I had an amazing and inspiring weekend at Shared Planet – the annual People and Planet student activism conference, which was held in Manchester this year. AWESOME doesn’t really sum it up. I’d never heard of Tar Sands before and it’s clearly a major issue so I shall soon be going to the h2oil website to watch their documentary online and find out a lot more about what I can do to save an area of Canadian land equivalent to the size of England, and the indigenous peoples who live there. For one thing, I know that targetting RBS with the Ditch Dirty Development campaign would be great because RBS invests in Tar Sands. A mass student action against RBS, with People and Planet groups from York, Leeds and Sheffield, is being planned for quite soon. It would probably be pretty irresponsible of me to announce exactly where and when on the internet.
I was also really interested by a lot of what Ann Pettifor said. She sounded like a really intelligent woman and she talked a lot of sense. Despite this, Graham has his qualms with her, which he shall be detailing next week in his workshop on whether or not charities (and NGOs) can make difference. Still, she was interesting and the idea of a New Green Deal is fascinating. It would be amazing if the government accepted the proposal at its appeal in the next couple of months.
3 out of the 4 Aldreth Grove girls have just been skipping and have happily returned with:
- 66 mince pies
- 25 bagels
- loooooads of bread products
- loooooads of little oranges – I didn’t check what type
- 8 free range eggs
- 6 packs of spring onions
- 5 bags of potatoes
- 3 cabbages
- 3 bouquets of flowers
Colette’s fallen asleep on the floor and I may have a cheeky bagel to spur me on with my research into China.
Megs xx
