World Environment Day celebration – recording and slides now available

With thanks to Floree of London National City Park, we have a recording of our four inspirational speakers on 5 June: Sally from Islington Council, Mike from Islington Swifts, Marnie from The Garden Classroom and Floree herself. If you would like the link to the recording, or the slide pack of over 100 slides (!) please contact eilidh.murray@blueyonder.co.uk.

World Environment Day

We have over 30 people registered to attend our webinar today which is very positive – lots of people looking for inspiration ! They will hear Sally from LBI talking about the Biodiversity Action Plan; Mike from Islington Swifts on how we can all do our bit for local wildlife, Marnie the founder of The Garden Classroom and what we can do to support our environment and Floree from London National Park City talking about their work and their network of rangers. So get yourself a glass of something Friday-ish and settle back at 5 pm to be inspired !

Seats going fast !

Lots of interest in our on-line event to celebrate World Environment Day on 5 June at 5 pm and we have a great line-up of speakers with a couple awaiting confirmation. Here’s a photo of what Islington Swifts will be talking about ! It’s the first time we’ve held an on-line meeting so fingers crossed that the technology and local networks hold up for us. Do sign up if you can: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inspiringsustainableislington-celebrates-world-environment-day-tickets-106239118062?aff=ebdssbeac

Our first online event

Self-seeded Islington poppies

5 June is Global Environment Day and we are celebrating with our first on-line gathering. we’ll be hearing from Islington Swifts, the Classroom Garden and London National City Park with perhaps one more speaker tbc. More details are here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inspiringsustainableislington-celebrates-world-environment-day-tickets-106239118062 and I hope that you will be able to join us.

Islington’s Biodiversity Action plan

The council published its Biodiversity Action plan in March 2020 and it will remain open for consultation until 31 July. There is lots of information and plans in there so have a read and send in your input. It covers many of the subjects we care deeply about and there’s been a lot of work done behind the scenes to produce it; the last one was published in 2010 so a lot has changed in the past 10 years, not least the declaration of a climate emergency. Sad to see not one mention of a community parklet ……

About 65% ready

Having given myself the goal of launching the #inspiringsustainableislington site by 27 April, here goes. There are still some IT gremlins to be fixed and the contents for each partner needs to be reviewed but hey ho, let’s go. And to make this post more interesting, I rather belatedly saw that Gresham College has a series of lectures on ‘Sustainable Planet’ given by Professor Jacqueline McGlade. The first lecture was back in September (How to avert a climate catastrophe) and the last is on 19 May (The last mile; ensuring access to affordable energy to poor, rural communities). All online, all available – for more information, go to https://gresham.ac.uk.

first post

This website is my lock-down project and as you can see, is still in the making. I set myself the goal of launching it by 27 April 2020, the date of our second meeting which was to be a workshop in Islington Town Hall but which, along with so many other events, got totally overtaken by Covid-19. The website will evolve over the coming weeks and we might be organising a Zoom meeting to keep people inspired until we can get our heads round what the ‘new normal’ will look like and the opportunities it will bring us.