March 22, 2006

Green Drinks starting to take off in London

By Steve Hubrecht
shubrech@uwo.ca

Business owners, consultants, organic gardeners, professors, members of the Green party and a chef crowded into Bistro Chocolat on Dundas Street Thursday night.

It was the fourth meeting of the London chapter of Green Drinks, a worldwide movement that tries to bring together environmentalists with differing interests, but similar attitudes, at local pubs and cafés.

Only six to 12 people attended each of the first three meetings, held monthly since December, but more than 25 came to this month's meeting.

Photo by Steve Hubrecht

Bev Wagar, far right, talks about organic gardening at Green Drinks.

"We might need a bigger venue," said Tiffany Roschkow, one of the organizers, as she tried to find extra chairs inside the small café. Some people had to stand in the back and peer over the bar to see Roschkow when she addressed the group.

This meeting was different from the first three because it featured a guest speaker. Bev Wagar, owner of natural gardening store My Green Garden, had come to talk about organic gardening.

The guest speaker was the reason for the larger turnout, said Roschkow, and it was a great way to "kill two birds with one stone" as participants were getting an educational talk while socializing with like-minded people.

People milled around, chatting, laughing and exchanging business leaflets before Wagar stood up to speak, but shut up immediately as she explained how to naturally manage garden pests.

Tracy Robinson, another organizer, wanted to start a chapter of the Sierra Club in London, but found Green Drinks easier to co-ordinate and not as time-consuming.

London lacks a strong environmental movement, said Robinson, who hopes Green Drinks can be a springboard from which to launch one.

There are a lot of environmentally-minded people in London, she said, but "everybody's in their own little groove."

"They don't know where their allies are."

Photo by Steve Hubrecht

Green Drinks members meet in a local cafe once a month.

Robinson hopes Green Drinks can be a gathering space to bring these people and their ideas together. She was encouraged by the turnout and hopes it will eventually reach "a tipping point" so that the environmental movement will organize itself.

She also hopes Green Drinks will inspire others to become more active like Wagar. "Bev is great, but there's not enough of her."

Robinson was steeped in environmental thinking from an early age. Her mother made compost and fed her homemade granola and yogurt.

She approached Roschkow about helping to organize Green Drinks after the first meeting in December.

Roschkow, who remembers having to leave Springbank Park after just 15 minutes on a hot day last summer because the Thames River stank like garbage, agreed something needed to be done about the city's environmental problems. She was eager to help with Green Drinks and is excited that it's now "starting to take off."

Tim Wilson and Melanie Doerksen attended Green Drinks this month for the first time and found it informative and a good way to meet different people in the environmental community.

"The unstructured atmosphere was nice and leads you to ask questions," said Wilson.

Green Drinks was started in London, England, by Edwin Datschefski in 1989. He was sitting in a pub with some green design colleagues. He saw another friend who also happened to be sitting with a group of environmentally-minded people at a different table, so they all pulled their tables together.

"And so a movement was born," said Datschefski in an email interview from London, England.

Green Drinks has since spread to 118 cities in 13 countries and Datschefski said it's seen more than 20,000 participants.

Chapters often start small and grow quickly. The first meeting of the group's New York chapter, in 2002, had only three people. The next meeting had seven, the next 20 and by 2003, it had mushroomed to 150.

Datschefski said the informal pub, or café, atmosphere is what makes Green Drinks successful.

"We go out of our way not to achieve much, and in doing so we get the serendipity and the chance meetings that will snowball into new projects, jobs, ideas."

"Putting a serious structure on Green Drinks would kill the very essence of what it is. We just keep it simple."

The local Green Drinks chapter meets at Bistro Chocolat on the third Thursday of each month.