Bear with me..., please.

After Christmas’ excess and the subsequent mad scramble for consumer bargains, my wife and I hoped to win the £97,000,000 Lottery. The odds were stacked against all but one of the millions of ticket buyers, but we’d done something to supposedly improve our chances - we’d spent the day thinking positively.

Bear with me! We don’t live in a sustainable reed or mud hut deep in the bush which provides all our needs, we are guilty of warming the Globe. Although we tried to have a low-key Christmas, for no other reason than wanting to, my wife and I drove to the coast 40 minutes away, we wore warm clothes made abroad and later returned to cook a meal containing products from many countries because it wasn’t easy finding sufficiently interesting food grown locally. OK, for years we’ve avoided flying, we hardly ever eat meat, we buy as much local produce as possible, we avoid plastics, drive as little as we can even though there’s no busses here. We keep the heating low, turn out unnecessary lights, consume little, and so on, but our carbon footprint is greater than anyone living in the African bush.

Global Warming isn’t going away, despite our tendency to ignore it. It is getting worse every day. We must act. We need a way for those concerned to connect, gain inspiration from each other and to find useful links, to group internationally, to gain power. Our self obsessed leaders and governments are in the clutches of industry and are driven by a desire to be re-elected; they won’t do anything meaningful, which became even clearer after the recent Climate Talks in Poland.

There must be loads of folk out there who wish to take up this fight but need help and guidance. Present ‘environmental’ organisations, locked into their own agendas, (but dedicated) don’t appear to be linking together to create a single accessible campaign presenting a clear message and route forwards. Maybe it’s been tried and failed, maybe it is impossible, but we’ve little time, there has to be a way to pierce through our consumptive, selfish blindness and create a groundswell of action. I’ve no energy myself, otherwise would be out there. And this needs dedication, famous faces, popular cultural hooks and much more; it ain’t easy.... And it needs money, hence that Lottery ticket - imagine injecting £97,000,000 into a Global Warming campaign!

You won’t be surprised that we didn’t win and that some other person is now using that absurd amount of money to buy, buy, buy, as winners mostly do.

Imagine setting up a global website (called something like TheHub?). You’d tap on a world map, enter your zone and find links to local and practical Global Warming (GW) action groups, ways you could cut your carbon footprint, find locally sourced goods and many other innovations.

Some might sneer, “What a waste of money! Nobody would know about it.”

That’s why we needed millions. To ask:-

a famous rock band to write a hit song about GW action;

Ask celebrities to promote GW;

make short potent adverts;

prod politicians, journalists, manufacturers…. the list goes on.

The money would also fund local and global activists, webmasters and managers to set up and run all this.

If you have the same itch to lessen the impact of GW, go out and buy a lottery ticket and increase the chances of one of us winning. If you do, tell nobody you won the lottery, blame a dotty inheritance. (That’s not as mad as it sounds, I could have had such money from lonely, lovely relatives (yes, plural) but when asked, never wanted it.... until now!)

If you know somebody with that clout, perhaps you could gently work on them to save the world. Future humans will lord them, which could be a disincentive or an incentive.

But hurry, time is short, we’re all warming because we’re buying, flying, driving and are not sustainably local.

Go on, buy that ticket and GOOD LUCK!

#ClimateChange #globalaction #worktogether #nature #environment