Time to celebrate!

October is our six-month anniversary as your Pips!

As well as marking our half birthday, it's a chance to catch a breath after the huge successes of the Tooting Twirl pop-up village green, our 10th annual Foodival sustainable food festival and countless other brilliant events this year.

October's meeting is about celebrating, checking in and changing things up

We have a working list of items to discuss and make decisions on but there will also be the chance to relax after the formal stuff, with some making activities, drinks and chat.

TTT is an exciting group with limitless potential and we want you to play a part in our future plans, so come along to our open meeting and find out how you can get involved.

Tuesday 10th October

7:30pm

The Wine Room

The Trafalgar Arms

148-156 Tooting High Street, SW17 0RT

We really hope to see you on the 10th!

Jeni (co-chair), Sharon (co-chair) and Eleanor (secretary)

Exploring Food and Travel in your carbon footprint - stories from May's 'Carbon Conversations'

TTT's 10th local Carbon Conversations series continues - the free weekly local facilitated meetings where participants can explore their own practical options for low-carbon living.

The sessions are not only about 'counting carbon' and understanding our carbon footprint; they are also about exploring our own values and preferences in a safe and facilitated setting with a small group. Understanding the meaning of our choices.... the 'why' as well as the 'what'.... means we are more likely to take steps which we can sustain over time.
Quoting one of the participants in this series:

"The beauty of Carbon Conversations is 

the optimism, creativity and ideas

that are shared and emerge"

Each of the six meetings has a theme - for example home energy, or waste. We reported on the first two sessions in this blog - read it here, and below two more participants describe the discussion points and feelings raised by the third and fourth meetings: about food and travel.


1 Food: probably the issue that goes to the core of our identities more than any other.
We did an activity reflecting on all the aspects of food production that worry us most. One of the group shared a really heart-rending story of playing a game with a child where they had to mime different animals. They wagged their tail like a dog, pranced like a horse, but when asked to enact a chicken they curled up into a ball on the floor. This child only knew a chicken as a dead body wrapped in clingfilm on a supermarket shelf. It was a poignant moment...

We also played a board game to figure out the carbon emissions embedded in all the different stages of the food production process: growing, processing, packaging, transport.

It was illuminating, but it also made us realise the complications of solely judging things based on carbon emissions. What is something is 'really low carbon' but harmful in other ways? There are lots of factors to take into account.
It also made us reflect on the foods we eat. As one group member said: 'it does make you think....what ARE we eating?!'

TTT's experience of the Climate march weekend in London and Paris - our personal responses

We'd like to share our responses to the Sunday 29th Climate Justice march in London, and to actions that replaced the banned march in Paris. 
And we'd like to share news of the Transition Network day in Paris on Saturday 28th.
All these events and more are urgently linked with the COP21 Climate talks in Paris which are running until December 13th.

We're sharing three blog posts: 

• this post on some of our personal reactions
• then a post about community-level responses
• and finally a post about the global view 

This is a snapshot of the experience we felt as participants....

What did taking part mean to us personally?

London

Hilary: It was hugely reassuring to see so many other people willing to give up a cold and windy day to marching

The march began, for us, at Tooting Bec Tube. We didn't know how many would come, after putting out the invitation via our blog. On the day, 7 of us met, with the world on one head and giant sign saying, "urgent".

We emerged in the centre of London and spotted one or two other likely groups - I guess this is how a march begins, with intentional meeting of friends and colleagues with a common cause. By the time we arrived at Park Lane, we realised that there were many common causes to put under the banner of "Climate March" - vegans, community energy, anti-oil, anti-fracking, save the polar bears, Greenpeace, revolutionaries, drummers, fundraisers and photographers...

We even had apples thrust until our palms from those campaigning against waste food! Delicious they were too.

Number 10 in TTT's '12 tweets to Christmas'

Here is tweet number ten:

No.10 in TTT's 12 tweets to Xmas: Midwinter but the sun is heading back our way. In every darkness the seed of renewal lies #Tooting #Transition 

Number 9 in TTT's '12 tweets to Christmas'

Here is tweet number nine:
No.9 tips for Xmas: Mark The Dark. Sit still awhile without light. Enjoy winter's dark solstice magic. Today the sun's new year begins!