2009 Annual Conference: Development versus Environment?
Development versus Environment?
Is sustainable development feasible?
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
10.00 Opening of Conference Announcements
10.15 Professor Peter Smith : Climate: Hot Topic or
Hot Air?
11.00 Questions and Discussion
11.30 Refreshment break
12.00 Michael Foster, MP. Questions and Discussion
12.45 Lunch break
1.30 Workshop Groups
2.30 Feedback from groups
3.00 Refreshment break
3.15 Plenary Panel Session (Chair: David Bryer)
4.00 Closing Remarks
4.15 End of Conference
NOTE ON SPEAKERS
Professor Peter Smith was formerly Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Leeds, and is a past Vice-President of the RIBA. His latest book: Building for a Changing Climate: the challenge for construction, planning and energy is due to be published by Earthscan in the autumn.
Michael Foster M.P. is Member of Parliament for Worcester, and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for International Development (DfID) where he has responsibility for environmental matters.
David Bryer was formerly Director of Oxfam GB and was until recently Chair of Oxfam International.
WORKSHOP GROUPS
Three workshop groups will be led as follows:
1) Steve Tonry (Friends of the Earth): Fixing the Food Chain;
2) Andy Wilson (Christian Aid): Is tax-dodging making poverty permanent?
3) Richard Priestley: Ecological Sustainability, Social Justice and the Transition from the Fossil-Fuel Age to the Solar Age
One or more further groups may be formed if there is sufficient demand.
Workshop leaders will also take part in the plenary panel session, together with local representatives of other organisations.
STALLS AND DISPLAYS
A number of local and national environmental and development organisations will be represented in stalls and displays at the conference. If you would like your organisation or group to be represented in this way please contact Jenny Houghton on 01684 540158 as soon as possible.
CONFERENCE LOCATION
We encourage people coming to the conference to use public transport wherever possible. If you come by rail to Foregate Street station, turn right out of the station, under the bridge, then right again down Pierpoint Street. At the end turn left into Sansome Walk and the Baptist centre is shortly on the right-hand side. The hall is behind the church.
For those coming by car a limited amount of parking will be available in the church car park, and BEACONS volunteers will be on hand to guide you. Please note that Sansome Walk is one-way going south, and you should access it from The Tything via either St Marys Street or St Oswalds Road (if coming from points south or west).
CONFERENCE REGISTRATION
If you have not already registered for the conference you can simply turn up on the day, but it helps us greatly if you register in advance so that we can estimate how many people to cater for. Please note that the registration fee (£10 individual; £2 students) includes buffet lunch and refreshments.
FURTHER INFORMATION
If you would like any further information about the conference, please phone 01865 541333. Website: www.beaconsdec.org.uk
If you would like to register, please complete the attached form, and return as indicated.
Please pass on this information about the conference to anyone you know who might be interested
BEACONS CONFERENCE 2009: Saturday 11 July
REGISTRATION FORM
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*CONFERENCE FEES: Individual £10; student £2.
Please return this slip to Roger Meagor (Hon Treasurer), The Manse, Jubilee Drive, Upper Colwall, WR13 6DQ to arrive not later than 9 July.
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We would like to collect in advance the views of likely participants on the central questions in our title - and that means you!
What we are suggesting is that you imagine yourself coming back to earth in (a) a hundred years time; and (b) a thousand years time, and set down on the Message Board what you would expect to find. Then, on the basis of these expectations, suggest your own responses to the questions in the conference title. We would prefer you to keep you responses fairly short - not more than 300 words in total please.
You will need to register to use the Message Board - it takes only a few minutes. Click on Message Board in the left hand column. Then click on 'New Topic'. A new window will come up, saying that you have to register. Click on 'Click here to register' (it's under the first line, it's a bit faint) and you will find a set of statements with which you have to agree, then a simple details form to fill in. You will then be sent an email telling you how to activate your account - and you're away!
We want to post your views on this website and then display a selection at the actual conference. In this way we hope to be able to prepare for the event so that the conference itself becomes a culmination of preparatory thinking. And not just a culmination, because these questions are among the most crucial of our age, and we have to keep asking them. A conference like this, in one tiny corner of the planet, can only be just one tiny part of what needs to be a massive surge of human endeavour if our species, homo sapiens, is to realise its true potential as guardian of planet Earth and, ultimately, survive in its own habitat.
Please note the significance of the wording in our title. Development (in the sense we use it as a Development Education Centre - eg poverty eradication) is generally regarded as good, a worthy aim. The environment is also a good thing, something we need to maintain and not abuse. Yet development often, perhaps normally, becomes equated merely with growth; and growth is physical, material, economic. Growth consumes material resources, which are finite. Growth includes populations (and therefore numbers of humans in relation to land and water and other available physical resources) as well as exploitation of the Earths resources to continually raise standards of material living.
We are now moving into a deeply recessional economic period primarily caused, it seems, by the greedy excesses of a largely unregulated financial system. The world economy slows down, perhaps even goes into reverse. Yet no national leader dares suggest that this slowing of growth is a good thing for the world. We are all, developed or developing, in a race to continue or resume growth at the fastest possible rates as soon as possible.
So the questions facing us are: can our species, so-called homo sapiens (wise man), continue to grow at this pace without destroying his habitat, planet Earth? Are there ways in which this growth can be sustained, ie kept at a level that does not irreparably damage this habitat, for both humans and its other inhabitants? How likely is this, given Mans record, and proven nature? In other words, will homo sapiens prove to be sapient (or wise) enough to maintain his own habitat, or avoid his own destruction?
This is the reason for using the word feasible in our title, which is different from asking whether it is possible. It is still possible, even if no longer to avert dramatic climate change that is already taking place, at least to avert runaway, catastrophic climate change in the not too distant future that would most probably result in the end of civilization as we know it and, again probably, in the elimination of the human race. But possible means either finding and applying some so-far unknown or untried technology or restricting human growth as suggested above. Thus the adjective feasible; do human beings have the will to restrict their growth, individually and collectively, to long-term sustainable levels?
So responses to the question will divide broadly into the pessimistic, or the optimistic, or the in-betweens. You may of course be one of those who believe that climate change is not man-made and that there is no real problem. If so we would still like to hear from you.
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