headwayyouth- phil smith's blog

It was only going to be so long...

Today I was invited to the world's first carbon free conference; you guessed it, it takes place in second life!

'OneWorld pioneers carbon-free travel and events on OneClimate Island
On Tuesday 28th November 2006 at 3.0 pm, the international network for global justice, OneWorld, will host a carbon-free meeting on Second Life, as a follow-up meeting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which concluded last week in Nairobi, Kenya.
The meeting is open to anyone in the world - but, appropriately for a climate change conference, produces no travel-related carbon emissions.
Instead the participants will meet as avatars on OneClimate Island, a virtual world dedicated to gathering and distributing shared solutions to climate change. The island, created by OneWorld, is part of the virtual world Second Life, which now has more than 1.5 million inhabitants and a local economy worth more than $18 million each month.'

Maybe this is just the start, a Blah in Second Life doesn't seem beyond the realms of the imagination.

S**t: climate change is going to cost us money!

Whoever commissioned Stern to produce a report on the effects of climate change was a genius. People have known about most of the effects of climate change for years, but still public opinion is against green-taxes or a curb on aviation. 500 million are going to become permanent refugees and Bangladesh will be one large lake and no-one bats an eyelid, but Stern produces a report saying it's going to cost us £3.68 trillion and everyone is suddenly thinking twice about that holiday in Trinidad...

A PR masterpiece from Tony and Gordon I suspect!

The Stern Report is 700 pages long, but there is a great PDF presentation which accompanies the report.

Black Gold

Black Gold isn't fully released in UK cinemas until next March, but fair trade enthusiasts should check out the advance screenings that are showing around the UK throughout November. The film is about the Ethiopian coffee industry and Starbucks reportedly gets it in the neck; unsurprisingly it turns out they're not as ethical as their publicity would suggest.

Lots more including a fine forum over on the Black Gold website

P.s. sorry about the typos on my previous post. The lesson is if you need to rush a post, don't post at all!

See the Flipside

For the past six months (and particularly for the past month) I've been working on a new campaign to get yoof involved in all things fair trade. The campaign is called See the Flipside and everything is just about finished; the website went live last week and everything to be printed will be signed off tomorrow. It's all very exciting!

Even more exciting is that we've managed to find someone to supply our paper stock who boasts that his paper stock is the most environmentally friendly paper stock around. The paper is 100% recycled, the water is recycled, the water is heated in some kind of eco-friendly way, and the paper has never seen any of that nasty chlorine stuff!

Although See the Flipside is about fair trade it's also about ethical living, so the fact that we've managed to find an ethical printers is jolly exciting! Anyway if you want more information on the campaign itself, rather than our printing practise just fill in your details on the website and I'll be sure to get some info in the post along with some (85% recycled, 15% sustainably sourced) beermats.

(RED)

Late last week GAP launched it's full (RED) range. I think I love the (RED) campaign but I'm not quite sure. Don't get me wrong I love the clothes, but  should I really be buying GAP clothing at all, even if half the profits do go to fighting AIDS in Africa?
Such a cliched dilema, but a dilema nevertheless!

Be good: cycle to work!

After a nice relaxing break this has been my first week back at work and it's been mental: preparing ads for magazines, writing copy for resources, getting quotes off designers and working my way through a backlog of emails. Anyway my head is now officially above water and the blogging will hopefully recommence!

A couple of weeks ago at work we ran a carbon footprint league table. Unsurprisingly I was distinctly mid-table, which was rather embarassing as I'm always the one who ends up talking about Traidcraft's environmental policy and doing seminars on ethical living. To compensate for my destruction of the world and all who live in it I'm trying to discover a more environmentally friendly way of getting to work that doesn't break the bank and today for the first time I cycled. It only took half an hour (roughly the same time as driving or on public transport) but on the downside I'm shattered, my hair is all fuzzy and I fear the journey home is much harder than the journey here!

The power of the marginal voice

As you do on your hols, I've enjoyed reading the papers more thoroughly than ever. Two particular themes of news have stood out:

1. It seems that that a war has broken out between supermarkets competing for the ethical consumer's weekly shop. Earlier this week Sainsburys announced it was shifting 500 of it's own brand products from plastic to compostable packaging and just yesterday Tesco announced a new 10 point community plan, including a focus on buying more products locally.
2. An article in the Guardian and a report on tonight's Channel 4 news suggest that bloggers are having more influence on the world than ever, demonstrated by the fact that a group of liberal bloggers met with Bill Clinton last week

Although the two themes are very different as I read one article after the other I was struck by the underlying similarity that increasingly the marginal voice which has been silenced for years is being listened to; the supermarkets are listening to consumers concerns about ethical issues and politicians are becoming wary of the blogosphere. In response to these trends there is the temptation for those who find themselves on the margins to cave in and join those occupying the centreground; to believe shopping at Sainsburys is fine because it's directors are taking the company in the right direction, to pledge allegiance to political parties who give the impression that they are listening.
In both instances I think it is important that those who have caused these changes choose not hop in bed with the enemy but instead stay in that uncomfortable place where your shopping costs more but you keep your local grocer in business and you earn less and have less power, but your posts are not effected by overfriendly politicians.

God's Politics on this side of the pond!

With Greenbelt just four days away I've taken half a day off today, which has given me the chance to finish God's Politics by Jim Wallis.

I'm a painfully slow reader, which makes it difficult to effectively summarise one book in one post, but, in brief, Wallis' book is a look at the political situation in America from a the perspective of a progressive conservative evangelical.

Although I have never been to the United States, the picture that Wallis presents suggests that politics and religion and the crossover between the two, is a whole different ball game in America to the situation here in the UK. Wallis' observation at the start of the book is that much of American politics (not least American foreign policy) is determined by bad theology . His suggestion is that the solution to this problem is not secularism, but good theology. Wallis then goes through a series of issues and presents alternatives to the [secular] policy of the left and the [theologically misguided] policy of the right. In particular Wallis deals with family values, the Middle-East, security, race and poverty (national and international).

Reading the book from this side of the pond the difficulty is that here the church does not have the influence that it does in America. Nor is the church a collective group that votes en mass. We are a disparate, diverse fellowship that has little influence on the state (except for a handful of white bearded men we call bishops) and therefore Wallis' softly, softly approach (meetings with and letters to the president) seems futile.

I would suggest that, politically speaking, the church in Britain needs to be more counter-cultural. To use the miners as an illustration, gone are days of beer and sandwiches with the Prime Minister, now is the time for picket lines and protests- Sentamu style!

Anglican Ecology

Sharing God's Planet is an impressive report by the Church of England on the environment. The recommendations of the report are due to be implemented from Autumn this year.
The publicity that has gone alongside Sharing God's Planet is the kind of publicity that I think the church should be receiving. As reported by the Church Times, the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Richard Chartres, has said that buying a car or flying on holiday are "selfish choices" and "a symptom of sin".

Interviewed about his comments in BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, the Bishop said: "Obviously it’s not my business to issue fatwas, just like that, against flying. But it is very important that people should be helped to take responsibility for the decisions they make; and people of faith — Christians, certainly, and others, as well — regard ‘living in sin’ as an idea which has sometimes been presented in rather a small way: living in sin is really living a life that is turned in upon itself."

They were talking about the report on Radio 5 last week and the presenter was arguing that as per usual this was the church acting all high and mighty, telling people how to live their lives, but when it comes to the environment I think the church should speak out, as such things don't just effect individuals that are responsible for these decisions, but (disproportionately) the world's poor and God's planet, of which we are the stewards.

For more information check out www.shrinkingthefootprint.cofe.anglican.org/

Food for free...

Yes free food, but don't get to excited as it's not for for you!
The Hunger Site is celebrating it's seventh birthday. The concept behind the site is wonderfully simple; go to the homepage, click on the 'Help Feed the Hungry' button and you're taken to a page full of adverts for ethical gifts and clothing. For every click one cup of food is sent to feed those suffering in developing nations or states caught up in war (particularly timely as one of the countries they operate in is Lebanon); the cost of this being subsidised by the adverts you see.
Thanks to Hippyshoppper for the link