We are delighted to hear that plans for the Autumn festival at New Brunswick in Canada are about to be hatched! The festival is set for September 22nd and lots of local schools are involved, as well as adults, and the organising team are already looking to future years. Their messsage to Neighbourhoods for the Earth is ‘Thanks for the inspiration!’
One of our main aims is to include the mass of ordinary people who can all too easily feel that environmental concerns are out of reach of their daily lives or overwhelming in their demands. For that reason, we are emphasising small communities, where everyone naturally feels included. These can be anything from small towns, of several thousand people, to isolated villages with just a few hundred, but the important thing is that people feel a natural sense of belonging to this place. Cities would not join this movement as a city, but as individual neighbourhoods, which have their own unique culture and way of seeing the world.
Working with relatively small communities has the advantage that looking after festivals and nature places will be relatively easy and manageable by a local voluntary group. It will also not require any great financial input or risk.
The key thing about a festival in this movement is that it is about celebration of our relationship with the Earth. There are three obvious core themes.
Every neighbourhood will express this differently and we will look forward to reading how your community wants to do this.
Many local areas already have them. They may be community orchards, veg growing initiatives, pieces of woodland or wildlife corridors. They may be parks or streams, rivers or hills. But whatever they are, their ‘setting apart for nature’ means that there is a deliberate attempt to give wildlife the deep respect it deserves and celebrate its flourishing. Such places can become for us, and for our imagination, a microcosm of the Earth.