Carbon Co-op - events in Moss Side

Email from friends at the Carbon Co-op:

In March 2010 The Carbon Co-op launched its Moss Side project with the Carbon Co-op
Manual offering advice on saving energy in the home. Now we’re inviting you to take the next steps by joining us for a free workshop and tour of local green projects.

*Moss Side Carbon Co-op workshop*
6pm-8pm, Tuesday 22nd June 2010
Greenheys Centre, Gt Western Street, Moss Side
How do you use electricity and gas in your home?
What simple ways are there to save energy and cuts bills?
How might local people club together to make savings cheaply and simply?

Come along to this free workshop to pick up some practical hints and tips and share
experiences with other Moss Side residents.
Arrive 5.30pm for complimentary food and refreshment

*The Big Red Bus Tour of Green Projects*
Midday-4pm, Saturday 19th June 2010
- See energy saving projects up close
- Meet people who have transformed their houses and hear how they did it
- See renewable energy projects from the top deck of a red London bus!
Departs midday from Greenheys Centre, Great Western Street, Moss Side, returns 4pm.
Complimentary food and refreshments available

Book spaces
Both events are FREE! To book a space on the workshop or the Big Red Bus tour call 0161 408 6492 or email info@carbon.coop

Find out more about the Carbon Co-op: 0161 408 6492 or www.carbon.coop

In collaboration with Great Western Street Residents Association and Peace FM.

Greenpeace on the BP oil spill

Original here.

Local food event, June 12th

I'll be at a wedding somewhere terrifyingly countrified, but in Manchester on 12th of June this very worthwhile event will be happening:

“Create your own Abundance” open event
Saturday 12th June, 11am-1pm at Madlab,  36-40 Edge St, Northern Quarter, Manchester City Centre, M4 1HN
Abundance Manchester invites groups and individuals in Greater Manchester to find out how they can cut food waste, have fun, reduce food miles, get fit, help vulnerable people and strengthen their communities.....all at the same time. How? By coming to an open event designed to help them set up an 'Abundance' project in their area.
Abundance Manchester is a small voluntary group that harvests surplus and unwanted fruit and veg from gardens, allotments and public places and distributes it to places that need it, like homeless hostels and refugee projects. It has been running for 2 years in South Manchester, covering Chorlton, Didsbury, Withington, Fallowfield & Whalley Range. Jointly with several other Abundance projects in the country, it is one of 3 schemes shortlisted for the ‘Best Grassroots Project’ award at the Observer's Ethical Awards 2010.
“Abundance is a great project, but we can only cover a tiny fraction of Greater Manchester, and we want people in other areas to take advantage of the 'abundance' of fresh produce that's going to waste where they live” said Debbie Clarke of the group. “And we'd like to help get them started”.
On Saturday 12th June, Abundance Manchester is holding a short open event in Manchester city centre where people can find out just how easy it is to start and run their own Abundance project, or something like it. The group will provide tips and advice on getting started, plus the chance to connect interested people from the same areas.
Starts 11am with a short presentation, followed by discussion and one to one advice. Those interested are asked to book by Monday 7th June, as places are limited.
For more info (& to book) - email: abundancemanchester[at]yahoo.co.uk, phone: Nicola: 07515 116 730 or Debbie: 07967 227 981, website: http://abundancemanchester.wordpress.com/

And congratulations to Abundance, especially Nicola, on that Observer Ethical Awards shortlisting. Full details of the shortlist for this year's awards are here - we'll know if Abundance gets the top prize in June.

Highly entertaining Green Party propaganda

Tony Lloyd on refugees... perhaps

In the latest installment of the Refugee Council Election Pledge saga (Manchester Central strand) I have an email reply from Tony Lloyd's office, in response to my reminder email, saying:

Thank you for your e-mail. A reply from Tony about this issue was posted to you yesterday, you should receive it in the next few days.
Yours sincerely,
George
Office of Tony Lloyd

The email was dated Friday 16th, and the letter hasn't arrived yet. Given the standard of postal services in Moss Side that could just mean it's been delivered to any of the six houses either side of mine. I await it with bated breath...
Still nothing from Suhail Rahuja for the Tories, although maybe that's because it's taking so long to clear out his full inbox...
Not one of the candidates has replied to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign message. I don't know if that's a technical problem, or a political one.
On a wider Manchester stage, the Tory council candidate for Manchester City Centre, Yan Zhang, who was supposed to be speaking at this evening's Manchester Climate Forum meeting scrutinising what the future of Manchester city council's action on climate change might be, has pulled out. No replacement seems to have been forthcoming - perhaps because most Tories have nothing useful or sensible to say on climate change, viz:

Tackling climate change not a priority for Tory candidates
"The new generation of Conservative MPs due to take power after the election does not share David Cameron’s professed commitment to tackling climate change, a survey being published this week suggests. “Reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was rated as the lowest priority, out of 19 policies, by 144 Conservative candidates responding to the survey of the 240 most winnable Tory target seats... The results of the survey by the Conservativehome website, to be unveiled at a conference on the Tory manifesto on Wednesday, suggest a gap might be opening up between the leadership and rank-and-file MPs and activists on the issue." Financial Times, January 2010

'Local press rubbish on climate change' shocker

Nice little analysis by Manchester Climate Fortnightly of a fairly bobbins editorial from Crains Manchester Business. Having been on the receiving end of some of their 'reporting' I've also been quite surprised how amateurish the fact-checking and quoting was, since I presume they're selling themselves along those FT-style 'accurate information for the decision-makers' lines.

Manchester Central candidate mithering update

A new reply to my Refugee Council-facilitated candidate-prodding in my email inbox this morning, this time from Gayle O'Donovan, the Green Party candidate. She says:

Dear Sarah Irving,
I have already signed up to this pledge, as it is quiet close to my heart. Please continue to raise this with other candidates as it is an important issue.
Best Wishes
Gayle O'Donovan
www.greengayle.com

With all this reasonableness on asylum issues coming from Manchester Central candidates, you'd wonder why the whole system in this country is in such a racist mess... Oh right, the Labour and Tory blokes haven't got back yet.

Meanwhile, here's a neat little roundup from the Guardian green page of where all the parties are on cycling, with the 'reliably daft' (to put it politely) UKIP wanting to make bike riders get off and walk at busy junctions.

Science Museum rubbish

Another work of bitter genius from Marc Roberts:

Email etiquette and political spikings?

Generally speaking, it's been quite a good few weeks. After an initial new year's panic when it looked like the recession was finally going to give me a good slapping, I've got a decent amount of work in (actually that's not completely true; I've got far too much work, as it's coming up to the financial year end and various grant-funded organisations, on the Use It Or Lose It principle, are buying in my services). I got my first Guardian by-line (albeit unpaid and online only, but hey). And Gaza: Beneath the Bombs book stuff is going pretty well, especially when we get lovely reviews like this one.
But obviously I couldn't possibly be that upbeat, so here are a few minor trivialities which have hacked me off recently.
Firstly, it's 2010. Email has been fairly common in the UK for the best part of a decade. Especially amongst campaigners. And surely there must be few Young Folk out there who've managed to evade some computer training at school. But it seems like using the BCC field on a bulk email is still beyond some people's capacity.
First, there was the eejit from the Energy Saving Trust (I promise it's the last time I'm going to whinge about the Boiler Scrappage Scheme and its incompetent administration). He managed to send an email confirming receipt of my voucher and claim - and several hundred other people's - to all of us, in the CC field. Then, in an attempt to rectify the fuckup, he sent one of those pathetic 'Recall Email' messages that civil servants use - but again to all X hundred of us. So if anyone on that list has a mate who works in boiler servicing, they have one very valuable little marketing list there... And then, in the same week, some twonk from the newly-formed Unemployed Workers Union which has been set up in Salford did exactly the same thing, with an absolutely vast (and by the look of it, at least 50% totally unrelated) press list. I emailed them back suggesting that they might annoy people if they carried on like that and got no reply... but got another press release off them slightly later doing exactly the same thing. How to alienate potential supporters and sources of coverage, in one fell swoop. Idiot.
Next thing to piss me off was City Library's Manchester Lit List blog, which supposedly covers all events book-related in Manchester. I sent the announcement for the Gaza: Beneath the Bombs launch to them well in advance, and got no reply. I chased the email, and got a reply saying it would be listed on the blog in the week preceding the event. Which it was - very briefly. I know this because I have a Google Alert on 'Gaza beneath the bombs,' and the Lit List came up on it. But by the time I clicked on the link, it had been taken down. I can only assume that this was a political spiking, since this was a bona fide Manchester book launch, in Manchester, with one Manchester author involved. Which is... interesting.

Be Very Afraid, and some updates...

Firstly, thanks to OA again for striking fear into my heart when I opened my email to this excerpt from a Financial Times book review:

The most shocking tales are about Sarah Palin, who last week took up a new role as a Fox News commentator, and whose recent book, Going Rogue, is selling in the millions. So uninformed was McCain's running mate that advisors had to give her junior school tutorials on the first and second world wars, Vietnam and the cold war. Palin insisted that Saddam Hussein launched the September 11 attacks. As the depth of her ignorance sunk in, as well as her total lack of interest in rectifying it, McCain's senior staff members were “ridden with guilt over elevating Palin to within striking distance of the White House.

And a couple of updates.

First, wahey! My boiler scrappage scheme voucher has arrived, and as I type the cats are cowering in the bedroom as the rest of the house descends in to a chaotic mess of disconnected pipes, lifted floorboards and men in boiler suits wielding bits of machinery. But that doesn't mean I'm retracting any of my comments on the equally chaotic implementation of the scheme, which I put down to the EST's political masters trying to create a bit of a warm (literally) fuzzy feeling before the electioneering really gets going.

The second one is a corker. Remember Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling declaring that Moss Side was like the Wire? A couple of journalists - a freelancer from Manchester and a crime reporter from the Baltimore Sun - decided to swap cities and see if he was right. So Baltimore blokey, from a city with several hundred murders a year, gets to spend a night with GMP in sunny Moss Side. Simon Binns reported the result in Crains:

Justin Fenton, the Baltimore Sun crime reporter, spent a week on a job swap with Northern Independent hack Mark Hughes in order to see if Moss Side really was like hit TV show The Wire, a recent claim made by Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling. Fenton was positively disappointed at the lack of excitement, however, after 14 hours with Greater Manchester Police. “The lack of action on my ridealongs has been quite ridiculous, especially since the press and the officers I rode around with in Manchester insist that these are tough streets,” he said. “Here's what I witnessed first-hand: a car full of teens who had just finished smoking marijuana; a kid whose furious bike riding raised suspicions but turned out to be nothing.” Furious bike riding is a suspicious activity now? Good news for Manchester's public image, though, and proof that cycling really has taken off since the Velodrome and Sir Chris Hoy's Olympic success.

The Boiler Scrappage Scheme: pt II

So, the Monday After the Saturday Before (see this rant), I get a phone call in response to the message I left for the Energy Savings Trust. I will not, for reasons which will become obvious, be divulging anything at all that might identify the person who rang me. That's the problem with slagging off organisations like this - some of the people working for them are actually genuinely dedicated and lovely. It's their bosses that are the problem.
So, Nice Person from the EST (NPEST from now on) gives me a call and establishes that what I would like is to apply for the effing Boiler Scrappage Scheme. They then helpfully offer to take down all my details for the application form, while admitting that they haven't actually seen the form before and certainly haven't filled it in. There's a first time for everything. But NPEST does warn me that this might result in my application going in several times, as they've already been told that "although the form looks like it doesn't work it actually has."
Maybe.
So, NPEST goes through the form, filling in the details as I read them off. They get a bit stuck trying to fill in the address section, since, as they comment, the fields are a bit confused and all over the place and it's not totally clear which bit of one's address is meant to go where.
NPEST also divulges (which I'm guessing they shouldn't have) that there was supposed to be a dedicated team staffing the phone lines to deal with the boiler scrappage scheme. I don't know if these are secondees from somewhere else in government, or what. But, says NPEST, for some reason they're not actually being trained until this week, ie won't actually be staffing anything for a few more days at least, and the EST's normal staff were significantly dischuffed to find this out when they came into work this morning, expecting to be able to farm this particular weight off onto someone else.
So, according to the computer screen in front of NPEST, my application has actually gone through this time. I haven't had any kind of confirmation email to that effect (and this must be six hours ago now), which is a bit worrying, but given the standard of form building which seems to be standard at the EST they probably just haven't remembered that people might actually want some kind of receipt.
The saga continues... (or, hopefully, it doesn't, but I get a nice voucher in the post).

The Boiler Scrappage Scheme: a tale of bureaucratic hell

In my bimbling innocence, I have been sucked into a bizarre parallel world of quangoese cockups that could drive a woman to... oooh believe that the state is incompetent and corrupt...
Gordon B announced with much fanfare a couple of weeks ago a boiler scrappage scheme, like the car scheme, which would replace G rated boilers with A rated ones, allegedly reducing CO2 emissions by the same amount as taking 45,000 cars off the road, and - the buzzword of the moment, create British jobs! Woohoo! What can go wrong, one asks.
The answer, of course, is that one can give the job of administering this scheme to the Energy Savings Trust, a clunking bureaucracy which isn't apparently up to anything more complex than sending out a few leaflets about changing your lightbulbs. It certainly managed to screw up the solar incentive scheme a few years back. Trying to make contact with this organisation is like dealing with some little organisation with three staff and a doggie on a string - you'd never guess its budget runs into tens of millions and it gets to second dozens of staff from government departments.
The sorry saga so far is that on the 6th January, my very on-the-ball boiler installer rang my at about nine o'clock at night to tell me to apply for the scheme. I went to the EST site next morning and, as per the instructions, emailed boilerscrappage@est.org.uk with a 'registration of interest' which included the make of boiler being replaced, the new one etc. I heard nothing back. So on about the 12th or 13th I rang up to chase this. The very nice, if somewhat woolly and confused-sounding woman on the phone told me they'd been 'snowed under' with interest (although I managed to get through straight away on the phone - obviously a good thing but not necessarily a sign of stretched capacity). She informed me that 'Steve' (not the name she said) would get back to my email - which rather (and worryingly) implied that a single bloke was actually dealing with this landslide of email interest.
Needless to say, by Saturday 16th I've heard nothing back. I tried ringing the national number, only to find that it's only staffed Monday-Friday 9-5. So how are people in work supposed to access a) the boiler scheme and b) the wealth of energy efficiency information the EST claims to be able to bestow? Not through the online forms on the site, that's for certain. I clicked through the same series of links I'd followed on the 7th, only to find that the instructions page has changed, and there is now a link to an application form for the scrappage scheme. Wahey! I thought. Yes, there is a question as to why everyone who sent in an expression of interest couldn't have been auto-emailed to tell them that this form was now up, but never mind. Now I can just apply...
Can I buggery. I fill in the form, not one but three times. Each time it all seems to go fine, I fill in the requisite fields - some of them dropdown menus, some typed fields. I tick the necessary disclaimer boxes. I press 'submit.' And then every single field on the form sprouts a kind of burgundy-purple message saying 'Please provide some information for the above field it is a required field,' or similar. It's not my browser - I fill in online forms all the bloody time.
So, I think, I'll at least let them know their form isn't working, and maybe I'll get something back telling me when it is. Or some such vain hope. So I go to the EST's standard contact form and write a little message to this effect. I also have to fill in a bunch of fields with my name, address, phone number etc, including one of those ones where you fill in your postcode and it finds your address for you. This works successfully. But when I press 'submit' - it all goes tits up again. Despite the form identifying my postcode enough to find my address, it's refusing to admit it is actually a postcode for the purposes of submitting the form. Great.
My last salvo is to try and email my message to the generic email addresses, which appear on various EST leaflets, ads etc, mail@ and info@. Neither of these are working either. There are completely unfunded organisations campaigning for the preservation of species no-one's ever heard of with more efficient communications than this over-funded shower. Withholding tax because irresponsible governments will just spend it on nasty nuclear weapons is a fab idea. But withholding it because their quangos are completely unable to perform basic tasks feels like an even better notion at this time...

Copenhagen

Thanks to my little-ray-of-sunshine husband for the cheerful, if accurate, image.

Climate change is not funny...

... obviously. It's deeply, deeply scary and unamusing.
But sometimes a certain grim humour can be found in it. Firstly I have to spread the word on one of the genius Marc Roberts' latest cartoons, the script of which was written by my lovely husband from a Copenhagen fantasy I'd had of the members of some of the most evil delegations - USA, Saudi Arabia etc - being eaten alive, very slowly and painfully from the feet up, by the polar bears who are being so painfully wiped out by the impacts of climate change. The cartoon is here.
The second dark little chuckle I've had this morning is at the eejits in, presumably, a) the PR agency hired by cheap flight website Nowfly, and b) Nowfly's own PR department which presumably passed its latest press release. It's headed "A Restive Festive," which is presumably meant to mean 'restful' and somebody thinks they've been terribly clever using the rhyming word instead. Unfortunately 'restive' actually means:

1. impatient of control, restraint, or delay, as persons; restless; uneasy.
2. refractory; stubborn.
3. refusing to go forward; balky: a restive horse.

and, as Dictionary.com continues, derives not from the same verbs as words like rest and restful, but from the Middle English restif meaning "stationary, balking" or the Old French for 'inert.' Which I guess is how many people do end up spending Christmas, but not in the way the advertising wonks intended...

Redwood and barmy things

John Redwood declared on his blog this week that "We will benefit from the better weather for tourism, agriculture and outdoor sports." This, of course, is his in-depth analysis of the impacts of climate change. Genius. This of course happily balances out massive species loss, widespread loss of human life, resource wars - and something that Mr Redwood should really be worried about, given his views on non-Vulcans being allowed to reside in the UK, mass migration.
Another reminder of why the Tories must never be voted for, like we needed any more.
And on a migration tangent - I love Moss Side. I love it's mixedness. Especially when it throws up multicultural wonders like Donner in a Barm. No I won't be eating that (ever), but I'm glad it exists...

Moss Witch

I keep saying I've reached the end of my tether with the BBC - particularly with its repulsive and growing tendency to report the views of scum like Migration Watch and the Taxpayers' Alliance as if these loons are purveyors of reliable research data - but then Auntie keeps doing something to vaguely redeem itself. This time it's support for the National Short Story Awards, which I probably wouldn't have taken an awful lot of notice of if it wasn't for the presence of the marvellous Sara Maitland on the shortlist. And her story, Moss Witch, which touches on some very pertinent tensions between maintaining wild places vs studying them, can be downloaded here (beware, it's nearly half an hour long and the file is 26mb). Sara's three decades of writing seem to manage to touch on many of the Big Questions - gender, sex, nature, religion - with humour and breathtaking lightness and sadness. Personal favourites - novels Virgin Territory and Brittle Joys, and one of my current reads, A Book of Silence. There's something terrifically, terrifyingly wise about much of her writing, especially the last-named book, although it also makes me want to up sticks and become a hermit in the Sinai (if such a thing is possible. I suppose it is in the desert proper, albeit that's still peppered with landmines, but last time I was on Mount Sinai itself the experience was somewhat marred by a Belgian evangelical Christian accordionist who insisted on playing in the dawn with deeply unspiritual wheezings and blarings, despite the other people on the mountain trying to appreciate the heartbreaking wonder of the sun rising over the desert mountains.)

Urban Research, urban refurb, urban renewal

So, interesting (maybe, to someone out there) bits and bobs going on around my corner of South Manchester at the moment...

Went to the Urban Research Collective launch at Zion Arts on Wednesday. A very interesting new CIC which aims to try and drag left-wing researchers like muggins kicking and screaming into the activist arena - whether via its own projects or letting other people use it as a fundraising vehicle or networking tool. I love researching, and I'm much more comfortable producing stuff that other people can then go and do things with. But I'm looking forward to working with these guys and being prodded out of my comfort zone.



My office at Openspace is currently a building site - hence the pictures. But it will give our tenant-managed workspace co-op more room to rent out and a meeting room. Images nicked from my colleague Jonathan Atkinson. I'm not sure why Polyp seems to be doing Bill & Ben imitations in the second one... oh, and we got a plug from Ed Mayo the other day, so the marketing team should be happy.

The genius Marc Roberts and my lovely husband have their cartoon masterpiece, the Great Climate Slamdown, on the New Internationalist website. Will Copenhagen bring us a settlement on climate change which will save the world? Will it fuck. Will trogging off there to run around being chased by riot police achieve much beyond some nice activist bonding experiences? I refer you to my previous comment. Ho hum. Hopefully certain of my friends won't notice that and hate me for it...

Information seems to be slowly spilling out of the Council about the proposed regeneration of the area of Moss Side adjacent to the doomed bus (formerly tram) station on Princess Parkway and Claremont Rd to the south and north respectively, and between Princess Parkway and my allotment patch on Caythorpe St to the east and west. At one time it looked like everybody was getting compulsory purchased and shifted out for a major demolition job, but I think the recession had squished that plan (to the annoyance of at least one friend living in the middle of a semi-derelict street, as the housing associations with properties round there moved their tenants out months or even years ago, creating at least the beginnings of a wasteland of rats, rubbish and temporary druggie squats). Instead many of the old 2-bed Victorian terraced houses will be knocked through to create homes more in keeping with the needs of Moss Side's families. Sadly, though, Bishop Bilsborough Primary School is still in the path of the bulldozers, despite being recently squatted for an alternative arts festival. It's a lovely building and could have been a great location for some kind of community centre (something we're a bit short of in Moss Side if you don't count various religious buildings and the hideous Powerhouse, although there's still the West Indian centre).

Oh, and with marketing ahoy on the Gaza book, I've also finally finished the bloody Leila Khaled biography. A considerable relief, to say the least, and I'm looking forward to slowly re-emerging into the sunlight (just in time for it to disappear beneath a wintry horizon) and start attempting to re-engage with my social life. I'm sure I had one, once. The post-book holiday in Brighton, while pleasant, wasn't the relaxing experience it was meant to be - it seemed to involved inordinate amounts of work and the idea for Book Number Three popped into my head, almost fully-formed. But that's as much as I'm saying about that - if I let the idea out of my head before it's all written down properly it might go all liquidy and spill out of my ears or something. So watch this space.

Signs o' the times

It was very odd the other morning to witness the Mail and the Express using the word Bigot in big headline letters to describe the execrable Nick Griffin of the BNP in the wake of his BBC TV debut. Mainly because the gap between the views on immigrants and women regularly espoused by said papers is usually pretty damn close to those of Mr Griffin. But I supposed they prefer their reactionary racism to be spouted by people at least one remove from out-and-out fascism, so they need to put some clear blue water between him and themselves. Weird to watch though.
On the subject of clear blue water - and, indeed, borderline fascism - a lurking cold, brain fatigue (the Leila Khaled book is due in in a week) and the NHS's ongoing slowness in offering any solution to my knackered hip have driven me once again into the arms of NCIS. A truly appalling show, but my goodness Mark Harmon is some quality eye candy. Hence the gratuitous pic. Just look at those lovely twinkly eyes.
Brian Candeland of Manchester Green Party has some good points to make about the decline of the local press here, as well as also pointing out the fallacy of assuming that because it's a less tangible Thing, the internet doesn't have a whopping environmental impact. To add to his info, I'll point out that the average server has similar climate change emissions to that bugbear of environmentalists, the SUV.
I suspect that Candeland and other Manchester G/greens will have their work cut out on coming months opposing Tesco's plans for one of its biggest grounds in the UK, being plotted in collusion with the corporate whores at Lancashire Cricket Club. There's a new campaign website here and I suspect that if Trafford council are stupid enough to let the proposals through the planning stage, this will turn into a big campaign - as one south Manchester environmentalist, a veteran of the Newbury and Manchester Second Runway direct action campaigns and now aspiring to a quiet life and parenthood (if those two are remotely compatible), said a while back, "Oh God, I hope it doesn't go through, or I'll have to go and sit on diggers and down tunnels again, won't I?" Well, there was an opening demo last week, and probably loads more to come. I'll be with you, guys, just as soon as I get that new hip...

Manchester food

There are some brilliant local food projects happening in Manchester at the moment. One of them is Abundance, which, inspired by a similar initiative in Sheffield, picks surplus fruit and veg and - in a proper example of joined-up thinking - distributes it to places like homeless hostels, projects supporting destitute asylum seekers and inner-city programmes supporting people with mental health needs. That is, the kind of people who are often excluded from getting good-quality, beautifully fresh local fruit.
Today, though, I'm excited about the news that the lovely Dig, who deliver my Tuesday morning veg box (today featuring a really spectacular bright purple cauliflower) are branching out from delivery into growing their own supplies. They're taking on some of the land at Dunham Massey, where a lot of the veg they deliver comes from already, and experimenting with new polytunnels to get a wider variety of veg over longer seasons. And being thoughtful kinds of people, they're also busy having a think about how environmentally focused food projects like this will get their produce into urban centres in the most sustainable way.

Plums image pinched from Abundance Manchester.

Blog Action Day on climate change

Well, today's Blog Action Day on climate change, so I have a specific incentive to blog and to focus on climate change, which isn't unusual for me (see tags) but isn't the main thing I waffle on about.
There are various things I could have picked for this - including the head-exploding fatuousness of Radio4's perky little headline this morning that 'in ten years the Arctic Ocean might be open to shipping' - presented as an interesting and potentially useful bit of information rather than something REALLY FUCKING TERRIFYING. But there's the halfwittedness of BBC climate coverage for you.
But instead I'm going to harp on a bit about the secondhand bookstall outside Manchester Metropolitan University. This may not seem an obvious climate change issue, but of course given that - despite campaigning by Greenpeace on the subject - many books are still printed on unsustainable virgin-timber paper, contributing to climate-damaging deforestation, secondhand books are definitely an eco option.
But MMU's management are - after the best part of twenty years offering cheap, quality books to both students and the local community - trying to drive the bookstall out of its place at the front of the MMU student union. There's a strong student and community campaign and some unflattering coverage, though, and other organisations in the area have made it clear that they see the bookstall as an asset not a threat, so hopefully MMU's attempt to clean them off its steps will crash and burn.
This is an interesting choice of timing for MMU, since it should be busy trying to enhance its green and community credentials, given that it's attempting to stress the potential values of its massive new planned development in Hulme, on some of the few remaining green spaces within any kind of reach of Manchester city centre and a valuable biodiversity site for a whole range of interesting plants, as well as for goldfinches in the summer and migrant species like redwings and fieldfares in the autumn and winter. I'm not sure what's gotten into MMU at the moment - it also seems to be trying to shaft a few other community initiatives attached to the university, which must needs remain nameless, but I fear it's caught a bad attack of corporateness from its neighbours at Manchester University, and that bodes ill for academic freedom, community relations and Manchester generally.