Transition Towns AGM

I went up to the Council Chambers last night - and they were packed out. There were people there from Cusop and Clifford and Painscastle, as well as Hay. The actual business of the meeting didn't take long - electing new officers and so on - and the main body of the evening was taken up with a presentation about the Green Valleys project.

It all started with two men in a pub.... They disagree about whether they were drinking beer or cider - but they agree on the idea they had, and the competition they went in for. I think they were slightly surprised to be one of the ten finalists, out of 355 entrants, and even more surprised to be one of the three winners. By that time, they weren't just two men in a pub any more....
The Green Valleys covers the Brecon Beacons area, and is a properly set up company with a board of directors drawn from five communities. They've decided to concentrate on two main areas of expertise, at least to start with - hydro-electric power from mountain streams (they already have several power plants up and running) and woodland management. They've talked to landowners all over the Beacons, and have made at least one farm carbon negative. Never mind carbon neutral, or cutting emissions by a small percentage - they're ambitious, and it seems to be working.
They've also been behind a group that has created 46 new allotments, and having won the original competition, and a further grant of £300,000 from NESTA, they have serious money to put into community projects, which they hope to make more money, to further invest. The people at Talybont have already gone on to a second stage by buying an electric community car (called Blue Bell) and one that runs on bio diesel (called Mr Chips). Another group have formed a bidiesel co-operative, and buy it in bulk from somewhere up the Heads of the Valleys, made from old cooking oil.
For the hydro electric schemes, they also put a percentage of the earnings aside for upland conservation and saving peat bogs, which are drying out at an alarming rate, and for which there is no grant funding at the moment. The speaker said that climate change really comes home to people when you show them arial photos of their own local mountain taken twenty years apart.
The speaker (Greville Ham?) said that what they provided was seed money, support and contacts - suddenly it's not a lot of little isolated groups doing it on their own - they're a Beacon's wide movement, with expertise and knowledge that can be shared.
They have a website at www.thegreenvalleys.org/

And to close the meeting, there was the good news that the National Trust wanted to put a demonstration allotment in on the Hay Festival site, and needed a local partner to run it and maintain it. Gardeners from the Wier Gardens near Hereford will plant it up, and all the locals have to do is look after it, and harvest the crops. Which sounds like a very good interim project while they get the permissions for new allotments up the road to Clyro, just over the bridge.