First of all, thank you to the Observer for offering me this weekly column on all things Green. I will use this space to celebrate all the community initiatives that are already under way to green our town and reduce our carbon footprint, but also to issue an urgent call to action. We need the imagination and energy of each of us, whatever our age or background, to create a flourishing future for Hastings that meets the needs of all, while working within planetary limits. I welcome everyone’s contributions, and especially your ideas for how we might initiate the conversations that will launch us on this journey together, as a town.
I’ll start with the obvious, our green spaces.
Hastings is blessed not just with an amazing variety of green spaces, but also with a large number of community groups dedicated to looking after them: running community gardens, restoring greenhouses, planting orchards and planters, managing woodlands, and setting up community composting schemes. As things stand, these groups often work in isolation, struggling to find volunteers and with limited opportunities to share knowledge. Also, there is a huge waiting list for allotment spaces and many people hungry to learn how to garden. As the council rethinks how it looks after its parks and green spaces, both to make them more nature friendly and more economical, I welcome conversations with local groups on how they want to see those spaces better used and how partnerships could help that process.
This summer I will be visiting our parks to understand better how they might address the decline in biodiversity, and also how we can involve more people in their care by extending the invitation to participate to everyone
I have already met with the Education Futures Trust at their site on the old football ground next to Pilot Fields. Here, children, families, and vulnerable adults are already learning how to cherish and look after the land. Plumpton College will soon be working from the site to start providing formal training in land based skills to both school children and adults.
Making change street by street
Over the Jubilee weekend, many streets closed to traffic to allow street parties to take place and the council made the process of street closing fairly easy. I will be working to make it much easier to create play and school streets where residents want to trial this.
Those of us who can should be using cars less, and for that we need good alternatives, such as car clubs and safe routes for cycling and wheeling. The charity Possible wants people to try going car free in July. Though I have an electric bike I do resort to the car sometimes. I’m going to take part in this car-free trial and I’ll report back in a later column on how it went.