This November 2021 may well turn out to be the most critical in the brief history of our civilization.
The UK is host to the United Nations 26th “Conference of the Parties” (COP26),
Since humans evolved, the more recent 10,000 year journey from the first farmers to our global economy and communication has been enabled by the benign benefits of a stable and predictable climate. That climate has now suffered what is an approaching catastrophic shift to a climate characterised by increasing weather extremes and where previously there was predictability is now chaos. Facilitated by the burning of fossil fuels, the spread and export of western European technology, capitalist enterprise and resource exploitation across the globe has seen the setting light to 60 million years of carbon deposits, 100 times faster in the last 60 years.
We have a government, not alone among the major political parties of recent times, which is no longer controlled by the careful examination of facts and circumstances but by a seemingly irresistible cavalier attitude and conviction to distort facts and beliefs where a plausible fiction is better than the truth. Unable to grasp contemporary realities and like in a fairy tale, unable to forgo what is within reach out of greed for the unquantifiable treasure a healthy climate and environment brings. We have been divorced from the natural world and our place in it.
This deflection of truth has diverted and wasted the most enormous amounts of our national and global wealth and effort, into an unsustainable way of life, the short term benefits of which are doomed to fail.
It is now necessary to divert all of the resources at our disposal, to fight the very real threat to our existence, climate change.
For 30, very largely ignored, years, the United Nations has warned of the need of Government to take action to mitigate increasing CO2 levels and our delay in addressing this, now means the whole planet has a common urgent necessity to act. The delay in taking action means throwing unprecedented resources at new and exciting opportunities to change the way our lives are lived and organised. The investment needed primarily in the immediate replacement of fossil fuels and development of alternative forms of energy use and storage, will inevitably influence all aspects of human personal and economic inter-relationships and trade.
As part of this new way of living, many of us believe the UK’s use of an annual £45 billion appalling and immoral waste of resources that have been and are being used to facilitate and prepare for wars and violent conflict across the world, as futile. These resources now need to be garnered to assist our work on addressing climate change. It is time to stop developing the means to kill and maim others in greater and more sanitised ways but to give life to all of us threatened by a drowning, wetter and hotter planet characterised by the cooperation among nations to achieve a common salvation. The human notions of valour and bravery in conflict, need deploying away from violent behaviour and towards compassionate cooperation and understanding.
If you would like to help spread this message, then this November, please consider wearing a White Poppy along with a Red to signify life over death and the use of resources for goodness.
As with every November 11th, at 6:30 in the evening, there will be a White Poppy wreath laying ceremony at Bridgwater’s King Square memorial to which everyone wanting Peace to prevail over War is welcome.
White Poppies are available from the Peace Pledge Union (ppu.org.uk).
Thank you
Charles Graham