Browse the Ecoliving Fair '09 activities to gain a taste of what is to come for 2010...

Morning

11.30

Official welcome from the Mayor of Randwick, Cr Bruce Notley-Smith

Randwick City Council’s Annual Garden Awards Presentation 2009 - the winners of the always-popular annual Garden Awards will be announced in the Main Marquee.

Category winners for best:

• residential garden
• native garden
• school garden
• community garden
• environmentally-friendly garden
  

will pick up fabulous prizes supplied by our generous local sponsors.

Afternoon

12.30

Conversations for the Future join with TransitionSydney to explore future options for combating climate change and the peaking of the oil supply, in the Conversation Cafe marquee

2.00

Conversations with Authors at the Conversation Cafe marquee, facilitated by Russ Grayson. Hear from, and ask questions of, several leading writers on environment, sustainability and community issues. 

The conversations highlights Randwick City Council's Sustainability Resource Collection at Bowen Library, Maboubra.

BY NECESSITY, writers are thinkers. They collect and analyse information, retaining some, rejecting some. They then reconstruct what is left to turn raw information into knowledge... into the books, magazines and websites that inform us today. Book writing and journalism tell us about the world and how the new practice of sustainable design and development is changing it.

At Randwick City Council's Ecoliving Fair, we have the opportunity to hear from, and join in conversation with, several leading writers on sustainabiity and community. We will explore why they chose to write on their topics, what inspired them and their ideas and how they went about writing.

The UNSW Bookshop will have the authors' book for sale at the EcoLiving Fair. Authors wil be happy to sign your copy.

Our authors... we will be joined by three leading sustainability thinkers...

David Holmgren, the co-founder of permaculture

Holmgren was born in Western Australia and studied at the College of Advanced Education in Hobart, Tasmania, where in 1972 he met Bill Mollison, who was then a lecturer at the University of Tasmania. The two found they shared a strong interest in the relationship between human and natural systems and their conversations encouraged Holmgren to write the manuscript that was to be published in 1978 as Permaculture One.

According to David: "I wrote the manuscript, which was based partly on our constant discussions and on our practical working together in the garden and on our visits to other sites in Tasmania... I used this manuscript as my primary reference for my thesis, which I submitted and was passed in 1976. The book was a mixture of insights relating to agriculture, landscape architecture and ecology.

"The relationships between these disciplines were elaborated into a novel design system termed 'permaculture'".

David's chief theoretical inspiration was the energy dynamics of American ecologist Howard T. Odum (Environment, Power and Society, 1971).

According to Holmgren: "The word 'permaculture' was coined by Bill Mollison and myself in the mid-1970s to describe an 'integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man'.

"A more current definition of permaculture is "consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs". People, their buildings and the ways they organise themselves are central to permaculture. The permaculture vision of permanent (sustainable) agriculture has evolved into one of permanent (sustainable) culture.

While Bill Mollison travelled the world teaching and promoting permaculture, David was more circumspect about the potential of permaculture to live up to the promises sometimes made about it. He concentrated his efforts on testing and refining the system, first on his mother's property in southern New South Wales (Permaculture in the Bush, 1985; 1993), then at his own property, Melliodora, Hepburn Permaculture Gardens, at Hepburn Springs, Victoria, which he developed with his partner, Su Dennett and described in his book, Melliodora, Hepburn Permaculture Gardens - Ten Years of Sustainable Living.

Starting in 1993, Holmgren has taught permaculture design courses at his Hepburn home and, through his company, Holmgren Design Services, as consultant for a large number of projects, examples of which can be found in the report Trees on Treeless Plains: Revegetation Manual for the Volcanic Landscapes of Central Victoria (1994).

About David's book - Future Scenarios

In Future Scenarios, David outlines four scenarios that bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural and economic implications of peak oil and climate change, and the generations-long era of 'energy descent' that faces us.

“Scenario planning,” David explains, “allows us to use stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail, or be transformed.”

Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Probable futures, explains David, range from the relatively benign Green Tech scenario to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario.

http://www.futurescenarios.org

Dr Mark Diesendorf, renewable energy and climate action pioneer

Dr Mark Diesendorf is Deputy Director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at University of New South Wales.

Previously a professor of Environmental Science at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a Principal Research Scientist with CSIRO, Australia’s national scientific research organisation. Mark's work in community and professional groups included president of the Australasian Wind Energy Association, Coordinator of the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Climate Change Program, President of the Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics and active membership of several other NGOs devoted to environment, health, renewable energy, appropriate technology and peace. He is author of Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy (UNSW, 2007), to which his present book, Climate Action, is the sequel.

For more details, see also Mark's private website:

http://www.sustainabilitycentre.com.au

About Mark's book - 

In the USA, social movements succeeded in stopping 59 proposals to build new conventional (dirty) coal-fired power stations. In the UK, there are ongoing campaigns to stop the expansion of Heathrow airport (primarily on the grounds of the greenhouse gas emissions from increased
flights) and the proposed dirty coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth. In Australia, the climate action movement is growing rapidly into hundreds of creative local groups.

Responding to this global flowering of commitment, Climate Action is a campaign manual that draws upon positive case studies of grass-roots social movements and presents key strategies and a large menu of tactics for activists and citizens to pressure governments and businesses to create a framework for big and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In doing so, it refutes the myths disseminated by vested interests, the Greenhouse Mafia, who are trying to undermine effective community action.

Book review by facilitors of the Conversations with Authors:

http://pacific-edge.info/?p=1094

Ro Morrow, international permaculture teacher

Rosemary has a history of involvement in the Blue Mountains community in which she lives.

An experienced teacher of the permaculture design system, Rosemary has a background in international development at the community level, having spent years working in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Her popular and successful book, Earth User's Guide to Permaculture, draws on case studies to demonstrate how ordinary citizens can set up sustainable lifestyles.

Her current project is the retrofitting of her new house. The book has already attracted a sizable following of people in the Blue Mountains wanting to introduce some of her own ideas in their own homes.

About Rosemarys book and video - A Good Home Forever

The booklet carries the rather intriguing title of A Good Home Forever. It proposes that we respond to economic downturn and the crisis in sustainability by taking control of our lives and by examining what it is that we want in a home.

Rosemary describes conventional homes as ‘consumer junkies’ gulping down resources and producing only wastes. Yet, Rosemary’s solution isn’t to go out and commission an architect to design a state of the art energy efficient house such as we see in those ‘green’ magazines aimed at the well-off. Not all that many can afford to do that.

Rosemary suggests converting — retrofitting, in the jargon — an existing house to make it energy, water and materials efficient. It is the reality that it is the retrofitting of existing housing stock that will make our cities energy and resource efficient.

A book review by Russ Grayson, the facilitator of Conversations with Authors can be found at: http://pacific-edge.info/?p=649

About Russ Grayson the facilitator of the Conversations with Authors

Russ is a journalist and editor living in Sydney. He is a speaker and consultant on community food systems and has consulted to local government on policy and development of community food gardens (http://pacific-edge.info). He also works with the Sydney Food Fairness Alliance (http://sydneyfoodfairness.org.au). He also writes for ABC Organic Gardener and the public affairs journal, Online Opinion.

A Randwick City Council Sustaining our City event.