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Transition New Mills

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Transition New Mills

Author Archives: Julian Ashworth

Get Moving!

28 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by Julian Ashworth in Discussion, Funding, News, Transport

≈ Leave a comment

A new project run by Active Derbyshire and High Peak Borough Council will help make our community stronger and healthier, contributing to our shared ‘New Mills 2030’ vision.

This aims to try and bring more movement into the day to day lives of the residents of New Mills. They’re interested in supporting more traditional sports and physical activity offers, but especially determined to support people who are currently fairly inactive to make changes to their lifestyle. They want to widen the number of New Mills residents who embrace being outdoors. This could be either by incorporating more activity into day to day activities, such as using feet or bikes for travel, or becoming involved with a community initiative such as a community garden or a befriending offer of walking together.

They recognise a strong link between community strength and the level of physical activity in a town, and note the great potential for some cross-over or connectivity between some of the work that is already happening or being planned. They’d like to assist this but also see if there is some way we could help existing projects thrive. They’re also conscious that significant portions of the New Mills population participate a lot less than others. They want to understand this better and use your insight and experience to discover and enable activities and communication that will address this imbalance.

So if you have a project that increases people’s movement and activity, especially ones that address inequality in participation in physical activity, we and they would love to hear from you!
https://www.activederbyshire.org.uk/our-work

The English Tree Strategy

16 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by Julian Ashworth in Biodiversity, Rewilding

≈ 1 Comment

Nature New Mills has responded to the Defra England Tree Strategy consultation that was launched in June and closed 11th September.  

The consultation sought views on the following:  

  • how to expand, protect and improve our public and private trees and woodlands,  
  • the increased role that trees and woodlands can play in supporting the economy,  
  • how best to further connect people to nature, and  
  • the most effective way in which trees and woodlands can be created and managed to help combat climate change.  

    Defra Press Release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/consultation-launched-on-the-england-tree-strategy  

     
    The consultation strategy included an introduction from the Forestry Minister, Zac Goldsmith, commending it as a way forward. The consultation consisted of 45 questions, and information to facilitate responses to the questions. The consultation document can be found in pdf form via the following link: https://consult.defra.gov.uk/forestry/england-tree-strategy/  

    As a group, Nature New Mills decided it was important to respond to the strategy. We collated responses from the group and fed those into the consultation survey. It took us a good half a day to do this and we hope that time has been well spent. As one of us said, ‘the Defra Document is a bit overwhelming’ 😉  

    We felt that the information given to help us respond to the consultation was carefully set out, though we would have appreciated further references, particularly to the scientific expertise informing the document.  

    We thought that there are some useful aspects to the proposed strategy. The strategy, for example, refers to natural regeneration and the need to encourage greater biodiversity. It emphasises the need for diversity in tree planting, as opposed to the establishment of tree monocultures, the need to ensure the resilience of woods in the face of climate breakdown, the need to control browsing by deer and other mammals, the value of tree corridors (to encourage biodiversity), the benefits of encouraging appropriate tree coverage along rivers as a means of controlling flooding, and the importance of trees and woodland for wellbeing, particularly in urban contexts. The strategy document emphasises the need to support and incentivise tree planting and regeneration projects financially. It also refers to the need for local community involvement, for example in mapping local areas. This last point is relevant to Nature New Mills and doubtless other areas of socio-environmental activity related to Transition New Mills.  

    All of this is heartening. However, as we noted in our response to the consultation, the overall target for tree coverage  (from 10% to 12%) is nowhere near sufficient, in a country with much less tree coverage than other European countries .We were also concerned that the strategy is more oriented around tree planting than it is with ‘reducing carbon and increasing biodiversity through better management of natural systems’. Our concern was that ‘a tree planting rush’ could happen at the expense of ‘other valuable habitats which may also play important roles in those objectives’.  

    Alongside these concerns, we were also unconvinced by the use of the term ‘ecosystems services’ in the strategy. We felt that this ‘service’ orientation would result in perverse incentives and constituted a ‘spurious cost-benefit tool which attempts to put a monetary value to woodland and nature’. Connectedly we questioned the desire for ‘energy forestry’ using ‘fast-growing trees which are planted and specially grown on a short rotation to provide biomass for power generation’ (Strategy consultation document, Page, 34). We wondered how much of the additional 2% forest cover would be given over to short rotation for wood biomass ( the strategy consultation document gives no indication that we could find).  Finally and substantively for us, the document does not explicitly mention the grouse shooting industry or industrial scale sheep farming (though it does mention deer and squirrels). We felt this was an omission and so raised it as a consideration in relevant parts of the consultation.  

    Alongside these key points we made the following points in the consultation (we have not included the exhaustive list of points made):  

    Creating space for nature  
  • Ensuring natural regeneration should be at the top of the hierarchy of approaches (as recommended by Rewilding Britain in relation to the strategy): helping people to understand how natural regeneration  works, timescales, and to value the evolving landscape even though it might look messy to some and not result in instant gratification.  
  • Natural regeneration is less costly than tree planting  
  • Reduce barriers to species re-introduction (e.g. beavers) to help manage ecosystems.  

Local communities and local authorities  

  • Local councils should be required to have a tree strategy which involves local non-governmental organisations.  
  • Connected to the previous point, a need for greater publicised transparency on land ownership and current subsidies.  
  • Facilitation of urban natural brown field regeneration and planting by community.  
  • Raise awareness of the health and wellbeing benefits along with promoting a sense of ownership of civil spaces.  Increasing opportunities for dialogue and involvement with communities through agential activities.  This facilitates the smooth running of local government and ultimately the implementation of central government initiatives.  
  • Advice and encouragement for communities to collect and grow trees for local planting in appropriate places.  
  • Actively promote citizen planting of trees in gardens which have been paved over; incentives and support to unpave and plant permaculture lazy gardens.  
  • More emphasis on help with whole ecosystem management, rather than just tree management. More accessible information for NGO’s, communities and general public education.  


    Planning and regulation  
  • Planning guidance for new developments to take more account of tree planting and connections between natural areas. Incentivising not just tree planting, but ongoing maintenance and survival of trees 5 or 10 years later.  
  • The planning system should be able to refuse development where this impacts ancient woodland. We also need to take better account of the cumulative effect of habitat loss.  
  • A means to put protection orders on trees along with a register for why trees are felled, who felled them and contract numbers.  
  •  Making it easier for town’s people to plant up trees in urban tarmac spaces can help with drainage issues and provide greened environment conferring health benefits.  

Supporting the economy:  Ecotourism  

(Note: The England Tree Strategy is interested in tree planting as a means of supporting the economy. Nature New Mills has made mention of ecotourism in meetings. Eco tourism could well be a useful way of supporting the economy, so we referred to it in the strategy document as below:  

  • clearer routes to helping design sustainable services involved in tourism management  
  • We would like people to be employed in this sector as conservationists and with a view to fostering eco-tourism around unique ecologies  
  • Eco-tourism has the greatest potential for drawing together multiple economic stakeholders whilst maintaining and growing sustainable landscapes  

How You Can Help Rebuild Our Town

26 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Julian Ashworth in Events, News

≈ 2 Comments

With unprecedented national public interest in addressing climate change, the impact of and reaction to coronavirus, and the vision of the Community Conversation, Transition New Mills is poised for its most significant year yet.

There are lots of ways you can get involved to help reimagine and rebuild our town; you don’t have to be an environmental campaigner, an expert in anything, or have lots of time on your hands. None of us can solve the climate and natural crises on our own; we need to harness the collective energy and capacity of the town and everyone in it.

The diagram below suggests how Transition New Mills can operate. Anyone can place themselves on it wherever they feel most comfortable. For example, you might want to join in another group’s related activities (such as the Litter Pickers), a Transition supported project (such as the Repair Cafe), help with project mentoring or some of the administrative tasks, or join the Committee.

structure

Looking forward to the AGM next Sunday evening (3rd May), we will be holding elections for up to 9 posts on the Committee. If you’re interested in that sort of role to help steer us forward, please do let us know beforehand by emailing transition.newmills@gmail.com.

Alternatively, if there’s any other way suggested by the diagram in which you think you could contribute, do also get in touch and together we can start creating a resilient, sustainable and ethical future!

To attend the 2020 virtual AGM on Zoom, please see joining instructions and papers here.

Join Us At The Virtual 2020 Annual General Meeting!

12 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Julian Ashworth in Events, News

≈ Leave a comment

Sunday May 3rd at 7pm, on this ZOOM link
https://zoom.us/j/130532834?pwd=Rno2Y3g4RUxhMTRUL3JTeXlKdlAxdz09
Password: 123

As you know, our AGM is usually an opportunity to meet our wider group of supporters, listen to a talk on a topic of interest, and have a good conversation about green issues. However, the lockdown has made us rethink our plans for this year; we will be doing this virtually instead, and just dealing with key business. To join, just click the above link and it will take you to the meeting. (This might take a few minutes if you’ve not used Zoom before.) Please check your video and audio switched on so we can say hello!
We are in need of a new constitution to enable us to operate effectively and efficiently as we continue to expand our range and scale of activities, and it is important that this is agreed soon so we can continue to grow. We also need to ratify the accounts after the financial year end.
If the constitution is agreed, there will be an election for up to 8 Committee members. We encourage you to consider standing; please let us know by emailing transition.newmills@gmail.com by 7pm on Sunday 26th April if you wish to. In order to be stand for election and be eligible to vote at the meeting we are asking participants to read and agree to a simple set of principles which cover the Transition movement.
We will also work on an accompanying set of more detailed procedures which will help put the constitution into practice; these will be ready before September.
When it is safe again we plan to have a proper celebration of the year’s achievements, so please watch out for that. It will involve food and lots of conversation, it goes without saying. There might be sunshine, and there may be a bit of hugging.
For now, please join us on May 3rd if you can. It should be short and painless, but is really important for the group. It would help if you could read the documents which will be posted on our events page beforehand.
We very much hope to see you there.
The Steering Group
Julian, Sue, Penny, Jill, Liz,
Sam, Jane, Phil, and Helen

Image

Cafe Transition: Renewable Energy

18 Saturday Jan 2020

RenewableEnergy_poster

Posted by Julian Ashworth | Filed under Energy, Events

≈ 1 Comment

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