Hands-On Climate Response tools

national | environment | event notice Thursday March 08, 2007 15:00 by Erik van Lennep - Cultivate Centre for Sustainable LIving and Learning erik at cultivate dot ie 01-6745773

A season of events to help us respond to climate change

Cultivate Sustainble LIving Centre, Dublin announces a series of practical skill building courses on climate change and energy. The season of learning and acivity is being kicked off by Jeremy Leggett, UK who jumped from the oil industry to Greenpeace, and now is promoting conversion of all housing stock to solar. He is doing it not with words, but by providing the technology directly through Solar Century Ltd. He will be meeting with potential partners while in Dublin, hoping to set up a branch here. This is part of the response to climate change we should all examine. It puts the power (literally) back into each of our hands, and moves forward a survival agenda which government is ignoring.

‘Responding to the Challenge of Climate Change’
A six week lecture series can be taken as a course of six or as individual lectures.

Over the last number of years Cultivate, Ireland’s only sustainable living and learning centre, has placed particular emphasis on appropriate responses to the twin issues of peak oil and climate change. These issues are emblematic of the problems we are facing, problems whose root cause lies in our culture's unsustainable relationship with the economy, society and environment. Cultivate believe that the threat of climate change and Peak Oil could act as a catalyst towards sustainability forcing us to move to a more fulfilled and ecologically way of life that values community and the local economy.

This lecture series aims to demystify the issue of climate change, prepare us for its implications and suggest possible responses we can make in a number of different areas.

Session 1 March 13th * 19.30 – 21.30
Connecting Climate Change and Peak Oil
With Jeremy Leggett

Jeremy Leggett has been described by Time Magazine as 'one of the key players in putting the climate issue on the world agenda.' He was an award-winning scientist, oil-industry consultant, and Greenpeace campaigner before setting up ‘solarcentury’, the UK’s largest independent solar electric solutions company, one of the UK’s fastest growing tech companies, and winner of the FT-Treasury Inner City 100 Greenest Company award. His first book "The Carbon War" has been described by the Sunday Times as "the best book yet on the politics of global warming." and his second book "Half Gone - OIL, gas, hot air and the global energy crisis" focuses on two related dangers: how we’ll run out of oil far sooner than we think and how burning what’s left of it will warm our planet to a catastrophic level.

Session 2 March 20th * 19.30 – 21.30
The Science of Climate Change
Speakers to be announced

Session 3 March 27th * 19.30-21.30
The Ethics of Climate Change
With Fr. Sean McDonagh
Fr Seán McDonagh is a Columban priest who has long been an activist in the field of ecological and environmental matters. He is the author of ‘Climate Change, The Challenge To Us all’. His previous books include Passion for the Earth (1995), Greening the Christian Millennium (1999) and Why are We Deaf to the Cry of the Earth? (2001)

Session 4 April 3rd * 19.30-21.30
The Economics of Climate Change
With Richard Douthwaite
Richard Douthwaite is a contemporary economist and co-founder of the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability (Feasta), the Irish economic think tank. His books include "The Growth Illusion" (1992), "Short Circuit" (1996) and the "Ecology of Money" (1999). In 2002 he organised the conference Ireland's Transition to Renewable Energy for Feasta, with the Tipperary Institute and Sustainable Energy Ireland. He edited and published conference papers in 2003 as the book, Before the Wells Run Dry. He is a founder of the Mayo Community Wind Energy Group and was also editor of To Catch the Wind , a report on the feasibility of such community investments in current conditions in Ireland.

Session 5 April 10th * 19.30-21.30
Development and Climate Change -

Speakers to be announced

Session 6 April 17th * 19.30-21.30
Biodiversity and Climate Change -
With Dr. Mathew Jebb
Dr. Matthew Jebb is a Taxonomist and curator of the Herbarium at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin