Sunday 31 January 2010

What a Biodiversity Action Support Group would invovle

As I said in my previous posting "Ten Top Tips" on 23 Jan, a friend asked "What changes to our lives do we need to make to avoid to contributing to species extinction?" and "What would this mean for action on a group environmental action programme and assessment of that action?"

Just "not harming species on an individual level" whilst "living in a society whose growth is causing biodiversity loss" does not seem right. (And remember a good definition of Biodiversity is "The variety of genes, species and ecosystems on the planet")

I would like to propose a CEL "Biodiversity Action Self  Help Group", or a "Biodiversity Support Group". I propose that the group has 6 – 12 people, and we run it for a year and a quarter, starting from February – (i.e. a year but with a bit at the beginning to get going and a bit at the end to “Measure” what we have achieved.).     

Each person could commit to 6 hours a fortnight.
That might mean getting up half an hour earlier each day- or have a blitz one long evening a fortnight. (It may be that people are doing several of the things below already:       
The members of the group could have the tick list below and once a
fortnight check that they had done everything: Being part of the group would be an encouragement to get everything done.

1.      1 hour of prayer/ meditation/thought (even if that is included in going out for a walk in nature)    

2.      1 hour of communicating with the group – this could be by phone conference (we could do it by Skype and then it would be free, or we could arrange some tele-conferences, and it could be by a private Ning group or a private Google group)

3.      1 hour preparing for communicating (e.g. making coffee, deciding what we want to say, filling in tick list, showing what we have done this fortnight)

4.      1 hour “doing natural history”(Number 7 in "Ten Top Tips  post")

5.      2 hours campaigning (Number 3 in "Ten Top Tips  post")

By filling in the tick list, after a few weeks this list will be our "Assessment of Action"

People who are members of the group would not have to commit to all of points 1-10 in ten top tips, but  I would hope that they would be committed towards working towards these goals to some extent, and be able to contribute to, and give and gain encouragement from the group.

Once we've "met" we might discuss and decide to alter our commitments slightly.  We might find that we have very varying interests. But by forming a group we would get encouragement.



If anyone is interested do contact me.

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