Goodbye to an amazing volunteer

Maureen Kirkbright has been volunteering here for over 5 years, but today, sadly, was her last day, as she decided to retire from her role as membership secretary.

She'll be very much missed for her sterling work making sure our financial supporters are kept up to date with what we're doing and making sure they are reminded to send us money when needed.

She was a real pleasure to have around the office and we were very lucky to be one of the charities she chose to give her time to. A genuinely warm-hearted woman, you could always rely on her to turn up smiling no matter how dull the tasks she had to perform were.

Every charity like ours depends on people like Maureen and we hope that she will be back soon to help us celebrate 35 years in our building, The Warehouse, on April 1st along with a lot of the other volunteers who've helped make those 35 years so successful.

Here's to amazing volunteers everywhere - thank you for the last 5 years, Maureen!

If you'd like to sign up as a member, you can do so here and we'll have a new volunteer to process your details soon.

Choo Choo! Here come the bikes!

This is the logo used by the group who have transformed commuting by bike along a busy road in Brighton by joining together for a safety in numbers approach, which also has the added benefit of getting to know some other cyclists.

It may not be as social as the Birmingham Critical Mass rides, which end up in the pub after work on a Friday evening, but they function to make people's journeys to work much nicer.

So, why am I telling you about this? Well, as you probably know many people think that the roads in Birmingham are a bit scary to cycle in to work along. Currently, nobody has set up a bike train anywhere in this city. We think it's time to rectify this situation and we want to make it a big story to encourage lots of people to do it.

For the last 2 years we've done high profile media work on In Town Without My Car Day, with our challenge to the power 50 and working with high profile businesses, as well as transforming a parking space into a park last year.

This year we want to do something more practical that might actually help more people out of their cars onto a more sustainable form of transport. In order for it to work, we need the help of experienced cyclists to lead the less confident, some volunteers to help with promoting it and doing the logistics of where/when the rides will happen and people to organise some kind of event at the end of it (possibly a breakfast for participants). We are in discussions with Pushbikes and Sustrans about collaborating with them already, but we can provide space in our office for a couple of people to work on this.

Fancy getting involved, then please contact us campaigns@birminghamfoe.org.uk or ring 0121 6326909 to get more information.

Birmingham Canal Canter 2010

I had been wondering why so few of our volunteers were up for entering this event, but now realise what a serious undertaking walking 26 miles is.

The idea for The Canal Canter came up last year as a way for Birmingham FoE to raise money and give the Heart of England LDWA some extra volunteers to make it run smoothly on the day and help in promoting the event.

Organiser Dave Powell said that he wanted people to see parts of Birmingham that they never normally do and see a whole different side of the city and he certainly achieved that on this walk. The first half of it was an absolute pleasure with a real variety of different places to walk through and a heart full of optimism, but the second half was much harder to appreciate as the legs began to give way and the novelty of canal towpaths began to fade.

We started at the Alexander stadium (home of the Birchfield Harriers) in the North of the city, where the first challenge was to get up onto the canal towpath through the nettles and very steep slope. For the first few miles, underfoot was grassy and rough with not enough room to walk side by side a lot of the time. We passed under some big roads, including spaghetti junction which the council once had a mad scheme to light up so it was visible from space) where the noise was incongruous with the pretty green surrounding down by the canal.

Then we made our way down through town (spotting herons and some amazing black and white ducks on the way - sorry no pics) to the Ackers where breakfast was being served by BFoE volunteers (porridge or toast with tea, coffee or cold drinks).

(Aldo, Mary and Ben in the kitchen with Roxanne and Beth serving drinks outside)

At this stage everyone was still fairly bunched up and the runners (who started an hour after us walkers) were just going past. I did the walk with my dad and we decided not to stop for too long there to keep the momentum going - we started pretty briskly and were feeling fine, so we left before quite a few people at this stage.

The next part of the walk was the one I enjoyed most, as I was still feeling fine and we went through some absolutely lovely green spaces. Firstly, the grounds of the Ackers were a joy to go through and I would recommend that a place for a walk for anyone in the area. Then we headed down through the Shire Country park (Tolkien land) past Sarehole Mill and down to Billesley's wonderful green spaces (the seven wonders of Billesley) where BFoE successfully helped local residents defeat a planning application for an access road through one of the parks last year.

All along this section of the walk there were loads of sloes and other berries that would be of interest to those who like mapping where food grows in the city, such as Abundance Brum. We are doing an event on 2nd October called Edible Birmingham to look at sustainable local food, too.

Lunch was at the Horseshoe pub on the Alcester Rd where we had sandwiches and pieces of pineapple with squash (I don't think I've drunk as much squash as I did on this day for years).

(welcome food in the pub's garden)

At this stage we were still going fine (12.8 miles) and after an 8.30am start left the pub at 12.40 full of hope and thinking "this long distance walking's a good thing - perhaps we'll do more". The next section was almost all along the canal and we got some interesting views of different boats moored along there - they have very odd names, including one called "John Thomas"! I'll let you make your own jokes about that.

Despite it only being 5.6 miles to the next stop for cakes at Maple Bank, this part went a lot slower than the previous section as our legs tired and the variation in things to look at along the route was not so great. We went alongside the railway line through Bournville, Selly Oak, over a section where they were digging under the canal to build a relief road by the Hospital and there were lots of cyclists zooming along with no manners to say excuse me or thank you when you needed to get out of the way. As a cyclist myself, I always thanks people for getting out of the way on a shared space with pedestrians and heard a lot of walkers moaning about these rude people. It doesn't take much, so come on cyclists, please.

We made it but were very sore at the cake stop (18.4 miles) and I took my boots off to see if there were actually any blisters as my feet were hurting every step by then. Also, we knew the last bit was 8 miles - the longest of any of the 4 sections! If it hadn't been for the sponsorship I'd been given, it would have been easy to give up then and save myself the agony of the last bit. I wanted the sense of achievement, but I really didn't want to let people down even more.

Foot-sore we set off towards the city centre. This was not the nicest bit because there were so many people that we had to dodge around and wait for as we went past the Mailbox, the ghastly Cube, Brindley Place and the NIA. If you've never been to Birmingham before this might have been interesting to see, but for those of us who live here, these crowded places are normally avoided if you're doing a walk.

From there we headed back up towards Spaghetti Junction again trying to talk about something else other than how much our feet hurt, but this was pretty hard now, especially when there were lots of ups and downs (the most painful things for tired legs). It also started raining to compound our joy and make the cobbled down-slopes of the little bridges even harder to manage.

We grabbed a quick drink and a sandwich at Spaghetti with 3 miles to go and then headed off along the uneven muddy part we'd already done (going the other way when we set off in the morning). Gritted teeth and determination (along with knowing there was no other way out by then) go us to the finish, somehow. I'm not sure I remember ever having so much pain in my legs or feet before (apart from when injured during football - but that's a different pain).

[My dad and me with our certificates for finishing]

I'm glad that I did it and that I've helped raise money for Birmingham FoE. If you'd like to add a bit more to my total for this, there's still time if you go to this link.

Next year they are planning to do it again and I think that as we got very nearly 200 people doing it this year, that's a great idea. However, for the less experienced walkers (most of our volunteers) I'd like to suggest that there's a shorter walk as well as the marathon-length one. If we start at Ackers (as I believe is planned), it'll be a lot nicer and provide more options, including a possible short children's nature walk - any volunteers to help organise that?

Most of all, though, I'd encourage people to get out and explore different parts of Birmingham now. It's a great city with lots to see and some great places to visit on foot, bike or by public transport.

Joe Peacock

Why I joined Birmingham Friends of the Earth

With environmental concerns slowly ascending the recent political agenda, as the G8 summit attempts to make progress on pre-Copenhagen agreements, momentum behind local and national groups campaigning to raise awareness of the necessities of collective socio-environmental change is increasing.

Since the beginning of my University sojourn (2006), the ailing state of the environment has gripped the public consciousness and prompted huge efforts in trying to negate our destructive influence on the planet. I, however, had remained fairly detached from participation – until I visited Köln, Germany, last year.

Hosting approximately 1,000,000 (996,000 - 2008) inhabitants, comparable with Birmingham’s estimated 1,000,000 (1,010,200 - 2005) the steps that Köln has taken to reduce its CO2 footprint are numerous and well-planned. The formerly traffic-locked downtown area has been converted into an ‘environmental zone’ forbidding vehicle use (with exceptions) and a state-of-the-art solar test centre has recently opened.[1]

Ultimately this visit inspired me to consider for the first time the impact my life has upon the environment. Furthermore it demonstrated what can be achieved, and I resolved to participate, by joining Birmingham Friends of the Earth, in ensuring Birmingham Council remain always mindful “that much more needs to be done to make Birmingham the green and sustainable City of the future that we know it can be.”[2]

[1] http://www.greenbang.com/state-of-the-art-solar-test-centre-opens-in-cologne/ [2] http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=27087&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0&MENU_ID=5191 – Quotation found in penultimate paragraph. (as of 08/07/2008)

By Chris Greasley