Skip to main content

My fact-finding tour of Suffolk:

Green Party lead candidate for Europe tours Suffolk projects.

   Green Party campaigning in Suffolk stepped up a gear this week when the lead candidate for the European elections, Rupert Read, came to Suffolk on Monday for a series of fact-finding visits to projects which the Green Party is keen to encourage.

   His first visit was to the Oak Tree Farm Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) enterprise at Rushmere St Andrew just outside Ipswich. There he met Tom Wilmot, one of the directors of the community interest company. CSA ensures a supply of good quality locally grown produce and also enables many Ipswich people to directly grow some of their own food. Rupert was pleased to see the wide range of vegetables available, even in winter, helped feed the pigs (who are being kept in exemplary conditions), and heard about the plans for fruit production, cattle and bees.

   Second call was to the Energy From Waste (EFW) plant at Blakenham where Rupert met manager Cliff Matthews and Councillor Michael Blakenham. Councillor Blakenham is playing a leading role in a proposed tomato-growing business which will use much of the waste heat from the EFW plant.    Rupert commented:

"Using heat to produce electricity is inefficient, that is well known, but hearing the full extent of plans to use much of the formerly wasted heat, from real enthusiasts for a full-scale area heat network, was a revelation. I'm still against incineration, of course, but this visit today was about being pragmatic : once an incinerator is up and running, then the way to make it make a certain amount of environmental- and energy- sense is to do what is now being planned in mid-Suffolk, and use the huge amount of heat it generates".

Councillor Blakenham works closely with the four Green Party councillors of Mid Suffolk District Council, one of whom, John Matthissen, accompanied the Green Party candidate throughout his visit to the county.

   To view biodiversity in action, Rupert Read then visited Bradfield Woods near Bury St Edmunds, a Suffolk Wildlife Trust reserve which has been actively managed through coppicing for almost nine hundred years. Woodland manager Peter Fordham, MBE, was on hand to explain the Trust's work, laying particular emphasis on the need for wildlife corridors and connections between habitats without which many species present in Bradfield Wood could not survive. It was also encouraging to see the range of woodland products which are sold from Bradfield into the local economy, while meeting some of the trust's costs.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reasonable manners, in the blogosphere

Dear readers of Rupert's Read; One thing I am pleased about about this blog is that when we have had debates or disagreements here, they have virtually always been good-tempered. Because the norm out there in the blogosphere is often not like that. Take 'Comment is Free', for example, on the Guardian Unlimited site: the level of debate on CIF is pretty awful, frankly, in terms of civility. It is a very unpleasant place to take part in any debate, generally, unless perhaps (as most commenters do) one hides behind the veil of anonymity (which 'ain't allowed' here). And the truth is, in case any fellow commenters reading this don't realise it, that there are many many people who get put off even reading (let alone posting to) CIF because of the volume of plain nasty comments that they risk getting, when they do. I am slightly singling out CIF here, because I believe that this is actually one of the worst places on the blogosphere in terms of this kind of ...
15 comments
Read more

Medialens under the lens, over Syria and Libya: Becoming the new Dave Sparts?

I have long been an active supporter of Medialens ( http://www.medialens.org/ ). Like many others, I have supported them with money, time, tips, and I have been proud to have done so. For they have done very important groundbreaking work over the years challenging the inanities and distortions of the 'mainstream' media. They have for example written important critiques of mainstream media coverage of dangerous climate change, of Iraq Body Count, of the corporate nature of most of our media, and much more besides. They have held the corporate media to account time and again. They ought to be saluted for all of that. It is therefore with a sense of deep regret (as well as of some foreboding) that I have finally to write to address the ways in which, lately, some of the wheels seem to be coming off their wagon. An early warning sign perhaps was their long-running spat with George Monbiot, over the Rwandan genocide and the terrible atr...
16 comments
Read more