Post in Welcome and introductions

2007 Mar 12 21:15 UTC

Hi

I'm Emma Winfield.  I am in the process of setting up Transition City Bristol,
to facilitate a community-owned process of awareness and inspiration for
creating a sustainable, post-oil-dependent Bristol, based on a permaculture
approach.  More info on the process at www.transitionculture.org and specific
Bristol info (early days) at www.transitioncitybristol.org, but the main thrust
is relocalisation to meet all the city's needs and use all the city's 'waste'
as a resource.

I live in Ashton and spend my time promoting and sharing permaculture
approaches to the issues of sustainability in our current lives.  I'm
particularly interested in encouraging creative urban sustainability and
countering any sense of "run away to the country or give up now"!  I prefer to
help people find out more about any issue, so they can choose to make informed
changes rather than be told what they 'should' do.  Permaculture specifically
encourages people to take an ethical stance which then underpins their
decisions.

As far as this forum goes, I recently left Bristol City Council's Community
Development team where I was working for a short time as an Investement &
Grants officer, and am interested to find out if this forum is a Council-down
talking shop or a local resource to see what creative solutions we can come up
with locally to make the area more inspiring to live in.

As for Ben's comment about the "Green Capital" idea, it seems many
'sustainability' groups in Bristol have wondered the same, and the general
consensus appears to be one of wariness, a kind of 'don't let the Council use
our efforts and results as flags to wave to show Council progress, when their
rhetoric doesn't follow through into policy & our outputs are often DESPITE the
Council or in the face of Council oppostition / obstruction'.  If you're
interested in getting an overview of this, one way would be to join the
Sustainable Redland's email group and read the back messages
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/susredland

Anyway, interested to see where this all goes ...