See Entry: http://cfisuk.livejournal.com/4995.html

Hi, we now have a blog on LiveJournal and I'll be moving our articles on this blog across to there for ease of use and convenience. Please by all means add us to your livejournal friends so you can keep up to date:
http://cfisuk.livejournal.com/

This is also a fantastic opportunity for us to link, communicate and exchange information with a whole number of new people :-)

Hello lovely darling people, the time to take action in now!!!

We now have a petition lodged with parliament, the text is as follows:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to pass legislature that all paper used by public companies will be 100% post-consumer recycled paper."
More details are found on the website, please read the text:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/post-consumer/

We REALLY need your help with this!!! 
With around 210 signatures we will be on the first page on environment petitions and more people will see us,
A minimum of 4,500 signatories will be required to get on the top page of all petition, if we can manage such a snowball effect.

I would ask you kindly to email all your British friends and ask them to sign, we mean to get serious now and we only have a couple of months!!!!

Love and all the best from the Cfis!!!

click here to learn more

Article - The True Cost Of War:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/150103-The-true-cost-of-war

One of the most serious environmental problems facing us today is the erosion and degradation of our soil, and modern industrialised farming has precipitated this, turning one solution into two problems.

The natural state of affairs is thus; farms combine livestock and crops, rotating their fields so that manure from the animals replenishes that taken from the soil by arable produce. Sometimes parts of the farm are left fallow to recover and grow grass which feeds the animals. There is no soil erosion, a perfectly sustainable ecosystem and plenty of jobs for farm workers.

The current state of affairs is vastly different. Our farms are now generally specialised, concentrating totally on crop production, or meat and milk. This has divorced the natural manure fertiliser from the arable land, replacing it with chemicals that ultimatley end up washed into rivers, while at the same time turning this valuable resource into a dangerous bi-product, slurry, which is highly toxic and also causes sever pollution to rivers, streams and water supplies.

For the animals it is far worse than that. They are kept in shocking conditions in the race to produce as much meat, eggs and milk in the quickest time on the smallest amount of resources.

A major factor in the fall of the Roman empire was overfarming of the land (see A Green History Of The World). The problem is this is no longer only happening in one country, but across the globe. It can take hundreds or a thousand years for nature to form even an inch of topsoil but since farming began in America they have lost at least a third of theirs. The climate is on our side in Britain so we really shouldn’t have any soil erosion at all except what nature can replace, but intensive farming has caused it.

Supporters of intensive farming claim that non-chemical farming cannot feed the world, but this is nonsense, especially if all the money and resources that are currently spent on researching new chemicals was channeled into making of natural food production more effective. More pertinently though, chemical farming definately cannot feed the world as long term it simply isn’t sustainable! Soil isn’t just dead matter! It’s made up of billions of tiny organisms and bacteria, which form the new soil and keep it healthy. If the pesticides in intensive farming don’t kill these creatures, the herbicides will kill the vegetation that they feed on having a knock-on effect. If we continue this soon we won’t be able to grow anything at all!

Pesticides have been shown to cause all sorts of horrible things like birth defects, cancers and gene mutations, I feel like eating organic!

Permaculture describes a system of cultivation intended to maintain permanent agriculture or horticulture by relying on renewable resources and a self-sustaining ecosystem. Combining plants, animals, water, buildings and the local landscape, more energy would be produced than expended, all nutrients, materials and resources would be recycled and nature would be interfered with as little as possible. Sounds great doesn’t it?

To learn more about this important issue refer to chapter eight of the fantastic book It Doesn’t Have To Be Like This.

I recommend everyone buy it quite frankly, especially since you can usually get a copy for £0.01+postage second hand on amazon.             Or a fiver from the official site.

CFIS is proud to announce we have been invited to make our first ever presentation on the 6th of March at a new event called The Brixton Supper Club. Infront of up to 500 people Antony, one of our affiliates, will be giving an educational presentation for 45 minutes on various environmental issues including Conscious Cosuming and what we can do to unplug from the destruction of the planet.

This will be followed by an evening of live music and more!

Would be wonderful to see you there if you can make it!

Awesome graphics on American Imperialism:

While most of the environmental campaigns today, including out own, are focused (rightly) on attempting to limit the destruction of the planet, Trees For Life - a Scottish charity, is actually working to regenerate and restore the native Caledonian Forest. Less than 1% of the original survives...

Scotland is one of the counrties which has suffered most from environmental degredation in the past but Trees For Life will eventually reintroduce the missing species of wildlife which formerly lived in the original forrest in this small area of.

More than a thousand volunteers, from teenagesrs to seventy year-olds, have taken part in their forest restoration work. If you are interested in taking park, from as little as £50, or just making a donation to this worthy cause see their website.

Natural forests are of course on decline on every continent with a resultant extinction of wildlife species which depend on them. For information on your local forest restoration group comment on this blog with your location and we'll see what we can do to help you.

Update - here are some restoration projects UK wide:
Friends of the Earth UK,
26-28 Underwood Street, London N1 7JQ

Gaia Foundation,
18 Waell Walk, London NW3 1LD

Living Earth Foundation,
4 Great James Street, London WC1N 3DA

International Tree Foundation,
Crawley Down, Crawley, West Sussex RH10 4HL

Rainforest Foundation UK,
City Cloisters, 188-196 Old Street, London EC1V 9FR

Survival Internationoal,
10-15 Emerald Street, London WC1N 3QL

The Woodland Trust,
Autums Park, Sysart Road, Grantham, Linocolnshire NG31 6LL

World Wide Fund for Nature UK,
Panda House, Weyside Park, Godalming, Surrey GU7 1XR