School of Sustainability

The repair cafe that asked its MP for nothing, at first

The surest way to get nothing from a powerful person, Keith Brady has learned, is to put them on the spot. Better to arrive with something they can accept without a moment's hesitation. Brady is project lead at Repair Cafe Gosport, and in the group's early days the problem was the usual one: too few fixers, too little reach, and a town that mostly didn't know they existed.

The first stage was trust, and trust, it turns out, is built from paperwork. Before any invitation went out, the group made its legal structure and finances transparent, ready to explain ring-fenced banking with multiple signatories. They bought their own domain so that emails came from the organisation rather than a volunteer's personal account. And they started a rung lower, courting local councillors first, on the grounds that an MP is likelier to visit if a councillor from their own party has already spoken well of you.

Their first anniversary party doubled as the occasion. The Mayor came, the MP came, and the local paper covered it. Gosport's MP sets aside one Saturday a month to see three or four local groups; the cafe's aim is to hold one of those slots each year, which means planning well ahead and getting to know the person who runs her diary.

When she does visit, the visit has to work for her. Someone is briefed with a thirty-second pitch and the key facts. Volunteers and visitors talk to her in their own words, so the praise doesn't sound scripted. Photos are staged well enough to be worth publishing, and afterwards the group follows up with its measured environmental and social impact. She is also encouraged to bring a broken item of her own - ideally, Brady notes drily, one the team will find fairly easy to fix.

Only after all that came the ask, pre-agreed rather than sprung. The relationship now returns things the cafe never planned for: a student journalist's interview with the MP in the local paper, nominations to the volunteer recognition event she hosts in Parliament, and her signature on the UK Repair and Reuse Declaration. Brady is careful to say every constituency is different. What transfers is the sequence: govern well, be seen, then ask.

The Restart Project · Read the source

Reading about soil aloud, in a walled garden, after dark

On the evening of 30 May, with a full moon coming up, a group sat on the veranda of a former Belgian pavilion in an Amsterdam park and took turns reading aloud. The pavilion is a leftover of the Floriade, the 1972 world horticultural exhibition that once packed the park with plants from every continent. Below it lies the old monastery garden, walled and whitewashed.

It is planted with young conifers, Jupiter's beard, sage, mint, evening primrose, tall grasses, buttercups and wild oregano; its keepers call it the Shadow Garden. The garden has been tended since 2021 by the artist duo Onkruidenier - Jonmar van Vlijmen and Ronald Boer - working with Zone2Source, the art-and-ecology organisation that runs the site as a testing ground for art and ecology in the park.

The occasion was the second Gardener's Assembly, a two-day gathering of artists, gardeners, farmers and researchers, backed by the Horizon Europe programme SoilTribes. The first, in late 2024, had started an exchange network among Amsterdam's art-space gardens and community gardens, and this one picked up the thread, with the Friday evening given over to nocturnal ecology: what a garden does after sunset.

The Perennial Reading Group, an open group led by Anne Diestelkamp that meets in gardens across the city to read about ecologies, worked through texts by Anaïs Tondeur, Germain Meulemans and Beatrice Zerbato on soil and atmosphere, caves and underground worlds, light pollution, and the moths and bats that pollinate after sunset. As daylight faded, the readers took turns aloud.

After the reading, outside the garden gate, came food. Artistic researcher Chen Zhou, who works on darkness and what happens underground, built an edible landscape from layered jellies in four colours, each layer a stratum of a real place: newly planted trees from a government transition scheme, an artificial topsoil under moss, and below that the concrete left behind by a demolished cement factory. No harvest and no decision is reported; what remains is the method.

Makery · Read the source

Three minutes of breath before two hours of systems thinking

Each live session of the course begins the same way: two or three minutes of physical practice before a single concept or slide. Curtis Ogden, who teaches it, puts the order first for a reason. He has spent years watching people nod through two hours of systems theory and go home unchanged, diagram in hand, week unaltered. Beginning in the body is his answer to that. "We're not here just to talk about energy, but to experience it."

What fills those minutes is small on purpose. One exercise is an eyebrow lift held for a breath, which Ogden calls the smallest intervention he knows. Another is slow breathing with the attention resting below the navel. Both are optional: skip one on a bad day, join the next when you are ready. Nobody performs. The body is simply given a seat in the room before the talking starts.

The rationale is practical rather than mystical. A felt flow and a described one are not the same thing, and a course built on description alone tends to produce competent diagrams and unmoved people. Where Ogden learned this - and why a map drawn on a whiteboard is not the movement it pictures - is left to the course page, which is short and worth the click.

Gaia Education · Read the source