Our CAN’s story
Worry for our environment and climate is nothing new, people first started widely voicing their concerns in the 1960s, when the damages caused by pollution started to be properly understood. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote of a coming Silent Spring, when no birds would be left to sing.
More and more people began seeing for themselves the changes happening in the world around us, and in May 2016 Australians launched a Climate Emergency Declaration petition.
In December that year, the City of Darebin in Australia declared a climate emergency. The following August, 2017, Darebin launched its Climate Emergency Plan, and one of its aims was ‘Support community groups to engage with and take action on the Climate Emergency’. This is the start of our current idea of a CAN.
In Britain, in May 2018, 100 professors, scientists, researchers and experts signed an Open Letter saying action on the changing climate was needed now. A further 100 would follow later in the year, and in November Bristol City Council declared a climate emergency, the first declaration of its kind in Europe.
How our CAN started
In September 2019, Stroud Town Council declared a climate emergency.
Stroud has a strong history of community groups coming together to solve community problems and pioneer innovative ways of living. Community agriculture, community repair shops, retrofit, recycling, habitat regeneration, green transport, green energy – it’s a very long list. Stroud Town Council saw that if its declaration was going to mean something real, it would be Stroud’s forward-thinking and active communities that made it so.
It would need a community of community action groups, a network of them.
The Council brought together a group of organisations to make a CAN for Stroud happen, and here we now are.
How we’re run
Some CANs are membership groups that you join as an individual, but there’s already loads of those in Stroud. Stroud Town CAN is about getting the existing groups to pull together more effectively, providing support to each other, and basically getting new groups and new projects going where they’re needed.
Which isn’t to say there’s nobody at the CAN – somebody wrote these words (hello!), somebody will answer you when you contact us, someone will be your helping hand when you need it, but the point of the CAN isn’t to have some people joining it, the point of the CAN is to get everybody doing things to help deal with our climate, nature and sustainability crises.