Transition Town Kingston

As a greenie, a talk on Transition Town Kingston was obviously attractive.

The occasion was the monthly Kingston upon Thames Society meeting which continues to serve up good talks on local matters.

Our guide this month was Dr. Martin Birley a consultant in International Public Health who, not surprisingly, focused on the health aspects of climate change and peak oil.

The story we heard was a little back-to-front with the what first followed by the why.

The what was a brisk overview of the activities that Transition Town Kingston is involved in and included the predictable things like cycling, renewable energy and recycling.

I would have liked to have heard more on this as my main reason for going to the meeting was to find out what I could do myself locally to help to address these serious issues.

The bulk of the talk covered why these changes are necessary and was a fairly basic, and somewhat biased, introduction to climate change. I've heard enough of the evidence over the years to accept that climate change is aggregated my our use of fossil fuels (and they are finite anyway) so we need to change our lifestyles.

He was rather preaching to the converted which rather made the preaching unnecessary but there were some good bits in the talk and was never boring.

The Kingston upon Thames society is to be congratulated for tackling such a serious topic.