Monthly Archives: August 2017

Deadline for Submissions: 11am 7th September 2017!

Help us communicate our critical message…

Since September 2016 we have been working with the aim to find the leaders of the future, creating exciting new opportunities for work, play and learning.

Our goal is to build an inclusive vision for schools and communities that recognises and understands our responsibilities as global citizens, while also meeting our commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement.

We need a powerful and clear image to communicate effectively the significance of the Paris Climate Agreement…

The targets the global community has to reach to have a realistic chance of avoiding climate change calamity are tough:

• Reduce emissions by half in the coming decade, and then again in each of the 2 following decades
• Re-invent farming to become a net carbon sink instead of being a significant source
• Create new technologies that can effectively extract carbon from the air and store it somewhere safe such as underground

The targets for these objectives look like this on a graph and the treaty allows us thirty years to make the changes required:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We think this is a powerful image and it many ways it represents a map to the future. However a steep slope down into uncertainty makes a daunting site, so we flipped it round to represent the rising up out of the mire of pollution and fossil fuel addiction to a bright new future. Much more appealing but it’s not the clearest image.. But hey, I am just an economics teacher what do i know?

The challenge is for all you creative people out there to turn this image into something inspirational that be shared and used around the world to inspire change and action.. Over to you!

Your Prize!!

Communicating such a vital message is a difficult challenge, and we are offering 3 fantastic prizes to the successful creative!

Your work will not only be used as the face of our revolutionary campaign, which is educating and inspiring the young minds who will make the decisions of our collective future…We will also provide and plant 3 tree guilds in return for your creative input.

The guild comprises of: 1 heritage apple tree and a set of supporting plants to help with pollination, fertility and weed control.

The first guild will go to Llanfyllin High School as part of their transition to a green leader in North Wales.

The second will be for the winner of the competition.

For the third guild, the winner of the competition can choose 1 other school or educational body to receive a tree guild provided and planted by Sector39’s own Permaculture Academy!  

Planting these  guilds will help us spread the word and inspire your school or institution to produce the climate change leaders we so badly need!

Competition Submission Date Deadline: 11 am Thursday 7th September 2017.

These school girls at Sabina School Uganda are in the forest garden planted back in 2010 which has since grown into a jungle of edible plants surrounding the campus. There are coffee bushes and papayas in the under-story, a ground cover of squashes and pumpkins, you can also see amaranth and herbs in the foreground as well as banana and citrus growing happily in the shade of the towering avocado trees above.

Surely this is a vision of the future we must now realize we are heading for? A school garden such as this can not only provide a significant boost to the nutrition of the pupils and represents cost saving on all sorts of resources the forest can also mop up excess rainfall and soak up the nutrients from the compost and organic wastes produced by the school.

This forest of food is a

• A class room
• a play space
• a recycling centre and
• a nature reserve – all at the same time.

Every year it becomes a little bit more productive and every year it takes a little bit less work to maintain it. As schools and communities alike begin to consider the realities of the transition to low-carbon, climate friendly lives and economies we will have to learn how to

The Ski jump to uncertainty

We have been using this graph on the project a lot. It maps the emissions reduction required to give our selves a chance of avoiding run away climate catastrophe and maps the transition to a low-carbon future.

The problem with the graph is that it looks like a plunge into the unknown,  Halving CO2 emissions each decade is gin to get progressively harder and demand more and more creativity from us to find ways to resolve our resource needs in new and different ways. So via this project we are inviting people to look at the future somewhat differently.

Re-imagining the future

We have to embrace change as an opportunity.. it is one of the core ideas in permaculture, change is inevitable and fighting against it will always fail ultimately. Lets us see this differently —  just by flipping the graph upside down we instantly get a different picture. Rather than something diminishing into uncertainty, lets us see this as a rising out of the depths of fossil fuel addiction and pollution to a new dawn of low-carbon and increasingly sustainable world.

The human project as a whole needs to begin to find ways to think and behave as a single species with a common destiny. The more I have been thinking and researching into climate change the more I have come to realise that in solving this challenge we will have to face and solve a great many other challenges at the same time.

Following the Paris targets still only gives us something like a 66% chance of avoiding climate catastrophe and each new report published seems to bring ever more urgent cries for change with it. So change we must and if we can embrace this change as a transformation journey then we have the opportunity to create a much netter, fairer, interconnected and more localised society and economy in the process.

 

I see it as a win win but however we see it we certainly need to get on with it.

The Dragons Sessions

We are planning some informal evening sessions at the Dragons gallery 
on Thursday evenings.
I am planning a couple of introductory ones first, then a series of 
12 starting in September. 
The One School One Planet project is keen to facilitate a discussion 
about how we are going to make this transition?