Local Groups Conference 2011 – Friends of the Earth at 40
Colette Humphrey, joint co-ordinator, talks about some of this year’s highlights.
At the time of writing, seven members of the Manchester group have just returned from an inspirational and fun-filled Local Groups Conference. This is held annually for local group members from across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The weekend is always packed full of exciting speakers, practical workshops and a celebration of the year with the Earthmovers awards.
Friends of the Earth is currently celebrating its 40th year of environmental campaigning. So the session I was most looking forward to was getting together four of the organisation’s previous Executive Directors, along with Andy Atkins, who currently holds the role. Tom Burke, Jonathon Porritt, Charles Secrett and Tony Juniper took to the stage on Friday evening for a panel discussion. As expected, the session included great insights, distant memories and certainly some moments of controversy!
As a reminder of our membership of Friends of the Earth International, it has become traditional to invite guests from other groups around the world. This year was no exception, with Nnimmo Bassey, Chair of Friends of the Earth International, from Nigeria, and Jagoda Munić, Friends of the Earth Croatia, joining us.
Presentations from both were incredibly inspiring and entertaining. Nnimmo gave a quote that I will certainly remember: “Keep the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sands in the land – keep fossil fuels where they belong.” He couldn’t think of one for fracking for gas but it got a mention anyway! Jagoda’s presentation was full of great pictures of campaigning actions they have taken and was an exciting source of ideas for our future campaigns.
The weekend was full of a huge choice of seminars and workshops to attend. Some that I went to concentrated on the new national campaigns being planned for the next twelve months – these will focus on bees, energy and resource use. We had lots of fun thinking up creative ideas of how the campaigns should be developed for local groups to use in our street campaigning.
The last presentation of the conference was by Kate Pickett, author of The Spirit Level. The presentation gave some highlights about equality and how relatively unequal societies suffer more from problems including life expectancy, obesity, crime – and carbon emissions.
The theme of the conference this year focused on the 40th anniversary with past memories but also future plans: ‘Journey to 2050: The next 40 years’. In line with this, two of the directors, Craig Bennett and Joe Jenkins, presented the strategy that has recently been developed outlining the world as we want to see it in 2050, and what we need to do to achieve it. You can imagine that involves a huge amount of work and campaigning – and I, along with many others, am full of enthusiasm to get on with whatever needs doing to succeed. If you too want to play a part, get in touch with us to see how you can get involved.
