A unique opportunity is presented by visiting specialist and co-editor of The Automatic Earth - Nicole Foss aka Stoneleigh - to discuss Community Solutions to the Global Crises. This inaugural event of the Mayo Sustainability Forum will take place on Monday 2nd August with keynote speaker, Nicole Foss, presenting her talk 'Making Sense of the Global Financial Crises in the Era of Peak Oil' - to date this is her only engagement in the West of Ireland. The venue will be the Linenhall Theatre in Castlebar, and will begin at 7pm. Admission is free.

Nicole was a key speaker at the Transition Network conference held recently in the UK. Her talk outlined the challenge facing our communities in the imminent future as the biggest financial bubble humanity has ever seen spectacularly deflates. By all accounts, it was the talk of the TN conference.

The Mayo event is being organised by the Mayo Sustainability Forum. Nicole's talk will be followed by a short break and refreshments, then an informal workshop/discussion on the implications for local communities and possible mitigation measures.

The Castlebar event will begin at 7pm. It is hoped the event will attract a big audience from all over the west and north west of Ireland.

There will also be an informal discussion/workshop/open space session earlier in the day, at a venue near Westport. This session will focus on specific areas such as food security, energy, critical infrastructure, crisis preparedness and social cohesion. Other topics may be added depending on who turns up and which areas are of most interest to those present. The individual discussions will be kept short, with opportunities for further review at the end. The key points emerging from the discussions will be used in the drawing up of specific policy action documents, aimed at providing guidance for local communities (and possibly for larger regional bodies).

The Westport event will begin at 1pm and finish around 5pm. Weather permitting it will be held outside.

Anyone requiring further information should contact forum@sustainability.ie or check the Transition Towns Ireland website www.transitiontownsireland.ning.com

Nicole M. Foss is co-editor of The Automatic Earth (http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com), where she writes under the name Stoneleigh. She and her writing partner have been chronicling and interpreting the on-going credit crunch as the most pressing aspect of our current multi-faceted predicament. The site integrates finance, energy, environment, psychology, population and real politik in order to explain why we find ourselves in a state of crisis and what we can do about it. Prior to the establishment of TAE, she was previously editor of The Oil Drum Canada, where she wrote on peak oil and finance.

Foss runs the Agri-Energy Producers" Association of Ontario, where she has focused on farm-based biogas projects and grid connections for renewable energy. While living in the UK she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialized in nuclear safety in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and conducted research into electricity policy at the EU level.

Her academic qualifications include a BSc in biology from Carleton University in Canada (where she focused primarily on neuroscience and psychology), a post-graduate diploma in air and water pollution control, the common professional examination in law and an LLM in international law in development from the University of Warwick in the UK. She was granted the University Medal for the top science graduate in 1988 and the law school prize for the top law school graduate in 1997.

She may be contacted through: theautomaticearth@gmail.com