The GLA and the London Development Agency have released a new report about how much greenhouse gas is accounted for by our food.

In London, it says, our eating habits cause nearly 19 million tonnes of greenhouse gases - including CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. A great deal of that is in its production and transport. Another great reason to start growing your own food - and if you can't get an allotment or don't have a garden, to sign up for our garden-sharing scheme.

Related to this, our upcoming film screening shows the incredible potential of urban agriculture: Havana now produces more than half of its vegetable needs inside the city itself. Londoners eat 8 billion meals a year and just 2 million of those are accounted for by food grown on allotments, so we have some way to go to approach Havana's self-reliance - not surprising when we have 100,000 people on allotment waiting lists nationwide, itching to have get dirt under their nails but still frustrated.

Embrace your stereotype

If there are any passionate environmentalists out there who want to reclaim the 'treehugger' insult as a badge of honour, you'll find company in Greenwich Park it seems.

Transitioners tend to be more about practicalities, but it can't hurt to have an arboreal embrace once in a while.

The Brixton Pound

Transition Town Brixton, following in the footsteps of Totnes and Lewes, is planning to launch a currency for Brixton this autumn.

The idea is that a specially printed currency, valid only in the area's independent shops, will work harder for local people than sterling, because money spent in local shops circulates three times more than money spent in national chains. Each Brixton pound will be worth £1, and sterling can be exchanged for the Brixton pounds at issuing points in the area.

An experiment well worth supporting, so if you know any Brixtonites, encourage them to get in touch with Transition Town Brixton and pledge to be one of the first to buy 10 Brixton Pounds.

The Age of Stupid

This new film is creating quite a buzz. It stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking back and wondering why we didn't stop climate change when we had the chance. By all accounts it's a cracking film, and in fact a great motivator for those who have seen it.

The story behind the film is just as compelling. A real word-of-mouth phenomenon, it is only making it to the big screen after winning a competition whose prize was conversion to the digital format needed for cinemas.

But it still needs help: it will be on limited release in its first week, and getting an extended run depends entirely on it doing well in that first week, so there is a campaign to encourage people to make a special effort to see it.

Happily, the Greenwich Odeon (but not, sadly, the Picturehouse) will be showing it. Tickets can be purchased by clicking here - but it might make a fun collective outing for all those interested in Transition Greenwich, so perhaps we could meet before and/or after the screening. Something to discuss at Transition Drinks tomorrow night.

It will have its big (solar-powered) premiere in a huge tent in Leicester Square, and live feed from that event will be beamed to the participating cinemas, including Greenwich, on Sunday 15 March. So if you want to take part but don't want to brave the crowds of central London, Greenwich looks like a good option. If you can't make it on the night of the premiere, you can catch in its first proper week, starting 20 March.

A Farm for the Future

You still have a little time to catch this programme on the BBC's iPlayer website, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking takes a long hard look at whether the methods used by her ageing father and uncle to tend their farm in Devon can continue when cheap and easy oil runs out.

She's clearly shaken by the realisation of how vulnerable mechanised farming is, with cattle feed, machinery, transport, fertilisers and pesticides all dependent on fossil fuels. A fascinating clip when she attends a Soil Association conference on the subject shows a room full of farmers listening intently but looking, one and all, as if they've seen a ghost - and the ghost is their farm, their way of doing things.

Sceptical that hippy dippy organic and permaculture methods can feed the UK, which is a net importer of food and therefore particularly vulnerable to interruptions in oil and gas supply, she is amazed to find that careful permaculture, and in particular the abundance possible through 'forest gardening', can produce more food per acre than mechanised farms.

She talks to the big brains of peak oil, including Colin Campbell and Richard Heinberg, for the bleak reality check. But the pleasure is in seeing her meet pioneering permaculturists delivering practical proof of how productive their methods can be by working with and imitating natural systems instead of exhausting soil and biodiversity by battling against nature.

If you have a spare 50 minutes, do have a look. At the moment there are 21 days left to watch it from here.

It makes a nice companion film for the documentary we are screening for free next month on how Cuba coped when its oil supplies were cut off. Do come along on 25 March if you can, and bring a friend.

A garden-sharing scheme for Westcombe

We are pround to launch the first Transition Westcombe project today.

Patch Match is a garden-sharing project aiming to match up people with spare space in their gardens with others who want to grow their own food but who don't have a garden and cannot get an allotment.

We think there is real demand for this free service. Allotment waiting lists across London are groaning, and have grown tenfold in the last 15 years or so.

If you have tried recently to put your name on the waiting list for our local sites, on Humber Road and by Maze Hill station, you probably found that, not only was the wait likely to be long (over 10 years at Humber Road), but in fact you could not even join the waiting list, as they have been closed to new names.

Meanwhile, there are many people in Westcombe who have gardens but for various reasons cannot make full use of them but would be glad to see them used for growing food.

Patch Match hopes to put these two sets of people in touch. We hope this will do something to increase the amount of food grown locally, so increasing our resilience and food security and cutting our food miles and carbon emissions. It could also help to strenghthen our community by putting people in touch with their near neighbours - if you're coming to see our free film screening on 25 March, you might agree after seeing it how important that is to a society's ability to survive and thrive under stress.

Find out more or sign up at www.patchmatch.blogspot.com.

If you have neighbours you think would like to take part but who do not have online lives, you could print the details and take them round to them. But we do hope to have posters and flyers in local shops and libraries before long.

Dates for your diary

Do you know of any upcoming events that fit in with transition principles? Email transitionwestcombeATgooglemail.com to let us know so we can list them here.

Wild Food Walk
Sun 14 June - 2pm
A TW EVENT
Roy Vickery of the South London Botanical Institute will lead a wild food foraging walk - all welcome, donations encouraged. Start at 2pm at Mycenae House. To reserve your place email davesh@btinternet.com

Transition Drinks
Wed 17 June
A TW EVENT
An informal social to meet others interested in transition ideas. Pop in any time to the bar in Mycenae House, Mycenae Road, from 6.30pm to 8pm. No agenda, just a natter.