I attended an event at the Kiama Library last night, “Sustaining The Library”, put on by the Kiama Greens.
Ten years ago, The Greens donated about $1200 worth of books and CDs about the environment and sustainability to the Kiama Library. Last night they did it again. There are some great books in the collection – I particularly want to read the ones by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver. Some nice DVDs were included too.
As part of the event, The Greens wanted to highlight and promote some local sustainability groups that had formed since the time of the last presentation – Jamberoo FutureCare, Kiama FutureCare, Jamberoo Community Growers and the Green Box Initiative. Representatives from each group gave brief presentations on how and why they were formed and what they were doing.
There were some brief talks by Howard Jones (on the book, A Reef In Time), Ben van der Wijngaart (on Council activities, particularly the idea of community farms), and Greens MP in the NSW Upper House Dr John Kaye.
It was wonderful to so many new books and DVDs going into the library, but it was also an excellent opportunity to network with other sustainability groups and meet some more local, like-minded people. Hopefully there will be more get-togethers like this in the future!
I read Michael Pollens’ In defence of Food recently. It is a great book, US centric but so applicable to us here in Australia also. He writes so well, and thoughtfully-but I feel that if you are reading such a book-you have probably made many of the changes and thought about the issues-how do we get people who aren’t thinking about; food,where it comes from,what is real food, food ethics, and making the right decisions about what we eat to read something like this-Michael Pollan’s message needs to be got out into the wider community. I love his message essence however: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Now, if I can only follow his manifesto.
@Leanne: It’s hard to know how much of Pollan’s descriptions are also applicable in Australia – so much of the US food system seems much worse than what we have here. But then again, it’s probably an indication as to where we’re headed if we allow the big corporations to dictate policy on things like food safety regulations, labelling standards, GMO trials, animal welfare, etc. It’s food for thought, so to say.