The artist residency which took place at Grow Heathrow last week was extremely successful. 15 artists came and lived with us for a week which culminated in an exhibition/tour on the Saturday. A proper blog is to follow soon but for now here is a few pictures. And a whole series of more photographs can be found HERE.
On Wednesday 18th January two members of Transition Heathrow made the 220 mile trip out west to Totnes; a small town in Devon that has the distinction of being the first ever town to become a Transition Town back in 2006. We had been invited to come and present the story of Transition Heathrow, Grow Heathrow, and the Heathrow Villages communities.
The talk gave us the opportunity to go back a few years and speak about the different factors that came together to create Transition Heathrow. We began at the Heathrow Climate Camp in 2007 around the same time that Plane Stupid came to prominence and then went on to talk more about the No Third Runway campaign and how activists ended up living in the Heathrow Villages. Then we told the story of Grow Heathrow and how the site has been transformed since it was occupied on the 1st March 2010.
The following day we got to see Totnes for ourselves. We were given a full tour of the town and got to hang out in the offices shared between Transition Town Totnes and the Transition Network, where we heard about what the Transition group members had been up to in Totnes. The main focus was on their successful Transition Streets project, which is something we hope to bring to the Heathrow Villages in the near future. This project has involved roughly 500 residents, who have come together in groups to discuss how they could save money by reducing their carbon emissions. The most obvious result of the project is the installation of solar PV panels on over 150 households and the town’s Civic Centre, but the biggest benefit as reported by residents who have taken part is how it has allowed them to get to know their neighbours better.
After lunch we caught a lift up to Landmatters, just outside Totnes, where we were given a tour round their site that drew comparisons with Grow Heathrow – although they are far more established and are based on a 40 acre site deep in rural Devon. Their grounding in a permaculture approach to living on their site had led them to build some very comfortable and homely benders, install a 2kW solar PV system, herd sheep and goats, harvest oak timbers from their wood, and cultivate productive vegetable beds. Even on a cold and windy January afternoon it was a delight and a privilege to be given an insight into their chosen lifestyle.
Later, we enjoyed walking around Totnes and remarking on the abundance of independent shops on the high street, the focus on local produce, and noticing the shop windows carrying stickers saying “We accept the Totnes pound”; an initiative co-ordinated by the Totnes group to increase the resilience of the local economy by encouraging the circulation of money between businesses and consumers within the community.
Thankyou to everyone for making us so welcome, especially to Chris Bird for acting as our host for the duration of our visit, and you should all come and visit us if you’re ever in London!
A group of community-minded gardeners have turned a former Athens airport into a blooming vegetable plot, showing how Greece’s eroded soil holds the keys to a revival in farming and a way to buck the jobless trend.
‘If we want to survive on this land we must first help to heal the earth,’ said Nicola Netién, agro-ecologist, teacher and co-creator of the NGO Permaculture Research Institute Hellas. He was talking to a group of some fifty people of all ages who had gathered for two days of workshops on self-sufficiency, how to self-organize, agro-ecology and composting. This small gathering was taking place on a beautifully sunny autumn day at the former Athens airport, Ellinikon.
When the airport moved to another location 10 years ago in preparation for Athens hosting the 2004 Olympic Games, there was the hope and the State’s promise that this now available land would become a park. Then the ‘crisis’ landed and rumors began spreading that the site had been sold to an international developer who would pour yet more concrete on the chaotic sprawl that is Athens. This is when a small group of local residents, bearing seeds and armed with shovels, moved in. Their mission: to create a communal and productive agricultural space that will encourage an exploration into antidotes for the ecological-economic-educational and cultural crisis.
‘Thirty percent of Greece’s arable land has salinized and every year Greece looses 750,000 cubic meters of topsoil as a result of erosion and poor land management,’ Nicola continued as his demonstration compost pile grew. Just a few kilometers west and the political drama of a failing government and national bankruptcy was unfolding. The world watched the theatrics of politicians scrambling for self-preservation, while the contagious and desperate fear of being ejected from the Euro spread and the markets turbulently responded.
Natasha, one of the first to start working this small plot at the Ellinikon, told me that since the beginning of the current crisis, more and more people are visiting this small edible garden. She understands why. A year ago she was anxious that her future and her basic needs were dependent on the State that employs her. She had no survival skills. Now, she says, she feels empowered by being proactive in forming her community and learning how to grow food.
There are other examples of Athenians taking matters into their own hands to reclaim small plots of land so as to create communal green spaces; sometimes quietly and peacefully and other times after long drawn out battles with riot police. An example of the latter is Navarino Park in the centre of Athens. This again involved a broken promise by the State. One of the most densely populated areas of Athens was hoping for a park, so when the plans changed to build a parking lot, the local residents organized and resisted. Despite the violence and threats by police, residents stood their ground and cultivated this small plot that is now a budding potential of urban agriculture.
All these examples are neighborhood initiatives. It would be wrong to suggest this is a single coordinated movement. Often confused by the scale of change that is needed and starved for stories of hope, there is a tendency to inadvertently prescribe meaning to and inflate such examples so as to enthuse optimism in ourselves and in others that we are well on our way to dismantling ‘business as usual’. But this would be doing these small groups of activists a disservice. This is not their story, at least not for now. They are in the process of finding their way.
Life in Greece has gotten harder and people are quite literally going hungry. The cultural and the economic reality on the ground and the systemic rot that is so pervasive demand an exploration into context relevant ways of organizing, empowering, sharing knowledge, and redefining our values and our identities.
Riots in Athens have become common; albeit an expression of discontent, the dynamic that has developed between rioter and State seems to maintain the status quo. As I understand it, these local activists are not interested in head on combat against the ‘business and politics as usual’ that is largely to blame for the erosion of land and values, but rather they undermine the status quo by actively participating and investing in their own communities’ potential.
Within each small neighborhood group there is a collective evolving, sharing knowledge, learning, building and growing together. Perhaps these small groups and their gardens will be catalysts for change-maybe they will become nodes in an emergent network of urban farmers-maybe not. Regardless, this is an account of people proactively engaging the challenges and opportunities they are faced with. When Greece’s dominant narrative, particularly of late, has been of bankruptcy, corruption, nepotism, inefficiency and violence, it is important to recognize that this is not the whole story. With respect for others’ work, as well as our own, and as a defense against the infectious cynicism of such depressing dominant narratives, we must conserve and in fact cultivate the space for hope to articulate itself.
‘We can compost anything that was once living. Soon we will be able to add our Euros to the pile,’ Nicola said with half a smile. For a brief moment the group became uneasy and nervously laughed. This unease though quickly dissipated. ‘A healthy compost pile should never smell bad…’
This blog was taken from The Ecologist website
This week Grow Heathrow have been busy preparing the site for the arrival of 15 artists on Sunday night for a week long arts residency. The exhibition date has now been set for Saturday 21st January, from 11am at Grow Heathrow, where all work created during the week will be on display.
The residency, called ‘Resistance is beautiful’, funded by Hillingdon Council, will explore the creative link between resistance, permaculture, occupation and resilience. The exhibition on the 21st will start at 11am with drinks and snacks later in the day.
For more info contact: growheathrow.residency@gmail.com
For directions see: http://www.transitionheathrow.com/grow-heathrow/
Campaigners from smkcampaigners on Vimeo.
This brings back some warm memories. This five minute film, produced by the Media Trust for UK-based charity the Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK), aims to inspire people to get involved in campaigning.
Every day, ordinary people campaign to right wrongs. Anyone can campaign.
A fine example of people Power against economic polluting giants. The video includes old footage of Plane Stupid, NOTRAG, HACAN, Transition Heathrow and all who organised the ceilidh (2nd half of the video).
SMK is the only registered charity in the UK dedicated to connecting, informing and supporting campaigners. For more information visit smk.org.uk.
This blog was taken from the Plane Stupid website.
Representing one of the most agriculturally bio-diverse nations in the world, India has become a primary target for biotechnology companies like Monsanto and Cargill to spread their genetically-modified (GM) crops into new markets. However, a recent France 24 report explains that the Indian government has decided to take an offensive approach against this attempted agricultural takeover by suing Monsanto for “biopiracy,” accusing the company of stealing India’s indigenous plants in order to re-engineer them into patented varieties.
Brinjal, also known in Western nations as eggplant, is a native Indian crop for which there are roughly 2,500 different unique varieties. Millions of Indian farmers grow brinjal, which is used in a variety of Indian food dishes, and the country grows more than a quarter of the world’s overall supply of the vegetable.
And in an attempt to capitalize on this popular crop, Monsanto has repeatedly tried to commercially market its own GM variety of brinjal called Bt brinjal. But massive public outcry against planned commercial approval of Monsanto’s “frankencrop” variety in 2010 led to the government banning it for an indefinite period of time.
But Monsanto is still stealing native crops, including brinjal, and quietly working on GM varieties of them in test fields, which is a clear violation of India’s Biological Diversity Act (BDA). So at the prompting of various farmers and activists in India, the Indian government, representing the first time in history a nation that has taken such action, has decided to sue Monsanto.
“This can send a different message to the big companies for violating the laws of the nation,” said K.S. Sugara, Member Secretary of the Karnataka Biodiversity Board, to France 24 concerning the lawsuit. “It is not acceptable … that the farmers in our communities are robbed of the advantage they should get from the indigenous varieties.”
Farmers and active members of the public in India have been some of the world’s most outspoken opponents of Monsanto’s attempted GM takeover of agriculture. Besides successfully overturning the attempted approval of Bt brinjal, these freedom fighters have also successfully destroyed several attempted Monsanto GM test fields.
This blog was taken from www.naturalnews.com
Food growers and friends; it’s been another amazing year here at Grow Heathrow of eating salads fresh from the greenhouses, roasting yellow, red, and black peppers and tasty tomatoes in the clay oven and seasoning our food with home-grown herbs – and now it’s time to brave the winter winds, get the wellies and wheelbarrows out and prepare for our 3rd food growing season down in Sipson.
This coming year we will be expanding out to the AIRPLOT site in Sipson where we will grow directly into the fertile ground and plan to cultivate the whole lot!
Transition Heathrow hopes to use this new growing site as a opportunity for different groups in the area to be part of the process of learning how to grow fruit and veg for their community, from scratch, with skills sharing and fun – and at the end of it lots of fresh organic produce to cook together and share, enjoy and sustain us!
But we will need help, and now is the time to prepare the ground for the spring. Its a bit later than usual but by the first week of January we plan to have done a cardboard and compost mulch all over the grass field – getting it ready to directly plant into when spring arrives.
We’re reclaiming fields and taking back control of our food production! Come help make the first stage happen and we reckon you’ll be back picking juicy tomatoes with us again this summer!
We have lots of cardboard to lay and 13 tonnes of conditioner top soil to barrow on and rake out – the more people the better and lighter the work! Starting at 9:30am sharp till dark both Thursday 5th and Friday 6th January – Big winter soups and fires in the evenings for those that stay.
Where: We will gather with tools and tea at Grow Heathrow (look HERE for directions) to then walk together to the Airplot site. Call our site phone 07890751568 if you arrive later to be directed to the airplot.
There is space to sleep both nights and longer if you wish at Grow Heathrow site, do bring a good sleeping bag for extra warmth and a tent if you want. Bring warm layers, a hot flask, a pair of gardening gloves if you got them and your lovely faces,
With slightly cold soily fingers but warm glowing cheeks the Grow Heathrow Crew excitedly looks forward to seeing you in the field. Resistance is Fertile!
More and more people are becoming interested in growing their own food. But our ability to take this essential step towards a sustainable future is being stifled by the radical inequalities of land distribution, in a country where patterns of land-ownership have changed little since feudal times, and the access to land of those who don’t own it has actually diminished. We will not be able to succeed in our Transition aims without challenging these inequalities and improving access to land for the many.
At a recent Transition discussion I was at, there was much talk of the value and importance of local food growing to a sustainable future. The merits of small-scale organic farming are many – reducing the oil-dependency of our food-chains, and reducing our own dependence on systems which destroy biodiversity and alienate us from our environment. Rising food prices are a direct result of climate change and decreasing oil supplies, and are a key aspect of the social injustices embedded within these twin crises as the poorest suffer most – both globally and in our own country. For these reasons, and for many others (perhaps mostly just because it’s fun), more and more people are starting to grow their own food, which is a fantastic thing.
But there is a problem: there doesn’t seem to be enough land. Allotment waiting lists have been rising rapidly across the country, in some places as much as 15 years long, and the price of land is also on the rise. More of us than ever live in apartments, without any garden to dig, and those who vision the future of our cities seem determined that this trend should continue.
There are some really useful initiatives going on to mitigate this situation. Some Transition Town run garden-sharing projects, to match up those who want to grow with those who haven’t got the time to keep up their garden; and there’s an interesting project originating in Manchester called Allotment Finder, which is trying to get the data about the different waiting lists for different sites and inform people who are searching for space where they might be able to find it more quickly.
But fundamentally, these are just sticking plasters for a crippling disease. In the UK, 0.3% of people own 67% of all the land in the country. It’s no wonder that the other 99.7% struggle to share out the remainder between us: to find enough space for our lettuces or for our community spaces. Not only is the ownership of land centralised in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, little changed over hundreds of years, but large swathes of land are desperately under-used and ill-managed. The UK consists of about 60 million acres. Admittedly not all of this is cultivable, but we do not lack in fertile land on this island. Even in an inner-city borough, a little walk around your neighbourhood will probably reveal numerous empty plots and scraps, going to waste. Without enabling people to access this land, there is no way that they can start to transition to a more sustainable way of life.
When the MST visited Grow Heathrow
It is not a coincidence that access to land is a core issue in the achievement of our aims: the removal of access was a core element in the onward march of capitalism which has brought us into the unsustainable present. As land was gradually claimed and enclosed from the commons, those who were left without land had to find other means to earn money, in order to buy food and to rent back the space to live in from the landowners who had taken it all. In some parts of the world, this process is happening right now, igniting resistance from indigenous groups such as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil, the Landless Workers’ Movement.
The ZAD, in Nantes, France
Internationally, many groups are struggling on this issue. Reclaim the Fields, for example, is a Europe-wide network of community food growers who are very concerned about access to land, and Grow Heathrow – the squatted market garden where I live – is part of this network. In May last year I joined a RtF event in France, where about 200 people took over and cleared an abandoned field that lies in the path of another proposed airport near Nantes – you can read more about it HERE. The current government’s attempts to criminalise squatting will make it even more difficult for people to reclaim land to grow and live on, reinforcing the existing injustices at a time when a radical rethink is more necessary than ever.
This blog was taken from the Transition Network website as part of their social reporting pilot project.
Poster by Olive Morris award winner- Missbadchild
Date:
Friday 16th December 2011
Time/ Location:
Bulb planting for spring, 2.30pm-3.30pm, Harmondsworth Recreation Ground
Decorate the village christmas tree, light the lights, christmas songs, hot drinks and mince pies, 3.30pm-4.00pm, Harmondsworth High Street, UB7 0AQ
With special thanks to:
Last week three of us hopped on our bikes and headed over to Abbotsfield School for Boys in West Drayton, where we had been invited to speak to a class of year 11 Geography students.
They’re working on a project about eco-footprints, and they wanted to hear about the work we do in Transition Heathrow to reduce our personal footprints and to promote solutions in the local community. We showed them pictures of the site, and explained all the many ways in which we keep our consumption low, including growing our own food, solar panels, rain-water collection, and our soon-to-be erected wind turbine.
We had an interesting chat with the students about the different types of solutions we are normally presented with, and the problems with them. On the one hand, it may be easy to stop using plastic bags, but what difference does it make if you’re doing it on your own? And one the other hand, how on earth can we convince governments who prioritise economic imperatives over environmental catastrophe that they need to take action before it’s too late?
The answer lies between these two poles. What we need is grassroots community-based action, working together with the people around us to empower each other and make the changes that our governments seem incapable of. We’re looking forward to talking to more children around the area and are currently putting together some proposals to be sent round all the schools in the Borough. We think it is really important to hear their ideas for a sustainable future, and to share some of the experiences that we’ve had in Transition Heathrow.
