Green Fair

A wonderful thing - I've just been to the Better Haringey Green Fair which was held just over the road from our house this afternoon.

It was so nice to see the green space outside Tottenham town hall being used for such a great purpose - it used to be behind railings, overgrown, full of litter and only frequented by vagrants and winos. But a year or two back the council put money and effort into sorting it out, opening it up and adding broad paved access paths and lovely old-fashioned street lights to make it safer. It is used a lot now and looks great.

But I digress! Back to the Green Fair ... lots of stalls with local campaigning, wildlife and recycling groups. I chatted to some lovely people, including the local Friends of the Earth group who had a bloke dressed up as an orang-u-tan to launch their campaign about Bio-Fuels: the EU is proposing a directive requiring 10% of petrol and diesel be made from biofuels by 2020, but using land for palm oil is causing food shortages and accelerating rain-forest destruction .. find out more here and contact your MEP about blocking the proposal.

It was great to visit the stalls and I signed petitions and MP letters on a number of issues and picked up lots of leaflets.

Thought I'd share some of the info and links, in case anybody's interested?

I got a wonderful 'STOP! Don't bin it, recycle it!' sticker which I'm going to stick on the lid of our kitchen bin to remind everyone to think twice about whether something can be recycled. This was from Recycle for London whose website tells you where to find your nearest recycling facilities and has lots of info on more ways to recycle kitchen and garden household waste.

At the BBC Breathing Places stand I was given a free CD 'tune into the dawn chorus: audio guide' which has the songs of different birds on it plus a quiz at the end.. brilliant! I can only recognise one or two, and would really like to learn some more so that I can listen out for them. We have a pretty good dawn chorus here, despite being in a built up city area. There's a little booklet to go with it which has pictures of all the birds and advice on encouraging birds into your space. You can hear and see some of them here and also download a beautiful kingfisher screensaver. Apparently, once a year in May there is an International Dawn Chorus Day.. shame we just missed this year's one, but definitely something to get involved with in 2009! Some more bird links you might like are British Trust for Ornithology and the RSPB.

I was also given a 'tree party' pocket guide - which has tree-planting tips plus spotting tips for common local trees. You can download your own copy here and, if you have kids, you might be interested in the Tree For All initiative, too?

Well, I hope you found something to interest you somewhere in all that! I'll add the links to the side bar in my continuing quest to develop Earth and Tree as a sort of resource centre for information on all these earth friendly types of thing.