TICKETS ON SALE: Kaleidescope community performance

Tickets are now on sale for our Community Kaleidescope performance – Heathrow in Transition, as part of Hillingdon Arts Week. (Box Office – 01895 673200)

‘A combined theatrical performance devised by a group of artists, performers and musicians, in response to the history of Heathrow’s fight against the third runway, the BAA buyout and the Transition towards Heathrow’s future.’

The performance will include forum theatre, real life experiences, bicycle power, new creations, and a musical twist! We will also have special appearances from our hand made puppets done by families at the Com.Cafe in West Drayton.

The performance will be on Sunday 10th June, at 5pm, at the Sipson Community Centre. Tickets are £6 / £4 concessions – to book call 01895 673200

Please spread the word and get friends and families to buy tickets. There will be a picnic beforehand at the Grow Heathrow site from 1pm, bring snacks to share.

Crafternoons

Transition Heathrow invite you to our free Arts and Crafts workshop running every Tuesday afternoon from 2-5pm at the Grow Heathrow community site – Vineries Close, Sipson, UB7 0JG

The next 3 weeks see:

Tuesday 15th – Kite Making – creating our own home-made kites that we can then go out and fly together

Tuesday 22nd – Fence weaving – with a fence as our canvas, we will use recycled materials such as plastic bags, fabric and wool, to create a patchwork fence.

Tuesday 29th – Clay modelling – using clay we have dug from the ground ourselves, we will explore this medium to make whatever we want.

Come and join the fun – kids and adults welcome – please spread the word.

A callout for donations

Transition Heathrow are building a straw bale house – would you donate to help get this off the ground?

With the start of Spring, Transition Heathrow and friends are embarking on a mission to build a straw bale house from scratch! With donated straw bales, used car tyres, scrap wood, dug clay, wheelbarrows and hammers, many hands and feet busy themselves with creating this beautiful natural building.

To make this possible, we need to raise some funds – so Transition Heathrow is launching a crowd funding campaign. You can help us to buy important tools in building this beautiful house, like string, saws, screws and water proof material, transport and of course just to feed and house all the lovely people who may help with the building.

If you want to help these straw bales become a home, then use the Paypal donate button on the website to make a contribution.

We rely on donations to fund these kind of projects, so if you’d like Grow Heathrow to continue doing what it does, please donate what you can. And if you don’t have any spare cash, please send this on to someone who you think might!

Puppet making workshop

In preparation for Kaleidoscope Transition (a creative performance at Grow Heathrow) kids from the Com Café in West Drayton have been making marionette puppets every Friday.

The lively, enthusiastic kids (aged between 5-11) have been getting involved in making puppets with the help of volunteers from Grow Heathrow, whilst gaining creative skills, the kids are also learning about the Transition Towns movement and alternative ways of living.

Once the animal puppets are finished, hopefully the children will perform with their puppets on stage as part of Kaleidoscope Transition, on Sunday 10th June, 5pm at Sipson Community Centre. Tickets for this performance are now available from the Grow Heathrow site but can also be booked by calling 01895 673200.

To the Hedgerows we go…Foraging Fridays!

Wild Flower and Leaf Salad

A Dandelion you weed out of your lawn. Nettles growing tall out of a crack in the paving. An Elder tree you always notice walking down the road…There’s too much growing wild for us not to explore and harvest!

Here in Sipson we have a whole backland which has exploded in a most beautiful spring green, over the coming seasons every week, we will be exploring, learning, gathering, cooking, preserving, drying, brewing, drinking, eating Celebrating natures wild abundance at our Foraging Friday sessions at or around the Grow Heathrow site.

• Gathering at 1pm fo lunch.
• 2pm we will head out to the hedgerows, fields and forests surrounding the Heathrow villages, from the beautiful Cranford Park to Harmondsworth Lake – bring your foraging bags, notebooks and wild food knowledge.
• Each week we will pick 1-2 plants to concentrate on learning where they grow, when to harvest, what to make with them, their medicinal properties, folklore and myth of these magical plants many people call weeds.
• Returning to the Grow Heathrow site in the later part of the afternoon we will create something with what we have foraged; maybe an evening meal, a herbal Tincture, a pickle or preserve, syrups, wines, beers, teas….anything we want. Finishing at 5:30pm we will all take away a wealth of knowledge and a jar of something delicious to share with community, family and friends.

The common Dandelion we will discover this Friday

Starting this Friday 11^th May at 10am we will start with a spring herbal tonic and a quick introduction to some ideas around wild food foraging.  At 2pm we will leave Grow Heathrow and discover the well know Dandelion with fresh eyes.

To the hedgerows we go! Spread the word!

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Remember to bring waterproofs and good shoes if raining. Also glass jars are always useful.

In Transition 2.0

Here’s another date for your diary. On Thursday 7th June, as the next installment of Grow Heathrow’s first Thursday of the month off-grid film club, we will be showing the Transition Network’s brand new film In Transition 2.0 

Filmmaker Emma Goude will be making the journey up here and will be taking questions after the film. We are inviting every Transition Town group across London and from the Thames Valley region to come and watch it with us so it should be a packed greenhouse.

Watch the trailer here and don’t miss out on this free film screening, starting at 8.30pm. Crash space is available if requested.

In Transition 2.0 is the new film from Transition Network, capturing inspiring stories of Transition initiatives around the world, responding to uncertain times with creativity, solutions and ‘engaged optimism’.

Stir to action

The fifth edition of STIR magazine is now online at stirtoaction.com and features the latest Transition Heathrow blog alongside an interview with the Transition Network co-founder Rob Hopkins. 

Transition Heathrow are lucky enough to be able to post blogs once a month on the STIR blog which offers anger, analysis and action.

STIR is a community-building online magazine that features articles and interviews on radical gardening, community-supported agriculture, climate activism, democratic education, permaculture, the occupy movement, the commons, grassroots sports, food justice, cooperatives, practical philosophy and  more.

The economic impact of high oil prices

As the developed-world economy tries to gain momentum, it faces a persistent headwind. The oil price remains stubbornly over $100 a barrel, acting like a tax on Western consumers. Some blame the high price on evil speculators—Barack Obama unveiled plans to increase penalties for market manipulation on April 17th. But there is a simpler explanation: that supply is inadequate to keep up with rising demand.

The concept of peak oil—the idea that global crude production may be at, or close to, its limit—is far from universally accepted. One leading asset manager talked recently of the world being “awash with energy” because of the exploitation of American shale gas. Nevertheless, oil is still the main fuel for cars and trucks. And crude output (as opposed to alternatives such as biofuels and liquids made from gas) has been flat since 2005.

A number of countries (including Britain, Egypt and Indonesia) have turned from net oil exporters into importers in recent years. And although rich countries have curbed their energy-guzzling a little, demand continues to surge in emerging markets.

This has left the oil market very vulnerable to temporary supply disruptions, such as the war in Libya. Speaking at a conference in Dublin this week, organised by the Institute of International and European Affairs and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, Chris Skrebowski, a consulting editor of Petroleum Review, argued that spare capacity in the oil market could be eroded by 2015.

The peak-oil concept was devised by the late M. King Hubbert, who correctly predicted in 1956 that oil output in the lower 48 states of America would peak by around 1970. At the conference Michael Kumhof, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, presented the findings of a forthcoming working paper which showed that adding the idea of a “Hubbert peak” to energy production greatly improved the ability of a model to forecast oil prices. Based on an expected 0.9% annual increase in production over the next decade, the model predicts that real oil prices will nearly double over the same period.

The economic damage caused by such a rise is predicted to be modest, perhaps 0.2% of global GDP a year. In the past changes in oil prices have had a limited long-term impact, since any losses to oil importers are matched by gains by oil exporters. To the extent that high oil prices played a role in the recessions of the early 1980s and 2008-09, the main reason is that oil-producing countries tend to have a lower marginal propensity to consume their income, denting global demand.

Nevertheless, Mr Kumhof worries that if oil prices are high enough, the economic impact might increase substantially. On the most extreme assumptions, it could be 2% a year.

Even if the world can find more oil—in the Arctic or tar sands, say—the longer-term question is whether the era of “cheap energy” is over and how the world can adjust if it is. Developed economies are built on easy access to cheap energy, importing goods that are transported from around the world, with consumers driving many miles to work in air-conditioned offices and then flying off to sunny climes for their annual holidays. Persistently high oil prices would clearly lead to substitution (electric cars, natural-gas-powered trucks) but the transition costs could be significant.

Furthermore some potential substitutes for, or new sources of, oil (such as biofuels and tar sands) are a lot less efficient, in the sense that they require significant amounts of energy simply to produce. To the extent that this equation (energy return on energy invested, or EROI) is deteriorating, that must surely have an effect on economic growth.

“What is the minimum EROI that a modern industrial society must have for its energy system for that society to survive?” ask Carey King and Charles Hall in a recent paper*. The academics’ answer: “Complex societies need a high EROI built on a large primary energy base.”

This issue is not much considered by mainstream economists, who are too busy focusing on monetary policy, the impact of fiscal austerity or the need for labour-market reforms. But just as the industrial revolution was built on coal, the post-second-world-war economy was built on cheap oil. There will surely be a significant impact if it has gone for good.

This blog was taken from The Economist magazine.

Gardening. Sundays. Be there

The time has come here at Grow Heathrow to leave the burners cold and drink our morning tea while peering about the site noticing the breaking through Buddleia and Elder, Nettles and Bramble which surrounds the site, stretch out into the coming spring.

Its time to leave meetings and dreams of fat yellow courgettes and crisp fresh peas for the winter months, get out in the meadow, build more raised beds, more cold frames, turn the (great) compost, get rain water collection sorted, make the growing plan, explore the rich and exciting Grow Heathrow heritage seed bank and get ourselves in action to grow food, with and for our whole community, Grow Heathrow and the Heathrow villages.

The PEDAL seed bank comes to Grow Heathrow

So we did that, more than a month ago. You’ll notice that’s why the blog’s a bit late, no time for computers when there’s plants to get to know! Now at Grow Heathrow it’s a buzz of activity – our seedlings are well on their way, soil firmly under our nails and a fresh new excitement in the air – this year we’re on it.

Gardening Club Sundays is the day here at Grow Heathrow to come and get growing. No way we could do this all by our selves, and by no means do we want to, that’s why the gates are always open for anyone to join in. A local resident, a passer by, a Londoner who needs a break from the concrete and smog, kids, parents, old, young, all abilities, experienced allotment growers, those who don’t know a thing about it at all, anyone – really anyone who wants to learn or share their own skills and experiences.

The idea of these Sundays is to get everyone together working on jobs around site to do with the food aspect of the Transition Heathrow project. From week to week that will differ, always an array of jobs to be done for different ages and abilities, from seeding to shifting wheelbarrows of compost. Planting out to harvesting produce. With snacks and hot drinks always available.

Drop a beet

And the best thing about it is, we learn by actually doing it, we will all learn together as we go – a crop might not grow so well, might get a disease or pest – but at the end of the day we’ll learn how to organically deal with it next time.

No, i was wrong, that isn’t the best thing about it, the best thing is we grow it together then we get to eat it, no TESCO in-between. You grow it, you eat it. You defiantly enjoy it. Anyone who has ever tried food they have grown with their own hands that’s fresh from the soil and plant knows it cant be beaten in taste and satisfaction.

With the new TESCO opening up around the corner in West Drayton, all we can really say to them is ‘get out of town’ we’re doing it ourselves. With the produce over the coming seasons, we will be distributing locally in our Sipson post office, and maybe a stall at local Farmers Markets, giving plants and produce away free to residents in the local community to grow in their own gardens, holding peoples kitchens, delivering our veggies to social centres and other squats in london, preserving, pickling, jamming any glut and generally getting to know what its like not to depend on veg imported from half way across the world.

I’m very excited, I hope you are too. Come and join us to understand what food autonomy really means.

The Grow Heathrow gardening club runs every Sunday from 2 – 6pm.

Transition Heathrow needs your support

On the 18th & 19th June when most people will be thinking about their upcoming summer holidays – members of Transition Heathrow and the local community down by Heathrow Airport are headed for Central London County Court for a two day hearing.

After three previous adjournments during court proceedings it is expected a judge will finally rule on whether an eviction order should be granted at our community market-garden project ‘Grow Heathrow’. Despite widespread support from the surrounding community including Hillingdon Council, the local MP and even the local Police, the site with three greenhouses on it and which we cleared over 30 tonnes of rubbish off could be handed back to the land owners who have no plans whatsoever.

In the meantime you can support us by:

• Signing our petition (NOT WORKING AT THE MOMENT – WE’RE TRYING TO FIX IT)
• Following our blog and twitter for updates: @transheathrow #DefendGrowHrow
• Sending us a photo or statement of support to info@transitionheathrow.com:
• Turning up to court on the 18th & 19th June. Please come and join the big show of support photo opportunity outside court on Monday 18th at 9.30am Address HERE.
• Donating us some cash. Paypal button also on top right of this page