The 'Greening' of Kenilworth
May 19, 2007 10:15 AM
Councillor Pat Ryan, newly elected Mayor of Kenilworth
Councillor Pat Ryan (Kenilworth Abbey) was elected as Mayor of Kenilworth at the Town Council's Annual Meeting at Leycester's Barn, Kenilworth Castle on Thursday evening.
During his acceptance speech, Pat called for a town-wide initiative aimed at the 'greening' of Kenilworth. Here is an extract from his speech:
"The third challenge we face is the same challenge that the world faces, climate change. There is now a consensus amongst our scientists and our political leaders that this is the priority issue for the 21st Century. What can we do here, in Kenilworth, to "green" our town?
What can we do to reduce energy use, to promote energy efficiency, to reduce car journeys, to get children to walk or cycle to school instead of being driven, to get local businesses to stock local produce and to get local people to buy it ? Here, in this lovely fertile South Warwickshire countryside, so close as we are to the National Agricultural Centre, the Royal Show ground, as it were the heart of English agriculture, little more than three miles from this spot, we should be taking a lead. - a hint to Waitrose there, and to Sainsburys and to Somerfields and the rest.
There is a lot that can be done, by communities acting in concert. I read of a town in Devon last week that had succeeded in banning plastic bags, by persuading business and townspeople that they were not necessary. I though that it was an inspirational story. I hope that by the end of my year we might have brought together people from the town to work on the 'greening' of Kenilworth. Not a committee, not a working party of the Town Council, not a bureaucracy but a meeting of minds. In many ways the organisations already exist, it is a matter of focus and determination. How can we mobilise our community organisations to this end? A big challenge.
This all may rather pious, rather a very tiny drop in a huge ocean in relation to the problem, but, to quote Mother Theresa, the ocean is made up of small drops. We cannot sit back and wait for governments to act. They can tackle the big problems of international co-operation, the big questions about power generation and so on. But individuals and communities have to act as well."
Do you agree with Pat? Please contact him via this web site and let him have your views.
What would you like to do next?
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