Coping with global warming, being more sustainable and relying less on others will require adaptation and change to some of our behaviour.

There are excellent examples of this new way of thinking in the small communities that are developing the Transition Town approach.

It involves living within our means, making fewer demands on the natural world, using energy more efficiently and having a more co-operative approach to meeting local needs.

These communities are preparing for the certainty that oil and gas have a limited future and they will have to be more self-sufficient, particularly in the provision of food.

In many ways, this is borrowing heavily from the past when there were local greengrocers, garden centres were unknown, most gardens had vegetable plots rather than decking, allotments were well used, many families were influenced by the ‘dig for victory’ approach in wartime, and fruit and berries were gathered and made into jam or bottled.

The Incredible Edible Todmorden website (incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk) has all the details of the considerable progress that this small township has made by involving schools, businesses, farmers, churches and the local community in growing food locally, as well as many of the background steps that are necessary, particularly if public land is involved.

There’s useful, transferable experience to do with the relationship to public bodies, such as the railway and fire stations, churches and housing associations as well as the Council, with successful attempts to define legal boundaries, establish public liability cover and test the soil.

The result is herb gardens, vegetables in among flower beds and previously grassed open land, with fruit trees wherever possible. There’s watercress in local streams, new polytunnels in the schools and raised beds and planters dotted about made from demolition timber. To cap all this, there are maps showing where surplus eggs can be found and there is even some ‘guerrilla’ planting on land where the ownership is not clear.

The ideas are now spreading, with Clitheroe, Haslingden and Bacup all involved with a proposal being considered by the local councils to grow purple-sprouting broccoli, red-flowered runner beans and the like in hanging baskets and herbaceous borders. It could be ‘pick your own’ on the high street.

To be really effective, and to have a high participation rate and community ownership, the towns need to be reasonably small, but I can see possibilities of this in many of Bradford’s ‘village’ hubs, such as Baildon, Queensbury, West Bowling, Great Horton, Clayton, Thornton, and in Buttershaw and Allerton, to name a few. Bingley could certainly cope, and already there are plans afoot in Keighley.

One field that won’t be involved is Westfield!