Save the bees!

After watching an item on Countryfile the other week on the plight of the bees did it drive home the importance of the bees. Not only do bees produce honey but they also are very important to our food supply. Did you know that 40% of our food supply relies on bees? All the orchards and fruit farms are reliant on bees pollinating their flowers. They also have an important environmental role, being responsible for pollinating wild plants which produce seeds and fruits on which birds and wild animals depend.

Einstein said that if the bee died out, that it would only be 4 years until human civilisation would end.

Now the bee population in America are reducing because they are being attacked by colony collapse disorder and this may emerge in the UK. New exotic threats such as the small hive beetle are expected in the UK anytime. In the UK the populations are reducing but nobody understands why? The UK doesn’t know enough about bee disease control and the medicines that are available are inadequate.

In the UK there is virtually no wild honey bees left due to the effects of the parasitic varoa mite and the viruses it carries, and for which to date, there is no cure.

What can you do about it?

* Sign the bee keepers associations petition at www.britishbee..org.uk.
* Make your garden bee friendly by planting flowers that they prefer.
* Make www.foxleas.com/bee_house.htm or buy a bee house
* Take up bee keeping, see www.britishbee.org.uk for advice

Mary

Longbridge to Frankley rail

It is not easy being an optimist and believing we do not have to have conflict and environmental damage. Those who come up with ideas are the ones placed in the sights of the ‘sharpshooters for inaction’.

We are all humans and together we exist at the expense of something else. There are a lot of us, we are organised, we are needy, we are intelligent. As we grow richer, we seem to grow less intelligent and drive expensive miles to save pence at an air conditioned supermarket. We then get home and find not all the food can be stored before it goes bad and has to be thrown away. You notice the use of the word ‘we’ as though there is a standard person and a standard solution. There is not a standard anything as here in Birmingham, we have choice.

Here’s an environmental and transport choice:
You are one of an existing population in a city and it is decided that people need to be able to travel within that city and further afield. A substantial proportion of the adults (and of course all the children) through circumstances or choice, have no car. It is just as well all these people do not each have a car as the residential streets are full and car parking at city centres is expensive to provide (and rather spoils the place).

So, there are feet, cycles, buses, and trains. The buses struggle as they squirm between parked cars in housing estates and travel quickly or slowly, dependent on the time of day, along the major roads.

So what to do ? If you build a railway to run trains, the construction and the operation is not without environmental consequence. Railway maintenance uses weedkiller.
The trouble is, there’s now a practical example in Birmingham where a closed railway long earmarked for reopening, Longbridge to Frankley, beyond Rubery Lane to Frankley, runs through a nature reserve. Should you give up on the people of Frankley, maybe boarding up the houses and moving the folk away? Who decides on the balance between nature, that brings joy to lives, and the quarrying to produce parking for the car growth resulting from the lack of trains. Put on the trains, less wildlife at the railway line, but less destruction and more wildlife elsewhere.

In this Frankley case, you only get to express a view if you respond to planning application S/01814/08/FUL. You can express your view here: http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/planningonline.bcc

Your thoughts?

John Davison

Tesco Spring Hill and the demise of local shops

Here’s a puzzle that I’d like answered: You take a boat out to really deep water. On the deck of the boat is a really really heavy anchor on a short chain. When you throw the anchor into the water, does the anchor keep going and drag the boat after it ?

I ask because part of Birmingham, Spring Hill, has a proposed shopping development and part of it, a supermarket, is to be The Anchor. Why is a supermarket an anchor anyway ? Could you wake up one morning to find a parade of small shops blocking the street because it was not properly anchored ?

Birmingham FOE has its own local Shops campaign that expresses concerns that building yet more supermarkets usually means that local shops are lost. There aren’t black and white cases as items in a supermarket may be cheaper than in the local shop – price savings at the shop, but the customer has had to travel and that travel has taken up more time. The customer can solve this by living close to the supermarket. There may be a downside: streams of cars heading to the supermarket car park.

If you have got as far as reading this blog, you have more time than many people and could also go through the following website and make a comment on the planning application… http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=67548&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0&MENU_ID=12189 website and look at Application number: C/02037/08/OUT
Location: Spring Hill / Icknield Street / Camden Street / Ellen Street, former Brookfield Precinct, Hockley, Birmingham, Proposal: Erection of foodstore (Class A1), 8 additional retail units (for A1, A2, A3, A4 or A5 use) with offices above (B1 or B2 use), 6 three-storey dwellings and alterations to Spring Hill Library, associated parking, landscaping and highway works, redevelopment of Birmingham Central Baptist Church to provide reconfigured and extended accommodation. In the development, the supermarket is to be ‘the anchor’.

Birmingham FOE’s planning campaigners have so far said:
Outline Planning application C/02037/08/OUT, Spring Hill, Camden St, Ellen Street,

The proposal to provide housing in a location close to existing facilities and services is welcome. However, the housing is a small part of the development that is dominated by a Supermarket. Does the whole development work, and does it comply with the planning rules ?

FOE have concerns about the Sustainable Development issues such as set out in paragraph 3.14E of The Birmingham Plan 2005. In particular the supermarket carries a 316 space car park with entrances and exits on Camden St and Ellen St that will considerably inconvenience pedestrians. FOE ask for seating spaced at suitable intervals on routes that radiate out from the shopping centre as it is claimed people will walk there.

FOE further state that the size and height of the proposed development provide an opportunity to collect energy from the sun through the use of solar water heating and/or photovoltaic cells on the roofs and the southerly facing facades. This to be in accordance with The Birmingham Plan 2005 paragraph 3.79.

On transport FOE ask where taxis and minibuses will wait / set down staff and customers and suggest this will need to be covered in a Travel Plan.

Tesco, the supermarket in this case, does not, however, consider the availability of the planet’s resources. Is it right that we fuel-prosperous Brummies take long drives past adequate but smaller shops closer to home, which leads to the demise of our local High Streets and corner shops?

John Hall

Poverty & climate change

Last Monday I was invited to speak at the Diana Stableworth Memorial Lecture by UN Association Birmingham. As a humanitarian aidworker by day and an environmentalist the rest of the time, I chose to combine the two: talking about poverty, climate change and the role of the UN. The main cause for people to be poor (not just financially, but genuinely and fully poor) in the majority of countries is environmental: loss of livelihood due to forest being chopped, loss of life and property due to desertification, floods and landslides. Landslides are often exarcerbated by loss of forest as tree roots no longer hold the soil together. And these forests are at great risk of being chopped and sold off cheaply to pay for international debts, debts often incurred by previous regimes (of dubious integrity) and with eye watering interest rates. This means many countries spend more on servicing debts than they spend on healthcare, education or sanitation. This in turn means next generations have less opportunities to escape debt and poverty through education and good health.

The UN has laudable aims (see UN charter preamble and article 55 for instance) and positive plans (e.g. 8 Millennium Development Goals, incl. halving hunger and ensuring environmental sustainability, all in SMART objectives to be achieved by 2015). Achieving these objectives doesn't come cheap (a few billion here, a few billion there). However, these amounts pale by the amounts we even spend on make-up in Europe, or pet food in the US, let alone spend on the military!

So what are our priorities? What will truly compel us to action? Is it when climate refugees become a 'security issue' (which some Governments are starting to call it)? The UN has a role, but WE ARE the UN, and the poor didn't choose to be poor, nor did we have much say in being lucky enough to have been born in wealthier parts of the world. So come on, let's BE HUMAN, let's care for our joint future and take ACTION (think what difference millions of 2p can do, together!).

In peace, Rianne

Birmingham going green with plastic bags!

Not sure if anyone else in Birmingham has had the same problems but we have been dutifully in our street putting out our green bags and it has been 4 weeks and they are still waiting to be collected.
I called up the Recycling hotline run by the council and was told that the council are behind in their collections. This is the same council encouraging us to "go green". If you come down my street in Yardley this seems to be by not collecting all the green refuse bags as the street is littered by them!! Its very de-motivating to turn into my street and to be confronted daily by all these bags. I know they don't have any hygiene issues, but maybe rats and mice might find them nice places to nest in and so I don't envy the bin men that have to collect them.
It is very commendable that the council is running this campaign and running a week long Climate Change festival, promoted as the first in the country. However actions speak louder than words and if they cannot cope with the current recycling collections then how are they planning to increase our recycling rates.
Birmingham Council is performing badly in the UK with the bottom 20 councils in the UK in the recycling league tables, how do they propose to improve the recycling rates when they cant manage the collections they already have!

Mary

Food waste dilemma

In a week where there has been a lot of media coverage about food wastage in Britain, here's a puzzle I'm often faced with while going about my shopping : my local co-op regularly puts out 'reduced' items, which are past their sell-by date. I've asked the staff, who tell me that what isn't sold ends up in the skip - so I've been in the habit of buying such items which I can use, rather than let them go to waste. But I wonder : in helping to reduce their waste, might the store merely be encouraged to continue over-ordering?

Aldo Mussi

Tropical Birmingham...

I spent Saturday night in the Accident and Emergency Department at Selly Oak Hospital, accompanying a friend who had been bitten in many places by mosquitoes in her back garden in Harborne. Her leg had become infected, was swollen and incredibly painful... quite impressive for someone already on opiate painkillers! What was significant was the stark comparison of my times sitting in A+E Departments in African countries just two years ago. 3 hours in an overheated A+E full of people wearing flip flops, shorts and skirts with insects flying all over the place and a patient needing treatment as a result of a tropical insect felt remarkably like the times I spent with malaria patients (of which I was one) in Africa.

I can't help thinking that the apparent rise in mosquitoes in the UK has got something to do with climate change. While we have some wonderful weather at the moment (no complaints from me), there is certainly a downside.

Chris