The Carbon Clinic
Practical solutions to reduce your carbon footprint – from home composting to global policy.
Saturday 26th July
11.00 Stephen Adamson – Volunteering Fife (Environmental Opportunities, Fife)
1.00 Sheena Stone – Eco Interiors: This workshop is for you if you would like to minimise the environmental impact of your home, but don’t know where to start. The workshop will look at eco-interior design from the aspect of environmental decision-making. There are many decisions to be made when redesigning anything from one room, to your whole home: organic, fairtrade, locally sourced, no-petrochemicals, natural materials, embodied energy, the supplier’s ethics, FSC wood, healthy materials, life span of the materials, how to incorporate the 3 Rs of environmental sustainability (reduce, reuse, recycle), not to mention the cost, the list goes on! But where do you start? What really has the least environmental impact? This workshop will help!
The workshop will looking at carbon footprinting as a tool, include a group quiz, and debate some of the issues around the above ‘eco-interiors decisions’. You will go away with a framework to help you make environmental interior design decisions within your home.
3.00 Alison McKinnie of WRAP – Home Composting. Alison McKinnie is the Home Composting adviser covering Fife, Dundee, Perth & Kinross and Forth Valley. She works with Waste Aware Scotland to encourage Scotland’s residents to compost at home with the help of a Scottish Government funded initiative.
My talk will cover all aspects of home composting.
* Why we should compost at home.
* What can we compost (there are more than you think).
* Where is best to site your compost bin.
* How long will it take?
* How do I empty my bin.
* Q&A session.
5.00 Richard Atkins, Scottish Environmental Design Association - SEDA – Greening Your Home
This talk and workshop will act as a primer for people who are interested in refurbishing, altering, converting or renovating their existing home so as to reduce their carbon footprint. We will talk, and work, with workshop participants to identify some of the key issues that we all need to think about when embarking upon an eco-renovation project and we will try and provide the necessary information to help those who are starting out. The session will talk through key features and components of buildings – from doors, windows and materials through to insulation, paints, finishes and services - and should provide an opportunity for those present to identify which may be the most appropriate choice for their different circumstances and, thus, which of the different alternatives and options discussed may benefit them, and reduce their carbon footprint, the most.
Sunday 27th July
11.00 Professor James Curran - Climate Change, Consumer Change, and Consumer Climate Change
1.00 Tony Hodgson - Carbon Connectedness - One of the challenges of reducing our carbon footprint is that carbon crops up everywhere in our lives. In fact, we are carbon based life forms, as they say in Startrek! Equally carbon is a critical component of the industrial and commercial infrastructure we have built around ourselves. We need to reduce our impact yet we can’t get away from it. Carbon is us!
This talk and workshop will work with the participants to identify how the major components of living (food, energy, climate, governance, trade, wealth, well being, habitat, biosphere and so on) form a web of carbon connectedness that couple our individual actions with the bigger systems and the issues of global governance in the context of Gaia.
Although this is complex, the session will focus around a colourful and fun game that helps us to visualise this web and trigger lateral thinking about some of the things that we might do and that we might convince other people to do.
3.00 Dr Dan Barlow of WWF – Scottish Climate Change Bill
5.00 John Riley – “Fair Shares of carbon for all, before runaway climate change takes hold” – explaining Contraction & Convergence. Scientists are telling us that we are already past the level of safe concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They are also telling us that if we hit a 2 degree increase in temperatures (over pre-industrial times) that we will trigger runaway, uncontrollable climate change, where the earth’s own feed back mechanisms will take over from man-made emissions.
So our challenge as a species is to get to zero carbon emissions as quickly as possible, in an attempt to stop the full effects of feedbacks but ensure that we share out the remaining emissions as fairly as possible amongst the world’s population.
This talk and discussion will consider how urgent the issue really is, will look at the various feedback mechanisms and will then consider how we can reduce our emissions in a scientific, fair and controlled manner.
We will then consider how we can educate and motivate people & governments around the world to move at the speed necessary to save our selves from catastrophe.
The aim of this session is to get people to understand that this relatively new issue of feedbacks, changes our understanding of the timescale we have to solve the climate change problem.
Please remember that adults must be responsible for their children at all times. Children will get their own special Big Tent stickers on entry with room for your mobile number just in case you get separated.
Using recycled cardboard playhouses, dens and tipis we will create the village of Big Tent. Children are invited to decorate and paint the village using Eco Paints and their imagination. Once dry, let’s play!
some planting of your own.
Join the puppeteers and storytellers from Flotsam and Jetsam for an hour in their wonderful storytelling / puppet-making tent. Come and listen to stories, make a puppet and take it on an enchanted journey to the well at the edge of the world. At the end of each workshop we will put on an instant puppet show based on an old Scottish folktale. This is a family workshop suitable for children 4 and up, and their adults.
The Big Tent is a gathering celebrating the environmental movement, cultural revival, and positive action for change. We’ve got a massive lineup of world and folk music including the Peatbog Faeries, King Creosote, Boogalusa, Nuala Kennedy, Moishe’s Bagel, Grassroots Zimbabwe, Voces Del Sur and more and more… Our compere for the weekend is Phil Kay. The forecast is hot.
