Village Sustainability Newsletter November 2025

SUSTAINABILITY – WORKING TOWARDS THE COFE’S CARBON NEUTRAL TARGET 2030

Happy festival season!

November is undeniably autumn even for those of us who like to squeeze every last inch of warmth, sunshine and outdoor fun out of summer, and I have reluctantly put away shorts and sandals.  But it’s a season of festivals as we enjoy the beautiful autumn colours that surround us.

Autumn brings the start of murmuration season, for starlings’ amazing dusk dances.  Google “murmuration map” or join the associated Facebook group to find country-wide locations to watch this incredible spectacle – last year’s best for me was an industrial estate car park in Oxford. 

Happily for many, by the time you read this Halloween will be over.  Spiritual differences of opinion aside, it's an absolute festival of consumption and waste with mountains of plastic-wrapped sweets and single-use “decorations” shipped half-way around the world before their brief use and then often just binned.  There’s no sustainable way to dispose of much of this tat.

Guy Fawkes night brings its own tensions for animal lovers and environmentalists, but these are not events I have any control over and I have to say I absolutely love watching our fabulous community display here in Chieveley.  Do our local “fire-team” use environmentally friendly fireworks?  If you’d like to explore and report back, please do!

It’s the run up to year-end festivities, with stir-up Sunday and traditions around making Christmas puddings.  And still on the food theme, we’ve celebrated Harvest and now it’s “use it or lose it” season to save the amazing fruit that has grown this year - apple cake, pear puddings, jams and chutneys and of course sloe gin. 

But then it’s the American-imported festival of shopping madness which is Black Friday.  TV news shows people on both sides of the pond clutching armfuls of stuff - clothes, electronics, or hurriedly ordering online so as not to “miss out.”  For a short period of time prices are cut, but are these genuine discounts or just encouragements to buy what we don’t need?  The rush to buy creates panic and the line between “need” and “want” can become fuzzy.

I’d like to return to Patrick Grant whose book “Less.  Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier” I am loving, after hearing him speak at a different kind of festival, the shorts and sandals sort, in August.

“We need a certain amount.  We need clothing, food, shelter, warmth, and probably transport to exist comfortably.  But we want a great deal more.  This want is tied to our drive to make ourselves feel better about our lives; we mistakenly think that by having more our happiness will increase.”  *

Patrick goes on to explore what writers and philosophers believe WILL make us happy… simplicity, nature, the arts, community.  No thinker seems to have concluded that the secret to a happy life – once our primary needs are met – is money or “stuff”.

“Perhaps most important, and most easily achieved, is simply learning the difference between need and want.  Epictetus the Greek philosopher wrote ‘Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants,’  ……. G.K. Chesterton went further: ‘There are two ways to get enough.  One is to continue to accumulate more and more.  The other is to desire less.’

Less is easy.  Everyone can afford less.  Everyone has room in their life for less. Everyone has the time for less.  It is also practical.  Why have three low quality things when you can have one high quality one instead?  We never need to waste time and energy making a choice.  We have that one thing and if we consider its purchase correctly it will be a good one and the right one always.” *

So, my tip for celebrating “Black Friday” in a way that will sustain, not harm, our planet?  Recognise that we actually need very little more.  Commit to “Buy Nothing Friday” (https://www.buynothingday.co.uk) and spend the time you save in nature, with family or friends, or enjoying a good book, some music, a slice of apple cake?  Simple pleasures.  You’ll be happier for it.  And so will the earth.

Julia Hoaen

*© Patrick Grant, reproduced with the author’s permission