In this folder there are a 14 climate change related lesson plans that will encourage students to think more sustainably. I have summarised these lesson plans so that they can be easily used for teaching purposes when school groups make site-visits to Hockerton Housing Project. For example:
Lesson 2 – Donald Trump Climate Quotes and Climate Denial
Summary:
Fake News or ‘What Donald Trump Said’ activity – great activity about 15-20 mins long
BBC News article on psychology of climate change denial. Students need to read this and complete an activity sheet asking them to summarise the article.
Google Docs Outline:
Starter: Trump
or Fake News – Show students the quotes from Donald Trump relating to climate
change. Ask the students to decide whether the quote is ‘Trump’ or ‘Fake News’.
Use the information sheet to elaborate on the meaning of his words. Ask
students their opinion of Trump’s attitude? Should he be allowed to have these
views?
Scientific Consensus –
Why does Climate Denial still exist? Explain the animated graph showing
temperature models for a variety of organisations around the world all showing
a similar trend. 98% of scientific evidence suggests recent climate change is
manmade. Is there still a debate?
News Article –
Brain Biases. Direct students to read the BBC news article. Using the worksheet
students should read and then reread, pulling out different pieces of
information as they go.
What’s the main reason for our
inaction? – Students should rank the suggested factors
and in pairs, develop reasons for why they think this might be the most
powerful factor.
Open the document below too see my summary of all 14 lesson plans.
This is a great book which gives the carbon facts about our consumption in a relatively easy way to understand. Mike has covered all aspects of life including a detailed first chapter on food but also travel, money, investment and values. Whilst he is very clear about what needs to be achieved to prevent 1.5 degrees of climate change he offers choices about our consumption in a way that left me feeling empowered and not guilty.
This is an essential read for us all! My response to this book has been to give a copy to all in the executive team at my hospital and to all of our current cohort of medical students. Those with the power to make high value decisions and the senior leaders of the future need to be thinking about this. In between , each one of us can use this book to guide us to reduce our carbon emissions urgently. I urge you to buy it, read it and pass it on to someone else.
Helena Tilley
Synopsis
Feeding the world, climate change, biodiversity, antibiotics, plastics – the list of concerns seems endless. But what is most pressing, what are the knock-on effects of our actions, and what should we do first? Do we all need to become vegetarian? How can we fly in a low-carbon world? Should we frack? How can we take control of technology? Does it all come down to population? And, given the global nature of the challenges we now face, what on Earth can any of us do?
Fortunately, Mike Berners-Lee has crunched the numbers and plotted a course of action that is practical and even enjoyable. There is No Planet B maps it out in an accessible and entertaining way, filled with astonishing facts and analysis. For the first time you’ll find big-picture perspective on the environmental and economic challenges of the day laid out in one place, and traced through to the underlying roots – questions of how we live and think. This book will shock you, surprise you – and then make you laugh. And you’ll find practical and even inspiring ideas for what you can actually do to help humanity thrive on this – our only – planet.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781108439589 Number of pages: 302 Weight: 380 g Dimensions: 216 x 138 x 17 mm
Its important for movers and shackers to read this book. We gave a copy to our MP at the Mass Lobby in London. Other people had opinions too!
Previous house sale 2020. Hockerton Housing Project’s passive solar eco house number 2 is sold, however there is a new house for sale .
(WE HOLD A WAITING LIST. IF THIS IS SOMETHING YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN, IN THE FUTURE please contact us.)
Previous sale information 2020 for a 4 bed house: It is one of the five private homes on this sustainable co-housing development. It comes with shared access and use of renewable energy systems, rainwater harvesting, lakes, woodland and 6 acres of land, with a further 8.5 acres on an agricultural lease.
£460,000
Kitchen of house for sale at Hockerton Housing Project
Click here for further information about the current house sales
Residents benefit from very low bills, onsite renewable energy systems and rainwater harvesting, and access and use of 14.5 acres. The homes and their gardens are private, with all households sharing in the management of the surrounding land and facilities, and the onsite business that provides an income for residents through its range of services relating to sustainability.
Location
The development is in the Nottinghamshire village of Hockerton, 1.5 miles from the market town of Southwell and 7 miles from Newark, with its 75 minute train link to London. The village has a pub and an active community spirit. Schools include the Lowes Wong Infant and Junior School and the excellent Minster School. Southwell is a bustling historic town with a useful range of shops, two weekly markets, and regular festivals throughout the year.
This is a private sale, please contact us if you would like to be put in touch with the sellers.
You can view the EPC here, but please note the method behind it cannot cope with the property’s lack of heating – we have the past 20 years records to prove it!
One of our residents is a keen upholsterer and last year, after using some beautiful fabrics, many of them already sourced from ends of rolls, she started to wonder what to do with the small offcuts.
By happy coincidence a friend introduced her to the idea of Furoshiki and gave her a copy of ‘How to be a craftivist‘ in the same week she read about the problems that glitter and metallic paper cause for recycling centres, and an idea bubbled up for some craftivism.
Metallic and glittered papers may add a sparkle under the tree but pose a challenge for recycling. Metallic paper has to be picked out of the conveyor belts, adding to the costs of handling the waste. Glittery paper is more likely to be missed by the pickers, and ends up reducing the quality of the output, and with it the options for its use. Ultimately this adds to the cost of recycling or to the costs of the products that are made from recycled paper.
With all this in mind, a small group of volunteers made fabric wrapping to gift in our communities. We made and gave out wraps and fabric pouches made from off-cuts of fabric to 50 households in Hockerton and to the congregation of the Methodist Church in Southwell, our local market town. These gifts were given along with a letter explaining why, and a guide to their use from the Japanese Ministry of the Environment (see below). This is the essence of ‘craftivism’, that messages can be enclosed with useful and hopefully beautiful hand-made gifts, to remove the idea of criticism and instead surprise and hopefully bring a smile to faces whilst delivering a meaningful message.
Fabric wraps are not the only way to reduce the challenge to the recycling centres this Christmas. We can also use paper that is both recycled and recyclable; use ribbon that can be used year after year; and of course reuse paper. Surely it’s not just me whose only memory of my father with an iron is when he used to save and iron the wrapping paper on Christmas Day?!
Hockerton Housing Project in Nottinghamshire is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion it welcomed the Chairman of Newark and Sherwood District Council, Councillor Keith Walker, to unveil a plaque commemorating the legacy of the three parties. The Project would not have got out of the ground without an enlightened landowner, pioneering architects and a visionary local authority, and it is their legacy that Hockerton Housing Project is celebrating this week with representatives from local business and the local authority.
The homes at Hockerton Housing Project (HHP) use 20% of the energy used by a similar-sized house built at the same time, for the same price. There is no loss of comfort. Instead of fossil-fuelled central heating the homes are built to absorb heat from the sun over the Summer and early Autumn, which is then released over the winter. This keeps the homes cool in summer and warm in winter. Air quality is maintained through the use of heat-recovery ventilation and water heating costs are reduced through the use of a thermal store.
By reducing the energy demands of the homes, the Project is then able to meet much of its remaining energy demand through onsite wind turbines and solar PV. This idea caught on in its wider community. In 2009, the parish of Hockerton invited the trading arm of HHP to manage the installation and management of a community-owned wind turbine. This now generates power equivalent to that used by the village and raises funds for the sustainable development in the community. As a pioneer of community energy HHP has since run a range of courses and support services for communities and land-owners installing and maintaining community-scale systems.
These ongoing and expanding benefits would not have happened without support from the original landowner, pioneering architects and a supportive local authority.
Roy and Eileen Martin were the original landowners of the land on which the Project is sited. On purchase, it had little environmental benefit. It was a monoculture of grass, mainly used for grazing due to frost pockets, boggy areas and exposure to wind. When their son, Nick, proposed a sustainable development incorporating organic land management alongside eco-housing they gave their support. Over time this formalised into a governance framework of a 999 year lease with a peppercorn rent, provided the Project continues to meet its social, environmental and economic obligations.
Professor Brenda Vale and Doctor Robert Vale are architects, and now world-renowned experts, in the field of sustainable housing. Their design framework for eco housing is a simple and cost-effective combination of high thermal mass, to store and release heat; super-insulation, to retain that heat in the structure of the home until it is needed; and designing for the environment. Whilst working at University of Nottingham they built a zero carbon autonomous town house fitting to the historic town of Southwell. Serendipitously they had used local builder Nick Martin who was looking for architects to help him and a group of friends with their ideas for Hockerton. They used the same design framework, but adapted it to the greenfield setting. By covering the main structure of the homes in a hill, the Vales were able to limit the loss of land from nature; by orientating the homes to face South, the Vales were able to maximise the solar gain used to heat the homes; and with the Vales’ design requirement to use rainwater harvesting to meet all water needs, water reservoirs were introduced that improve the habitat for a range of flora and fauna.
David Pickles OBE was chief architect and energy manager for Newark and Sherwood District Council in the 1990s and 2000s, whose work with others generated a national reputation for innovative energy work in the East Midlands [1]. He understood the vision and the need for research and development of zero carbon homes. He worked with Hockerton Housing Project to develop a framework that ensured the greenfield development would benefit rather than harm the green environment. The resultant section 106 agreement remains a cornerstone of the Project’s activities 20 years on. In particular the requirement to generate employment instigated the trading cooperative that today provides a range of educational and advisory services to a range of individuals and organisations, along with an income for residents [2].
Councillor Walker has visited the Project over the years – during their initial build and when they were first occupied and was interested to see how it was continuing the original vision set out with Newark and Sherwood District Council in a section 106 agreement. He congratulated the residents, past and present on what they had achieved. Guests also heard from Stormsaver, Tarmac and Nottingham University about their interest in the Project’s approach to sustainable housing and water systems, with many questions about why such an affordable approach wasn’t being taken up by developers.
Around 2000 people a year visit the Project each year; it has featured in thousands of green building and energy publications and informed millions more through broadcast media; and is studied by architectural and engineering students across the UK and beyond. But the Project remains, primarily, home to 5 families and their shared interest in continuing the legacy of an exemplar sustainable development that could, and should, shape the design of housing fit for the 21st century.
