It’s now 6 years & 7 months since the Maldon Local Development Plan 2014-2029 [pdf] was approved (21 July 2017) and 6 years & 5 months since the Burnham Neighbourhood Plan 2014-2020 [pdf] was made part of the Maldon LDP by Maldon District Council (8 September 2017). The period both these plans cover ends in 2029 – now just 5 years away.
Continue reading “If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail”
Last Sunday I participated in a stage of Beach of Dreams, walking between Bradwell Waterside and Burnham-on-Crouch. Beach of Dreams is an art project initiated by Ali Pretty of Kinetika, it’s a collaborative 500-mile walk between Lowestoft and Tilbury
Continue reading “Beneath the Seawall, the Beach of Dreams”
There was a heat dome over the north. It was in the news about the USA and Canada, but it’s also been in the Russian Arctic, Scandinavia, in the febrile crescent above the Arabian Sea arcing from Oman to Pakistan. A couple of weeks ago, during a Zoom call with a colleague in Milan she mentioned it had been 41°C there in the previous week. Temperature records have been broken in British Columbia, Washington, Portland, Moscow, Lappland, Helsinki, Northern Ireland. All this in a ‘cool’ La Niña year.
Continue reading “New Vernaculars”
This week Essex Live brought back the Climate Central Flood Map story that featured in the last post. This time around the story, and its associated maps, were accompanied by some welcome discussion of the implications and possible mitigation from Drs Natalie Hicks and Tom Cameron of the University of Essex’s School of Life Sciences. There was something of a disjunct between their commentary and the featured statements from the Environment Agency and Essex County Council. If local journalism wasn’t in such an under-resourced state that disjunct might have been creatively opened further in order to plot some better sense of the different visions of the future each presents. Continue reading “Back to the Strandline”
Lots of the local ecologically concerned folk are sharing this news story based on the
Climate Central flood map update using the CoastalDEM® v1.1 digital elevation model. I’m not immune to doing so myself. Combined with the recent devastating floods in the north of England these projections seem to offer a warning from the future that Continue reading “Vulnerable to Flooding”
The time we have left to avoid climate disaster is getting short and the sun is setting on the opportunity to avoid catastrophe. Not that you would know it from the political inactivity around here. Continue reading “The Hour is Getting Late”
It’s now ten days since I wrote to my District Councillors (Peter Elliott and Ron Pratt) asking why Maldon District Council has no current Environment and Climate Change Strategy despite the Climate Emergency and I’m still waiting for a reply. I recognise that they may be busy, that it’s not a salaried role and their time may be stretched, so I think I’ll give them a month before I follow up with another letter seeking an update on progress. I’m also thinking about other ways I can raise this issue – ask the leader of the opposition on the council to raise it?, seek recognition at the town council level? Again, learning how local politics works is proving to be a case of just try stuff.
The urgency of the emergency was brought home last week with Continue reading “High (Tide) and Dry”
On 8th December I posted on social media about trying to find a point of agency in the face of the wicked problem of climate change – partly re-energised by the Extinction Rebellion actions:
‘I’ve never been a member of a political party, I’ve always been against it on the basis that joining a political party seemed to indicate you supported implicitly everything their representatives ended up saying or doing, no matter how idiotic, and even the barmiest parts of their manifestos. No thanks, I favoured the Groucho Marxist position. Continue reading “Climate Emergency”
The fifth question in the Where You At? bioregional quiz is:
When was the last time a fire burned in your area?
This is one of the quiz questions that reveals its Cascadian/West Coast USA origins. As Carolyn Merchant has noted in Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (1992) the quiz is ‘culture-bound’. I write that because the whole concept of a fire burning ‘in your area’ seems to reflect the spread of wildfire over large parts of a landscape, something that happens regularly enough to note in California, but is much less familiar in northern Europe.
The widespread deforestation of the Atlantic Archipelago has left the UK without a lot of standing trees to burn and the climate here means that we have rarely experienced the hot, dry conditions that catalyse these types of conflagration. Continue reading “Where You At Q5: When was the last time a fire burned in your area?”
The next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due late in 2019. The lag time between data gathering and data publication, plus the need for an agreed consensus amidst the contributors have conspired in previous editions to present overly optimistic scenarios, it’s now widely recognised that they’ve routinely underestimated the rate of global warming. A recent study suggests that we might see 1.5 metres of sea-level rise before 2100: ‘Revised median RSL [relative sea-level] projections for a high-emissions future would, without protective measures, by 2100 submerge land currently home to more than 153 million people’. If we don’t avoid those high-emissions scenarios we’re also locking in greater future sea-level rises as Antarctica and Greenland give up their land-based ice to the sea.
A look over the Dengie’s sea walls at high tide and imagining another 150cm of water is a sobering matter – factor in the conditions that caused the spate of inundations referred to in a previous post and you can see we have a problem. Continue reading “Greenhouse Britain”
Dengie Bioregion 