This week's challenge from our really royal Prince Charles to Charles Bibbey!

Thank you for your email that I thought bore little relation to mine!  Mine of the 12 May was asking if you would be so good as to ask your client, Charles if he would be willing to have either a woodland or hedgerow creation scheme if I was to pay!  Monday's national Radio 4 news mentioned Prince Charles wanting his mother's Platinum jubilee next year to be a tree-bilee to get more trees planted.

My email was nothing about " due diligence" or, it affecting your client, or my having access.

It was nothing about dear Charles being inconvenienced in any way at all!

It is up to Charles to "progress my proposal", with help from the Woodland Trust, if he wishes!

Do check out my email, again.

I think you were thrown by my sheer generosity!  But it was also to do with you top people and Charles being like Prince Charles and being loyal to merry England and the Queen.  Our VIPs, like B Johnson Esq wish us to treble tree cover in the UK and Her Majesty wants her Platinum Jubilee next year to be a tree Jubilee or tree-bilee.

Do ask our own, only a little less royal, Charles to do some quality tree planting or hedgerow creation at my expense.  It would be entirely of his own volition, as you say - of course.  But if he took up the suggestion he would be a most loyal subject.  Her Majesty might be so proud of him, he could be in the offing for a knighthood!

Best wishes

FEET BEFORE FOSSIL FOOLING

I think we are all guilty of living unsustainably and, therefore, threatening all life support systems on earth.  The size of our homes and gardens, the size of our families, the kind of commuting and consuming we do and the holidays we take, all contribute to resource depletion, especially of finite fossil fuels and, highly dangerous greenhouse gases to bring climate catastrophe to end all life on earth.

I am very guilty of all this.  My land take and lifestyle mean that if everyone lived like I do we would need three or four planets!  I’ll work it out from 

http://www.footprintcalculator.org/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwuJz3BRDTARIsAMg-HxXbEjRqUmqs0ZEJXBOAusr6nHxzsfRPC7osTIur-aC9aBe0NFAOCzYaAn7fEALw_wcB

In fact, I need 2.1 planets and my overshoot day is 24 June.  I’ve probably biased it in my favour!

To compensate, I cycle instead of the car whenever I can; and, I used the bike for commuting and work visits before retirement.  I drive to 70 mpg, cut down on meat and dairy and v nearly never go abroad and certainly don’t fly - a big blown raspberry for that one.

To compensate, I am writing and working to open our English and Welsh 19th century railway network for trains or, as cycle-walkways.  I am working to maintain our footpaths in our 32 sq Kms Golden Green Triangle, bounded by M5, A456 and A491.  I continue to ask for it to be the first area to go in the 2019 announced W Mids National Park to prevent any built development on fresh land.  Land that must go only for farming and for recreation, as we are doing in lockdown.  I am trying to win over all our wonderful farmers/landowners not to sell their land for the false, fools gold of concrete, brick and tarmac.  Especially at Tack Farm that is so near to the bypass boundary that must not be breached. But farmer Charles Bibbey has had enough of farming and wants his farm land for housing.

Lockdown for all slashed the world’s greenhouse gases.  I think, to achieve the same bliss but to help those who suffered, governments have, as their first duty, the defence of the realm from civil unrest by protecting the worst off with:

• a Basic Income scheme for all to cover food, clothing and shelter;

• East Europe’s Fare Free Public Transport for all and not just for the disabled and over 60s, like me;

• Carbon allowance for all to start rationing the calamitous burning of finite fossil fuels.

Learn from the UK’s disastrous laid back approach to the virus and prepare now for the inevitable Really Big Crisis we have been warned about for decades.

We cut economic activity to kill the virus.  We must now continue the good work of minimum economic activity in order to leave the planet’s life support systems able to support our descendants.

 

Join the buy less crew and don’t head out to the shops.  Feet first to our footpath network, instead and lower your eco footprint!             

Tim Weller  17 June 2020

Tack Farm, Dowery Dell Trail and W Mids National Park

 Thanks, Chris for your interest in these matters.

The name is Charles Bibbey at 

Tack Farm, Uffmoor Lane, Romsley, Halesowen B62 0NP

St Modwen, I understand, wants to develop the land for housing, when we need it to grow our food to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  One contact I have for St Modwen is Rob Flavell who is copied into this email if he wishes to clarify for us where his company stands on this matter.

I would also be glad of your support for Rob/St Modwen to finish the Dowery Dell Trail - our name for the walkway on or near the Halesowen Railway line to Longbridge High Street.  Roy Burgess gave it that name.  It runs from the new path I re-opened on the public right of way in 2019, that starts in the SE corner of land owned by Romsley and Hunnington Sports and Social Club, opposite the former Blue Bird sweet factory.  We have the landowner's permission to walk the railway line from the site of the Dowery Dell viaduct to the right of way subway beneath the M5 and, from there, it is a cycle-walkway, signed as a public footpath that soon becomes the Princess Diana Way and/or NCR5 but, goes only to the A38 at Rubery/Rednal.  It comes out into Leybrook Road by Colmers Farm Primary School on the A38.

St Modwen knows that it needs to be finished, through their land, on the north side of the R Rea, aka Callow Brook so that it takes the old railway line tunnel beneath the A38 (safeguarded and available) into Austin Park.  However, it is taking a very long time to be finished!

Would you also be so good as to support Prof Kathryn Moore, also copied in so you get her email address, over the West Mids National Park plan that is fully endorsed by the WMCA.  Mick Freer (michael.freer@btinternet.com) is not enamoured with the idea, thinking that the purpose is to facilitate economic growth and more loss of greenbelt.  However, Roy Burgess and I are wanting the Clent Hills Country Park to be extended into its foothills as the Clent Hills Regional Park over our 32 sq Kms Golden Green Triangle, bounded by M5, A456 and A491.

Many thanks and best wishes