

But Lynne maintains that frontier research into the nature of human consciousness has turned this scientific 'certainty' on its head demonstrating that all matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection: "at our essence, we exist as a unity, a relationship – utterly interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment".

Therefore what happens in Norfolk affects what happens in Ghana.

We are only just beginning to understand the vast and untapped human potential at our disposal: the individual's extraordinary capacity to influence the world. If we could learn how to direct our potential for influence in a positive manner, we could improve every aspect of our world – and overcome the endemic corruption found within global society. Across the world, governments are battling their way out of a greed-induced global recession. This applies to Ghana as well as Britain. Young people in this country often stray into alcohol and drug abuse, neglect their education and end up on the streets, wasting their individual potential and failed by a system under stress. In Ghana, young women are driven, through lack of opportunity, to head for the cities in the South, looking for employment. They frequently end up as prostitutes, only returning home to die of AIDS.

In Norfolk, a small, dedicated group of people has achieved outstanding successes in a deprived area of northern Ghana. This month, the Wulugu Project has managed to open six more primary schools, each with a full compliment of girls. Older girls, previously condemned to slavery, flood into the five 'Wulugu' vocational schools, where they get high quality training for locally-based careers. They learn to read and write, alongside nutrition, family-care, catering, tailoring, hairdressing and office work. Wulugu is currently building a hostel for girls at the vocational school in Savelugu, allowing girls from more distant villages to return safely to education.

Lynne Symonds, Wulugu founder, explains: "Wulugu owes its success in part to the dedication of its supporters here in East Anglia, who tirelessly fund-raise, strengthened by the knowledge that 99p of every pound goes to help people who are forgotten, largely due to their geographical inaccessibility. Those who work with 'Wulugu' in Ghana walk tall because it has such a good reputation due to its refusal to participate in any form of corruption".

Let us hope that the girls of Ghana are spared the excesses of 20th century philosophy where human beings became commodified 'units' or 'human resources' – their individual creativity curtailed by over-management.

This 21st century revolution in scientific thinking gives us back a sense of optimism, something that has been stripped out of our sense of ourselves by the arid target-driven outlook of the 20th century. We are not isolated beings living out desperate lives on a lonely planet. We were never alone. We were always part of a larger whole – just as the Wulugu Project has proved.

What price for our back yards?

By Marguerite Finn

The surveyor, naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau held that the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

The price of the land must have figured in the minds of those proposing the 'Norfolk Hub Development', (appropriately dubbed 'Disney World for the Broads', EDP 27 July), of four square kilometres of farmland between my village of Little Plumstead and the gateway to the Broads at Wroxham. The proposal for a massive conference and tourism complex includes eleven hotels, a sports centre, outdoor stage, golf course, lorry parks…

What sort of 'life' would the developers exchange for this? Doubtless they took into account the increased traffic, road accidents, building-site mishaps, late-night violence and gang warfare that concreting over prime agricultural land would inevitably cost. Maybe they exchanged those in their minds for the new human life inhabiting the built environment? Did they think of the genocide of invertebrate life, from earthworms to ladybirds, and of plants from algae to dandelions, in every cubic metre of soil they would replace with tarmac and bricks? Does their balance sheet mention the sea-floor life extinguished by the dredging of building aggregate for concrete? The dictionary definition of "concrete" is "formed into one mass" – spot-on for the true objective of this development: to produce a concrescence stretching from Norwich to Wroxham, engulfing discrete Broadland villages and their communities all along the way. The Broads Authority has objected to Broadland District Council's (BDC) proposals and to the notion of "closing up the gaps" between the distinct communities of Norwich and Wroxham.

Where will the rainwater go, denied the 'sponge' effect of the soil? The run-off will cascade into the River Bure causing it to flood. Or, has the government magically taken care of that by proposing to replace the existing Internal Drainage Boards, thereby consigning a tried and tested system of drainage and flood prevention to the dustbin?

Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn said recently that Britain must produce more of its own food to help prevent the rising world population from going hungry. So the developers plan to grow conferences on good land here while our entrepreneurs grab Ukrainian land to grow wheat on! That’s a joke worthy of Micky Mouse.

And what about those who presently enjoy the peace of 'messing about in boats' in this unique part of the world? Who needs expensive leisure centres in such a naturally unspoilt and beautiful place?

If that makes NIMBYs (Not In My back Yard) of all the plants, animals and humans who would suffer from the Norfolk Hub, then so be it. Such an irrevocable transformation in our landscape involves all of us and our back yards. No matter when – or if – we climb out of this economic recession, the world has changed and we must change too in order to survive climate change, resource wars and a population explosion. One way of coping is to re-connect with Nature. Environmentalist Satish Kumar, writing in Resurgence, says: "The cause of these multiple crises is our disconnection from the place where we belong. Wherever we live we need to be rooted in our place." Spreading urbanisation mitigates against a sense of place and produces a sense of alienation.

Thoreau's back yard was a pond in Massachusetts. The former Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva's back yard is the rainforest. She resigned from the country's ruling party, berating the country's leaders for pursuing material wealth at the expense of the natural world, and may stand for president. Would that they could join Broadland District Council – and the latest outfit, the Broadland Growth Project - bringing practical common sense to offset the current virulent outbreak of Developer's delirium.

Since they can't, we must deal with it ourselves; BDC's consultation ends on 4th September.

Welcome to Paine's County

By Lee Marsden

While visitors to Norfolk are welcomed by road signs proudly proclaiming that Norfolk is "Nelson's County" last weekend's bicentennial celebrations in Thetford demonstrate that honour rightfully belongs to Norfolk's greatest son, Thomas Paine. Paine is one of the most politically significant figures of modernity, a leading figure and inspiration in the American and French revolutions that helped shape the modern world. A Thetford boy who attended Thetford Grammar School before becoming a corset maker, excise officer and then, after a chance meeting with Benjamin Franklin, a major political figure on both sides of the Atlantic. The University of East Anglia and Thomas Paine Society hosts a biannual Thomas Paine lecture, and UEA's politics department awards its best student with the Thomas Paine prize each year, but for many Norfolk residents Paine remains largely unappreciated. Throughout the summer and autumn, however, Thetford hosts a variety of events to commemorate the life of this great thinker.

Paine challenged the existing order of his day, writing three of the greatest political tracts ever written which still have resonance. In 1776, Common Sense became the best selling book of the eighteenth century, selling 125,000 copies in just three months in a population of just two and a half million people in the thirteen American colonies. Paine made the case for American independence, railed against the monarchy, inheritance and privilege, arguing in favour of representative democratic government, and to establish America as a safe haven for the world's oppressed. Written in two parts The Rights Of Man in 1791 and 1792 offered justification for the French revolution, opposed hereditary rule as being as "absurd as a hereditary mathematician", sought elected leaders, term limits, a judiciary acceptable to the public, redistribution of income, pensions, state education, a system of welfare benefits, the end of wage restrictions, a complete separation of church and state and the abolition of the monarchy. Finally, in 1794 and 1795 Paine wrote the Age of Reason, the application of reason to the Bible. In exposing inaccuracies and contradictions within the Bible, Paine produced a far more devastating critique of religion than anything produced by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens; suggesting that "the whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum".

Paine was vilified in his home country for attacking the monarchy, in France for opposing the execution of the King, and in America for opposing religion. And yet, throughout the ages, Paine has continued to inspire those who believe that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood". In a year that has been marked by the greed of bankers and politicians, the death throes of the New Labour project, the upsurge in support for racist and Little England parties, and the inability of the leader of the opposition to articulate any coherent policies, the memory of Thomas Paine behoves us to rediscover the radicalism that inspired previous generations. To read Thomas Paine's work is to again be challenged about the potential of political engagement to change the world. Paine fought to defend and advance democracy, to oppose inheritance and privilege, to oppose offensive warfare, and to defend reason and secularism against religious fundamentalism.

Thomas Paine is radical and an antidote to a political culture that is more impressed by presentation than substance, is more concerned about personality than character, and is more concerned about self rather than community. Paine believed that a better world was possible and set about doing something to achieve it, and so can we. So let's celebrate that inheritance and be proud that we live in "Paine's County".

The lesson of ancient dragons

By Liam Carroll

Dragons are one of the most widespread and ancient symbols in human culture and are still consistently emerging in artistic, educational and religious activities to this very day. I had the pleasure recently of cycling the Dragon Trail around three charming Norfolk churches on the Broads and was struck by the dragons enduring appeal. I was even more surprised when I subsequently walked around Norwich Cathedral cloisters and saw many dragons on the roof bosses.

Probably the oldest creation myth that we know of is the Enuma Elish, which foreshadows much of Genesis and comes from the same part of the world (the Middle East). It features the great dragon Tiamat, a watery chaotic power, that is confronted by Marduk, a courageous god, who defeats the dragon and creates the world from her carcass. It represents the awakening of human culture, and is echoed in the Bible by the creation story and later references to the sea beast Leviathan.

Marduk's struggle with the dragon Tiamat, and the biblical threat to God's kingdom from the sea beast are psychological stories, not events. The struggle to keep chaos at bay, to have the courage to do the right things and to confront fear and anxiety, was, and still is, a living reality. For the ancients, the world was a much more mysterious place, and probably more frightening, for death was never far away. Yet even today, in the age of science, we cannot eradicate anxiety.
To achieve anything of value still requires a struggle of some sort, the sacrificing of one's time, a test of will power or the ordeal of examination. Yet we often know in our hearts that we must endure such discomforts for there is really no other way to progress in life, for talent too is often only the product of considerable effort.

Children and young people are constantly challenged by new and uncomfortable experiences, whether that be starting school, going to the dentist or going to work for the first time. Adults may be expected to be somewhat better equipped to deal with the new and unfamiliar, yet in reality we often have to face far more serious choices, for which the consequences of failure can be far reaching.

Anxiety and difficult choices face all people throughout their lives, and the process of getting old hardly lessens the burden, despite the increase in wisdom. We are imperfect beings with imperfect knowledge about ourselves and the world, and it is not surprising that we seek to lessen our state of vulnerability through material security.

Material security often proves evasive though; the more one pursues it, the more it seems to recede into the background; the more we run from our vulnerability, the more we are endlessly confronted by it.

Folklore, fairytales and dragons offer a different wisdom; the hero always makes the difficult choice, the fool pursues the immediate gain, the hero always helps people despite the difficulty of his journey, the fool always seeks to outwit people for his own personal benefit and thinks himself clever. In the final end the fool is always left with nothing whilst the hero gains the ultimate prize, which is never something material but something more precious like love or redemption for a particular community.

Norfolk and Norwich have a rich variety of dragons; mostly to be found in it's many religious houses, but also in it's heritage (Dragon Hall and the Snap Dragon in the Castle Museum), but most enduring of all are the dragons of children's stories that still proliferate homes, schools and libraries. This is to be welcomed, for the dragon stories often have something valuable to tell, something we have perhaps been telling ourselves since the very beginning, but somehow we seem to keep forgetting.