Blog
A wide range of blog articles published by Sustainable Wales.
We have raised £420 in the first weekend - please consider donating to the DEC Appeal.
The DEC Appeal Page
£10 could provide blankets to keep two people warm
£25 could provide emergency food for a family for ten days
£50 could provide emergency shelter for two families
Donation collection tins are available SUSSED and at Porthcawl high street businesses.
Payments handled by our community coop SUSSED
New Journals published
Read MoreSustainable Wales (SW) employs a young graduate, thanks to funding from the Postcode Lottery.
Ella Williamson looks forward to working with the community and young people in the Bridgend County Borough.
Read MoreOn BBC Radio Four, Inside Science from the banks of the Wye talking rivers, the challenges of protecting biodiversity, COP15 and the Welsh Government -from 08.00 minutes.
Read MoreNote: Applications for this role now closed. (January 2023)
Contractor required for SUSTAINABLE FUTURES – BRIDGEND, with ability to manage people, policy and process, providing professionalism, confidence and clarity.
Sustainable Wales Cymru Gynaliadwy requires a part-time Local Sustainable Development Coordinator for Bridgend Borough to encourage sustainable community action, offer information, help and support. (Phase 1: Working in Porthcawl)
Budget: £150 per seven-hour day equivalent. Annual FTE £30k
Working Time: flexible working days dependent on project needs; average 10 days per month x 18 months – with potential for extension.
Home and office based.
Start ASAP.
Contractwr ei angen ar gyfer DYFODOL CYNALIADWY – PEN-Y-BONT AR OGWR, gyda'r gallu i reoli pobl, polisïau a phrosesau, gan ddarparu proffesiynoldeb, hyder ac eglurder.
Mae Cymru Gynaliadwy angen Cydlynydd Datblygu Cynaliadwy Lleol rhan-amser ar gyfer Bwrdeistref Pen-y-bont ar Ogwr i annog gweithredu cymunedol cynaliadwy, cynnig gwybodaeth, cymorth a chefnogaeth.(Rhan 1 - gweithio ym Mhorthcawl.)
Cyllideb: £150 am bob dydd cyfwerth â 7 awr. Cyfwerth â blwyddyn llawn amser £30k
Amser Gwaith: diwrnodau gwaith hyblyg yn dibynnu ar anghenion y prosiect; 10 diwrnod y mis ar gyfartaledd x 18 mis – gyda photensial ar gyfer estyniad.
Gweithio o adref ac o’r swyddfa.
Dechreuwch M.G.â.P
Poster for Green Room 28 October 22
This event like our regular monthly Green room poetry events; supports Sustainable Wales. Located above SUSSED on James Street Porthcawl, CF36 3BG.
Green Room events are listed in our events section.
MEDI 29 SEPTEMBER 2022 - 18.30
PENRALLT SIOP LYFRAU’R SENEDD-DY
PENRALLT BOOKSHOP parliament house
CANOLFAN Owain Glyndwr
machynlleth
Pen’rallt welcomes Jane Davidson, author of #futuregen; Robert Minhinnick, editor of Gorwelion: Shared Horizons, and one of its contributors, Suzanne Iuppa,
joined by Sam Robinson. These are just a few of the many people working imaginatively on how Wales can realise its greatest potential and highest expression
for the health and wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants; they'll be here at our Senedd-dy Bookshop to share ideas and listen, too.
Take our short climate change survey today
Read MoreA visit to the University of South Wales (USW) to see how it is addressing the challenges of sustainability has helped two sixth-form students win £250 prizes in a Global Citizenship competition.
The contest formed part of a partnership between USW, Sustainable Wales, and the Welsh Joint Education Committee (WJEC), which earlier this year saw 120 year 12 students from Porthcawl Comprehensive School visit USW’s Treforest Campus. During the visit, which included a campus tour, the students had lectures on sustainable fashion, climate change solutions, transforming urban mobility, and mapping and monitoring biodiversity change.
After the visit, the A-level Welsh Baccalaureate students were invited to submit entries for the best Global Citizenship Project under key themes including population, land use, sustainable resources, energy, climate change, and cultural and political influences, which would be used as competition entries. They were asked to identify a problem, suggest solutions, and come up with ideas of actions that need to be taken.
Following the judging of the competition entries by Dr Stewart Eyres, Deputy Dean of Faculty of Computing, Engineering & Science at USW; Robert Minhinnick, award-winning writer and long-standing adviser to Sustainable Wales; and Professor Merryn Hutchings, Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Policy Studies in Education, Seren Cook and Emma Jones were announced as the winners.
Text of the announcement given by Robert Minhinnick at the award ceremony:
The charity, Sustainable Wales/ Cymru Gynaliadwy would like to thank everyone who entered this Baccalaureate competition.
We congratulate the two chosen as winners.
Seren Cook – Is winner of the Alwyn Jones Award for Global Citizenship.
Emma Jones – is winner of the Steve Harris Award for Sustainable Development.
Alwyn and Steve were both board members of this charity.
We can imagine both winners – Seren and Emma - going on to turn their enthusiasm for their subjects – ‘period poverty’ and ‘consumerism’ into voluntary, maybe political action.
And also imagine both winners using their strongly-held beliefs in the making of art.
I’ll say something now about Alwyn Jones and Steve Harris as people. By the way, Alwyn was 80 when he died, Steve Harris only 56.
Both Alwyn and Steve worked for the University of Glamorgan. Alwyn was originally an accountant who gained fantastic experience of life by working in Fiji in the Pacific.
He appreciated the more sustainable, even spiritual form of life he encountered there.
Steve strongly believed in ‘citizen science’, taking personal action for our beliefs. You might see his influence on the ‘Lift the River’ campaign against pollution in the River Wye.
Steve also believed in the power of the written word and musical phrase. He was a musician and songwriter.
Alwyn Jones remained very much opposed to nuclear power, and was thus a different type of environmentalist from Steve.
Steve Harris felt that nuclear was the answer to climate change and global warming.
Steve Harris was also supportive of genetic engineering of food crops. In fact, Steve blamed the green movement for allowing world hunger and climate irregularity by its too rigorous opposition to nuclear power and genetic engineering.
For Steve Harris, genetics could supply possibly the only answer to world hunger.
Alwyn foresaw nuclear waste extending thousands of years into the future and felt nuclear power a permanent cause of pollution.
Maybe Steve felt the green movement hidebound and conservative, afraid of challenges. Alwyn would not have agreed.
Both Alwyn and Steve were interested and involved in the arts. It was vital to both men. It completed their vision of ‘sustainability’ via the use of the human imagination to describe what it is to be ‘human’.
Music, literature, dance, painting, sculpture, cookery, mime, songwriting, drama, etc were all art forms in which people described what it is to be human. For Steve and Alwyn, a world without art was inconceivable.
Steve Harris was a songwriter who left behind a body of work, only made known to us at his death.
Both Alwyn & Steve depended on curiosity, which is the foundation of both science and creative art.
They asked questions, and possessed a journalistic flair, which I urge all the Baccalaureate candidates never to abandon, but to foster always and keep developing.
I enjoyed reading all of the Baccalaureate projects, and give all the candidates this advice.
Apply your research to yourself and where you live, be it Porthcawl, Corneli, Pyle, Bridgend, Margam.
You are unique.
You matter.
What you think matters.
You’re not clones.
Whether you go into science or art or both, never forget that fact.
Steve Harris used to write his songs and essays in a café at Trecco Bay, maybe the Hi Tide.
I was closer in age to Steve than to Alwyn, and I still mourn Steve’s early death.
Here’s a quote from a poem I published about Steven Harris in the Hi Tide at Trecco, Porthcawl:
Steve would sit with coffee
Under the mullions of a marine sky,
Our mission is to seek solutions for the unsustainable way we live. This involves cultural change and has implications for future generations.
Sustainable Wales’s aim is to help revitalise the local economy. We promote social and environmental progress and are enterprising, creative and internationally aware.
We are committed to society, artistic creativity and the natural world. We work with communities, voluntary groups and government.
We believe in this way we can foster an exciting future that doesn’t cost us the earth.
Sustainable Wales | 5 James Street, Porthcawl, CF36 3BG, UK