Blog - Page 9 of 10 - Eastbourne ECO Action Network

Everybody’s Business

When you think about it, there is so much you can do which will not add any time or effort to your day. If you go out on a walk, there is nothing stopping you from putting some gloves on and picking up as much litter as you can. There are no excuses. COVID-19 had to grind the Earth to a halt, and now it is the best time to reform the Earth into a state where future generations will not have to suffer from an irreversible hell. This is our home; this is everybody’s business.

My name is Oliver, I am 12, and although I don’t have to do it, I pick up litter.

Midway through April, I started the account @uklitterpickers on Instagram. I was generally eco-aware before, but there is a difference between awareness and activism. I didn’t quite know how bad the situation with litter was on our planet, but by learning from other people and following various social media accounts I realised that the reality was much worse than I ever thought. I started picking up litter on walks from time to time and I got a good reception from my friends. This motivated me to launch my account – I feel I need to do something about the current climate crisis we are in.

Whenever I go on a litter picking walk, I always count my litter and take a photo at the end of it helping me to keep track of how much litter has been picked up in my area. At the beginning of May, I joined a group called the 1 PIECE Army (@1piecearmy on Instagram) uniting people from different countries across the world who pick up litter. Their mission is to collect 1 million pieces by the end of 2020. At the time of writing, we have just surpassed 100k pieces across 15 weeks and over 20 countries.

The group is amazing and is growing at an incredible rate, and an all-round pleasure to be in. I also volunteer making a graph and a map every week for their impact report, as well as working closely with the director of the group giving ideas and helping out generally. I have also designed their group logo.

This journey has taught me communication skills, social media management and different ways to help the environment. I want to take this opportunity to talk about some accounts that I have interacted with who helped me along my journey.

@ecoplanetpedia is a group which posts environmental news and motivates me to post more. I have talked with them many times about issues and discussed environmental problems. @cleansomethingfornothing is an amazing account which reposts people’s litter picking using their hashtags. I have also worked closely with this account. Finally, @thebethechangecommunity who has been close to the 1 PIECE Army and are celebrating their one year of litter-picking. If you are interested to support these guys’ work, you might like to check out and follow their accounts.

One noticeable difference is that before this work seeing a piece of litter on the ground didn’t bother me. I would look at a bottle on the floor and not take notice of it and think that it’s just another piece of litter and it’s not my business. Now, I realise that each plastic bottle has a story behind it. One bottle can tell you what kind of person has dropped it, when they dropped it, and why they dropped it. That is why I can feel a pain inside when I see a bottle on the floor, and an even bigger one when I can’t pick it up.

Oliver Witts

Eco Activist, @uklitterpickers

Photos by Brian Yurasits on Unsplash, Oliver Witts

Will People of Eastbourne Celebrate With Plastic?

Now the lockdown is being gradually eased and people can gather in small groups in their gardens and public places, will people of Eastbourne be planning a celebration?

Plastic Free Eastbourne wants to encourage all communities to hold celebrations should they wish to when this pandemic has allowed us all to gather and mingle once again in groups.

But while we were in the lockdown, our town has changed. It has the cleanest air for a long time. Our wildlife is enjoying the lowest levels of pollution in their habitats for decades. We can hear birdsong and nature in clear conditions. Our streets and open spaces are as free of litter as ever before. We would like to retain these conditions from now on.

One big way of retaining this newly obtained environment is to make sure wherever possible that any gathering remains single-use plastic free, which is in line with Eastbourne’s status as a Plastic Free Community since December 2019, fully supported by Eastbourne Borough Council.

The examples of single-use plastic hugely damaging for the environment include but are not limited to:

balloons,
plastic single-use water bottles
clingfilm
plastic cutlery
single-use plastic packaging
lighted lanterns

Instead, we should try to celebrate like we saw people doing in the newsreels during VE Day in 1945. Not one balloon was visible and yet, they obviously were having a great time!

So what are the alternatives? We have some suggestions for you:

planting a tree communally
ribbon dancers
banners and streamers
kites and spinners
tissue paper pompoms
light a candle
drumming
seed bombs to name just a few.

Of course, all of these should be plastic-free, made from recycled materials, or for more than one use. Hygienic packaging of food and drink should be washable and reusable, such as plastic reusable boxes with lids. Alternatively, products made from Vegware or similar should be chosen.

We would like to build on the great work which we as a town have done together to reduce single-use plastic already. We have the reputation for being at the forefront of developing a Plastic Free Community. If we all agree, we can take our campaign up to the next level and contribute greatly to becoming carbon neutral by 2030.

And above all – we will keep our town and our coastline free of plastic for the next generations to enjoy.

Oliver Sterno

Plastic Free Eastbourne, EEAN Education Group

Photos by Brian Yurasits , Eleni Koureas on Unsplash.

Cycling in Eastbourne during COVID-19

Emergency protected cycle lane proposals: from the railway station to DGH via King’s Drive.

Emergency protected cycle lane proposal: from the railway station to DGH via King’s Drive

King’s Drive (and Lewes Road) is one of Eastbourne’s busiest arteries, linking the town centre and seafront with several large residential areas: Upperton, Ratton, Hampden Park, Willingdon and beyond to Polegate and Hailsham. It also connects to the hospital (DGH), East Sussex College, various schools, David Lloyd sports club and retail parks.

King’s Drive runs along the edge of flood meadows, it is essentially flat and it provides the quickest, most direct North-South route. Sadly, the good news for cyclists ends there. As anyone who has attempted to ride along King’s Drive knows, the sheer volume and speed of traffic feel uncomfortable and at times it’s downright dangerous. Data from Crashmap bears this out. Not surprisingly, few people attempt to use their bicycles here and most opt for the car, even for short trips.

Solutions

Bespoke Cycle Group has long argued for a separate cycleway to be constructed along the meadow to the east of St Thomas A Becket school (see below) and behind Weavers Close. It would continue to the DGH roundabout and join up with the existing cycle path alongside Cross Levels Way.

Sustrans echoed this idea in its draft recommendations (310.2) to ESCC in 2017, but signs of progress have not been detected. In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic has swept in, forcing local authorities around the world to wake up to the importance of cycling and walking as genuine alternatives to cars and public transport in urban areas.

It is surely the time for ESCC to construct temporary protected cycle lanes here. Bespoke propose one-way 2m wide lanes (in line with the traffic) on each side of King’s Drive and Lewes Road, extending from the DGH roundabout to the junction of Tutt’s Barn Lane for southbound cyclists and from the junction with Upper Avenue to the DGH roundabout for northbound cyclists.

Here, a cycle lane could replace the grass verge, or take up part of the road next to it.

In this section of King’s Drive, temporary bollards could be placed on the road 2m from the kerb.

The same applies here, by St Thomas A Becket school, so this dad and his daughter wouldn’t need to be on the pavement.

Southbound cyclists could turn left into Tutt’s Barn Lane, then continue along the quiet Gorringe Road.

At the junction with Lewes Road, there could be a combined pedestrian and cycle crossing to Upper Avenue – ideally to the pavement on the north side (on the right of this picture).

This pavement could be widened, or space reclaimed from the road to accommodate a two-way cycle lane:

The grassy area could be narrowed to accommodate a two-way cycle lane.

There’s plenty of space on this corner of Upper Avenue:

A new crossing for pedestrians and cycles here on Upper Avenue, opposite St Mary’s House, would enable safe passage to and from St Leonard’s Road.

The quiet St Leonard’s Road probably wouldn’t need any cycle infrastructure.

Nor would St Ann’s Road, on the left in this photo.

St Ann’s Road leads to the station car park – for access to trains, the Enterprise Centre, town centre and seafront.

Robert McGowan

Transport Group, Bespoke

The bus is here,
but not quite yet!

Recently the Department of Transport has issued its vision for transport Decarbonising Transport report, which it hopes to achieve by 2050. One of the main threads of their vision is to reduce our dependence on petrol and diesel car.

Recently the Department of Transport has issued its vision for transport Decarbonising Transport report, which it hopes to achieve by 2050. One of the main threads of their vision is to reduce our dependence on petrol and diesel car.

The burning of petrol and diesel in cars produces carbon dioxide which goes into the atmosphere and significantly contributes to climate change. The gases emitted by these vehicles also produce pollutants damaging people’s health, causing breathing problems, skin reactions and having a particularly bad effect on people with respiratory problems.

One way of achieving a reduction in these gases is to encourage the use of electric cars. But these are expensive to buy, need a new charging infrastructure and a lot of energy, which produces more pollution.

One of the government’s aims is to reduce the number of car trips that we all make. They hope to do this by:

Provide frequent and reliable public transport (buses) so that we don’t have to use our cars.
To get us to lead healthier life styles by walking and cycling rather than driving.

But how do you get people to abandon such a convenient form of transport as the car? This will require a lot of changes in our everyday life and our mentality. EEAN is convinced that tackling transport pollution and achieving a culture change in societal attitudes to transport is one of the crucial elements in reducing the effects of climate change.

See the summary of the Decarbonising Transport report in our Library.

David Everson

Transport Group

Cleaner air and healthier food beyond the pandemic

The COVID19 pandemic is an unintentional real-time experiment in how our economy and society can cope with and adapt to a profound shock. There are already many lessons to learn from it about how to build a more resilient and sustainable economy in the future, one that also better protects people’s health and wellbeing.

Some of the environmental effects of the pandemic have been significant, such as a cleaner, more breathable air as a result of the collapse in traffic levels and a resurgence in wildlife and nature as a result of the lockdown of the entire communities. The citizen science air quality monitoring project led by the volunteers of Clean Air Eastbourne has already recorded a 70% drop in particulate air pollution during March 2020 compared with March of 2019, confirming that air pollution can decrease rapidly in Eastbourne if road traffic levels drop far enough and stay reduced for long enough.

This is leading to calls from across Eastbourne, mirrored across the rest of the country, for more safe cycle lanes and better walking infrastructure now, even if only on a temporary basis, so as to ensure that the much needed modal shift to active travel – a shift already accepted as necessary by Eastbourne Borough Council in its draft local plan – can be accelerated during the pandemic, and sustained after it. The UK government is responding to these calls by introducing new statutory regulations authorising those local councils responsible for local highways to introduce such cycling and walking infrastructure and providing a £2 billion fund to facilitate their construction.

The pandemic has also highlighted many of the issues around food supply and delivery in a crisis and the difficulties involved in ensuring that everybody has all the food they need, an issue that may get more urgent over the coming year given the acute shortage of foreign labour to help bring in the summer harvests. The Climate Adaptation and Food working Groups of the EEAN, in collaboration with the Eastbourne Food Partnership, organised a joint visit, just before the pandemic, to two ecological community farms at Arlington – Aweside Farm and Fanfield Farm – which are about to start providing fresh organic sustainably produced food for local delivery.

More such local farms, together with the already existing local organic farms and horticultural nurseries, will surely be needed as the large commercial farms begin to struggle and the international food supply chains start to fracture during the upcoming global recession. According to Sustain, only 1-2% of all the food we consume comes from local food chains. So bringing local food producers and suppliers into a resilient local food network to provide local people with a diverse range of fresh, healthy local food is an essential part of any strategy to create a truly sustainable local food economy in the Eastbourne area, cutting down food miles, reducing food and plastic waste, reducing overdependence on fragile international food chains, and reducing carbon emissions through the sustainable care of soils practised by organic growers.

The pandemic may be a time of great tragedy and suffering, but it is also a time in which the positive changes previously thought too difficult to introduce are now becoming possible, helping to improve health and wellbeing in the long run. The EEAN aims to promote and facilitate those changes through collaboration across all sectors of our local community.

Andrew Durling

Climate Adaptation Group, EEAN Director

A waste of roof space?

Scorching through Google Maps’ 3D satellite function, Top Gun-style, the other day, I found myself bearing down on Hampden Park.

Scorching through Google Maps’ 3D satellite function, Top Gun-style, the other day, I found myself bearing down on Hampden Park. And saw familiar out-of-town places: Sainsbury’s, Halfords, B&Q, Dunelm Mill, King’s Church and Bannatynes – those temples to last-minute DIY missions or spiritual enlightenment – in a new light.

Viewed from above, their logos and functions fade and they take on the appearance of a great herd of pale grey hangars, jostling for position in the flatlands beside Cross Levels Way. The ambition of their construction – the sheer scale of the retail parks and factories, warehouses and health clubs is impressive. But is something missing – in Britain’s sunniest town at a time when scientists tell us we’re entering a full-blown climate breakdown? Could those great expanses of metal roofing and south-facing walls be smothered in solar panels?

A 2016 report for the BRE National Solar Centre seems to think so: “There is an estimated 250,000 hectares of south-facing commercial roof space in the UK. If utilised this could provide approximately 50% of the UK’s electricity demand”.

Robert McGowan

Journalist, ECO Research Group

Start by Planting a Tree

Our planet needs trees. We all know that. Without them we wouldn’t be alive today. People and animals breathe in oxygen, and breathe out carbon dioxide. Trees and plants do the opposite. We’ve evolved together with them over millennia. There’s a natural balance to our ecosystem that’s held in place since the start of life on earth. But now we’re tipping that balance and threatening our very existence. Our carbon emissions, from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat and transportation, have risen to the level where they are far outstripping the carbon that is consumed by trees and plants, and the resulting climate emergency has been widely acknowledged.

In Eastbourne, the Borough Council formally declared a state of climate emergency in July this year, and pledged to “continue working in close partnership with local groups and stakeholders to deliver a carbon neutral town by 2030”.

With the Council’s support and full engagement, local environmental groups have pooled together to create an Eco Action Network, comprising a number of working groups, each focussed on specific ways to achieve this goal. The Carbon Capture group is focussed on removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by any means possible – planting trees, shrubs and hedges, building living walls, nurturing kelp and marine plant forests off the coast, rewilding wasteland, and so on.

But if our challenge was tough to start off with, it just got a whole lot harder. You may not yet have heard of ‘ash dieback’, but as an Eastbourne resident, that situation is likely to change very soon. Ash dieback is a devastating tree disease that is threatening to wipe out up to 95% of the UK population of ash trees. It is a fungal infection carried in the air, that unfortunately cannot be prevented or cured. And it spreads like wildfire. The past 12 months have witnessed the devastation of the ash forests which run along the downland slopes that cradle the western side of the town. From Butts Brow in Willingdon, approximately four miles down to the edge of the Meads.

All we can do is to cut down the trees to prevent them from falling as they die and rot. And it’s not finished yet. On Monday, 2 December 2019, the council and the Forestry Commission began a tree felling programme that is expected to last till 2024. Over the next 5 years, a staggering one hundred thousand plus ash trees will be lost to Eastbourne for ever.

This will have a huge impact. The landscape of the edge of the Downs will change completely. The affected woodland and streets around it will be cordoned off and inaccessible as the work takes place. Eastbourne’s current level of 5% tree cover – and the CO2 they consume – will be reduced dramatically, leaving us with an even steeper mountain to climb.

Ash dieback threatens the character of our town and the health of our planet. In one way or another, it affects all of us who live in Eastbourne. If you ever walk on the downs or ramble through the woods, you will see and feel the changes for yourself. This is not someone else’s problem. It is all of ours. However, working together, we can achieve so much more. If everyone in Eastbourne were to plant just one tree in their garden, a third of the entire lost Ash population would be replaced in one fell swoop! Community collaboration is the key to success. It will take a coordinated and concerted effort by all of us over the next ten years, not only overturn the loss of that many trees but to go way beyond that.

Call for Action

The ECO Action Network groups have begun the work with the council to find ways that we can reach our 2030 goal. On a personal level, you may ask what you can do. There are many changes you can make, but for now, if you have a garden, start by planting a tree.

You can get very small saplings free from the Woodland Trust. Or visit local nurseries for bare-root trees, hedges or shrubs – whatever suits your space. Stick to the UK grown native species ideally. But anything that thrives in our climate will do.

Adam Rose

ECO Action Network, Carbon Capture Group

Turning Eastbourne into an Ecobourne

The eagle has landed. The Eagle in this case being the Eastbourne ECO Action Network (EEAN), which held its first convening session for its 8 initial Working Groups at Eastbourne Town Hall on 19th November 2019.

The Eagle has landed. The Eagle in this case being the Eastbourne ECO Action Network (EEAN), which held its first convening session for its 8 initial Working Groups at Eastbourne Town Hall on 19th November 2019. This was the culmination of months of planning & networking by the core team of the newly-formed Eastbourne Eco Action Network CIC, a Community Interest Company that aims to facilitate deep cross-community collaboration within the EEAN on the climate actions necessary to help deliver a carbon neutral Eastbourne by 2030, as mandated by the Climate Emergency Declaration passed by the full council of Eastbourne Borough Council on 10th July 2019. These Working Groups are self-organising, bringing together local community groups, businesses, environmental activists, and councillors to set priorities for local actions and to work up practical projects. Early in the New Year they will convene again to co-ordinate on progress and collaborate on proposed projects.

The EEAN CIC has already secured some grant funding and has put in an initial submission to the recently opened National Lottery Climate Action Fund. It is assisting Eastbourne Borough Council in planning for the official launch of the Eastbourne Carbon Neutral 2030 campaign at the Welcome Building on January 18th 2020. It is also exploring innovative ways of obtaining resources for the Working Groups: the CIC is now bidding for help on the recently launched East Sussex Social Value Marketplace, and has joined the freshly launched Open Credit Network, which allows its member businesses to trade with each other using a mutual credit system. Combining entrepreneurial initiative with grassroots community organising and partnership-working with the local council is very much the model emerging from this growth of the EEAN, and it is a model that might serve as an example for other local areas in the UK to emulate.

The motivation for the EEAN to act with urgency is high, as Eastbourne is mostly a low-lying coastal community that is very much in the front line of climate change, quite literally facing the rising seas and stronger storm surges of a rapidly warming world. It is also a town facing issues such as urban air pollution, traffic congestion, acute shortage of land for housing and commercial development, as well as the issues of biodiversity and ecosystem collapse that plagues most of the rest of the UK too. The challenges are huge, but the resources, skills, and community spirit of Eastbourne’s people are huge too – harnessing them in order to start meeting those challenges is the task for 2020 and beyond.

Andrew Durling

ECO Action Network, Finance Director

Emotion leads to action

Be passionate and act. We can all feel overwhelmed by climate change. Here there’s lots of things to start doing.

“The essential difference between emotion and reason is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to conclusions” Donald B. Calne, Canadian Neurologist.

We can all feel both the passion to act, and a sense of being overwhelmed in the same moment. By acting we ground ourselves, and see we’re making a practical difference. This site offers 52 climate actions to do.

Have a look and get started: 52 things we can do.

Together we can do this

This really isn’t business as usual – climate change action needs to be a scale and pace to meet the risk, and lower the chances of achieving a rise in temperature from 50%. It is time for seismic shifts, not fiddling around the edges. This is humanities greatest challenge, and we need action at global, national and regional levels. We need bold, positive actions in Eastbourne. Watch We Can Do This.