Green Events Devon 

       ... for exploring better ways of living!   

Welcome to Green Events Devon - where it's free & easy for everyone to add green & holistic activities ... and to discover all the eco-friendly, holistic and inspiring things to do locally.   As no membership is needed, it's completely free,  easy ...and direct, for everyone to -

View: Calendar events,  Ongoing events, Directory entries,  News items  or to - 

Add your own: Calendar events,  Ongoing events, 
Directory entries,  News items

 See About this site  for more details

News Highlights

Rising Tide: Fossil Fools Day!  April 1st - day for action

Avaaz: Time to choose - Elephants or Ivory

- 2020 Vision Exeter  joins Facebook

- Avaaz: Support the "Robin Hood Tax" on international bank speculation

- Greenpeace: Stop new coal for good!

- Protect The Chagos Islands marine reserve - it's not too late!

- RSPB petition: help us halt illegal bird killing

- Urgent appeal to save popular Devon Arts & Ecology Centre - CCNAW

- Transition Exeter's Feb Newsletter

- Lee Mill incinerator - BBC's report on plans submitted

- Avaaz: After Copenhagen "the elephant is moving"

- See:  Climate Ark   for latest (& archived) Climate Change & Global Warming News from around the world




Avaaz: There were some opening champagne in Copenhagen today. The polluting industry lobbyists and corporations -- those who have captured our democracies and divided our leaders -- celebrated their victory. They operated quietly in the shadows, but their voices were loud in some politicians' ears. As they drank their champagne their one concern may have been us - the potential of our new people-powered movement. In fact, they're already launching an attempt to silence us, and next week, we'll take our fight to the heart of this powerful polluter lobby - watch out for the next bulletin.   ...    see latest up-date: News (28/12/09) 

Greenpeace: 5 ways you can help the planet in 2010

Six Billion Reasons: make images and music to help protect life on earth 

Oneclimate.net - a new social networking space for sharing ideas and experiences on climate change


Transition Tavistock is now forming!

Plymouth Transition Group Meeting report from Jan 15th

Exeter Climate Action newsletter: Nov & Dec. See News



Campaign Highlights

AVAAZ: Copenhagen failed primarily because big polluters US and China wanted a weak agreement. But President Obama was heavily constrained by a US Congress that has been captured by lobbyists. The Chamber is a front group for the largest corporations in the polluting lobby, including oil and coal companies like Exxon Mobil. The New York Times (link) says "no organization in this country has done more to undermine [climate] legislation." The Chamber were major backers of President George W Bush, and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars blocking Obama's attempts at change. The Chamber claims to represent US businesses, but even many large corporations (like Apple, Nike, Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson) have opposed its pro-polluter positions on climate change.

While people were out in force in Copenhagen, polluter lobbyists worked in the shadows, their voices loud only in our politicians' ears. To get the climate deal the planet needs in 2010, we have to expose their influence, stand up to their intimidation tactics, and send a signal to others that the time has come, once and for all, to stand up to the villains holding our planet hostage: http://www.avaaz.org/

Recently a few youth climate activists (funded by Avaaz online donations!) dared to challenge the most powerful polluter lobbyist group, the US Chamber of Commerce, by helping to stage a humorous satirical press conference announcing the Chamber had decided to help fight climate change.

The polluter lobby’s response? A huge lawsuit suing these young activists for potentially enormous amounts of money. Experts say a response like this is extremely rare. It appears designed to send a chilling message to our movement and silence others who would effectively challenge these groups holding our planet hostage.

Let's send a message back. The Chamber has raised $750,000 from US corporations to help launch this attack – If 20,000 of us give just a small amount each to our effort to stand up for climate activists and stop the polluter lobby, we’ll outraise them - showing their intimidation backfired! Let’s show the polluter lobby that we can’t be silenced, and show politicians that the future belongs to people, not polluters:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/people_vs_polluters

In our journey together as the Avaaz community, we've taken on dictators in Burma and Zimbabwe, promise-breaking politicians in Europe and North America, and the forces of extremism in the Middle East. But the Chamber is in some ways the most powerful and dangerous opponent we've faced. Some have advised Avaaz to stay quiet about this, to protect our own organization. But with danger comes opportunity, and if people power can defeat even the most powerful corporate lobby in the world, we'll send a much broader message, that a new world, the one we all seek, is on its way.
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/people_vs_polluters


The Tar Sands Issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KokiUgvlwc4

Greenpeace:  what you can do to help



*Ongoing Movements:

The 10:10 movement.(http://www.1010uk.org/)
Following on from the successful film "The Age of Stupid" a new momentum is growing behind many individuals, celebrities, local governments, businesses & organizations to sign up to local level, grass roots efforts to cut carbon emissions by 10% by the end of 2010 - giving many reasonable suggestions how.
See: http://www.greenevents.co.uk/devon/new-view.php?new_id=4083


350.org - worldwide umbrela organisation for action on climate change


TckTckTck is an unprecedented global alliance, representing hundreds of millions of people from all walks of life. ...." World leaders know they failed to produce a climate treaty at Copenhagen. Climate change is putting life on earth in peril, but there is still time to build a safer, greener world. The climate deal we need in 2010 is what they didn't get done in 2009"


Transition Town movement:
Grass-root action in our towns, villages and cities, - to reduce our carbon emissions and prepare for peak oil
Now includes Totnes, Plymouth, Exeter, Crediton, Bovey Tracey, S. Brent, Tavistock, Ivybridge .... ... many more!
For Totnes - the founding site, see: http://www.totnes.transitionnetwork.org/
or for all areas: http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwork/
TransitionNetwork


*Armchair Actions:
If you can't join campaigns and movements and many of us can't find time or aren't physically able, then it's still very helpful just to put out positve energy for our planet whenever possible! For instance: when talking to friends and neighbours, when silently meditating or praying, and when working with 'the light' or energy. All our tiny contributions - doing whatever we are able to do - will help build the conditions needed for positve change to grow in the real world. Every bit is needed and we're all needed to do whatever it is that we can do. With this happening on a world wide scale we still have a chance. It's our planet, our time - and we're all in it together.


*Green Events
It's the purpose of our interactive online calendars to help show the many local activities happening everyday that are in tune with a more sustainable and conscious future. So for day to day opportunites click: here to view; and here to add your own.


Editorial
There's lots happening today that can help us answer the burning question our grandchildren will be asking - "What were you doing about climate change when it was still possible to stop it?"

The critical meeting at Copenhagen has now ended with a very poor looking outcome indeed for all our futures! Yes lot's of good things have begun with the UN process but much more is needed if our grandchildren are to have anything like a decent future. There's still a small amount of time available and this comming year will be crucial. The politicians are wavering. The worlds' situation is truly hanging in the balance. Every bit of support we give now can really help influence the outcome for the better. In fact it's largely the grass-roots movements all around the world that are driving and demanding the change that science and right-thinking people see are needed.

Politicians and big business are afraid of the changes because of their own short term interest ...and the sophisticated lobbying from big business has a lot of money behind it! So all our voices and actions are needed to show politicians everywhere that the time to act is NOW. We can make a difference, we are the difference. We hope you will join in. The above are just some of the ways we know of that can add to the huge momentum growing worldwide to limit climate change and build a positve future. (if you'd like to recommend others - please contact us)

And we needn't wait for the politicians either - we can start bringing in some necessary changes right now.  Many local governments, businesses, engineers, designers and local people working together - are making moves even now that will help us live more sustainably ... and in a more wholesome, meaningful, happier way. (see 'Ongoing Movements' above)

As well as climate change, we know that the world does not possess enough resources to sustain so many people living so extravagantly and wastefully consuming so much - and that too whilst so much of the world is still impoverished.  Many of us in richer societies realise that we no longer need to be such mass consumers of the many meaningless things we've been encouraged to want, and that a  more genuine happiness comes from having more time, more friends, more community, more feelings of connectedness to nature, to each other, to our own  creativity and inner natures.

We hope to reflect all the new developments and local lifestyle opportunites in these pages over the comming months, so keep looking out here for the new things to do and be involved in. 
AND please continue to add interactively all the new things you yourselves are arranging, and to let us know if there are other  things we aren't showing yet that should be included here. This way all of us, collectively, can be involved in offering the widest  choice possible for: enjoying ourselves in sustainable ways, for improving the quality of our lives and the health of our planet - right here ...and now. 

 
Inspiring words:

Al Gore
Here is a short interview with Al Gore from Radio 4's Today proamme on Wednesday 4th Nov. Here he explains that he's now optomistic about a climate solution because of groundswell support from people the world over.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_
8341000/8341734.stm


An extract from the introduction to a seminar
...According to a majority of the world's experts, there is now overwhelming evidence that our modern society is headed for a catastrophe. Leading scientists are telling us that the impact of our industrial system, and the sudden expansion of humanity's ability to harvest the common bounty of our planet for short-term gain, may actually be upsetting the balance of our highly complex and fragile web of life.

It is as if we are living inside of a dream, sleepwalking toward oblivion, while self-serving, shortsighted interests encourage our slumber with managed news, celebrity culture and other weapons of mass distraction.

It has become clear that our political and commercial institutions are unable to effectively address this crisis, primarily because they don't realize that they are looking at an interconnected world through a fragmented lens. The villain here is not Big Business, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, or even those who for personal profit seek to clearcut our forests, overfish our oceans, pollute our atmosphere or drain our aquifers. The villain is an outmoded worldview - a way of seeing the world in which such unthinkable acts appear reasonable, sensible, and even intelligent.

Indigenous people of South America who still live in their traditional Earth-honoring ways refer to our modern worldview as our "dream" and have urged us, for the sake of all life, to "change the dream of the North". Well, it appears that changing this collective dream of ours will be a do-it-yourself-together project. It will be accomplished by committed individuals working in concert with one another, tens of millions of us, each willing to think and act in a whole new way...

[the full text can be seen at: http://bethechange.org.uk/]

Quick Links

Local climate action groups

Low Carbon Exeter
Transition Exeter
Transition Town Totnes
Transition Town - all areas
Bovey Tracey
Crediton Climate Action


Outdoor nature events

Devon Wildlife Trust
Torbay Coast & Countryside Trust
RSPB


Centres for meditation & inner transformation:

Gaia House
Embercombe
The Barn