Reuse, Recycle - clothes swap and tip visit

A couple of weeks back there were two green events I've been meaning to record. Suzanne took a group from Oasis and the cafe to the Civic Amenity Site to witness the recycling process there and apparently it was quite an eye-opener. Last Sunday Alison stood up to talk about it briefly and advised us to talk to her, Monika, Bridget or Suzanne if we want any more information. The amount of contaminated stuff going into the recycling is absurd (duvets very common, but also a deer and a goat in the past year!). Apparently the biggest headache is the plastic bags that get put in, especially full of cans, hence all cans have to go through the sorting process twice to give the poor sorters a chance to grab all the bags going through.

Then Anne and Helen organised a clothes swap party at which 15 folk turned up with clothes they no longer wanted to exchange for someone else's. This was a fun evening and the left overs went to a charity shop.

The Truth About Climate Change

Last night was the second of our 'Creation Time' film evenings. I was not very optimistic that anyone would want to venture out on such a soggy October evening, but to my surprise seven folk turned up, most of them walking. David Attenborough has been a hero of mine since childhood and this kind of down to earth BBC documentary is something I feel much more comfortable with than the dramatic films probably. We just watched the second episode because there is a certain amount of repetition and it seemed an appropriate follow on to our last film. This also meant there was plenty of time for discussion afterwards, and there was certainly plenty of inspiration for discussion in the programme.

Its main focus is the predicted consequences of the rising temperatures, primarily using modelling fom the Met Office's Hadley Centre, and this makes pretty bleak viewing: 'somewhere between severe and catastrophic'. I was surprised, however, by the exent of the optimism that we can at least stop carbon emissions at 2006 levels (it was made three years ago).

Home, update

We welcomed two home groups to our front room a couple of weeks back to watch the film Home (lucky we live in a clergy house). It is a very powerful film and does offer a bit more hope than Age of Stupid towards the end. As long as 'we still have half the world's forests' counts as hope? For me its greatest strength is that it makes it more obvious what it is we're fighting to protect because it is stunningly beautiful (in its shots of people as well as, primarily, landscapes). As far as I noticed there were no shots of British countryside, so since I happened to be on the Cornish coast a couple of days later, that's what this picture is of.

October is a busy month in the run up to Copenhagen - upcoming events in Reading include an event at Caversham Heights Methodist Church at which CAFOD's head of policy will be talking about the importance of acting to avert climate change at 7.30 on Friday 16th. This will be one of a number of Stand Up aganist Poverty events that weekend. Then on Thursday 22 there will be a Tearfund Climate Justice Evening to equip people to respond to the crisis.

Rubbish Art

Last October our Eco-congregation assessor, Rob White, finished a challenge to fill only one bin bag of rubbish in a whole year. He subsequently took his bag of rubbish to various school assemblies to talk about recycling. Once that was done he was looking for an alternative to simply throwing it away so a member of our home group, Sue Batchelor, turned some of it into a work of art. She chose to make a vase of flowers because of Rob's job as a gardener. These tiny photos don't really do the art justice so if you can enlarge them to admire them please do. On the single flower you can see some of the writing on the plastic still.