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February 16, 2021
Glasgow was exhausting but energising, all the good stuff was happening outside the blue zone, and mostly outside the green zone too. And yet it’s what happens in the blue zone this week that will impact us all. In another way though, it’s all the community stuff, the new ideas and the passion of the fringe events that we can choose to impact us. Find your niche and your people, look for those determinedly driving change even in the face of despair. Remember hope isn’t a passive thing, ‘Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.’ COP26 memories part two COP26 memories part 1 En route to COP26 - full video from my earlier post here! I’m currently en route to Glasgow for #cop26 so I thought I’d make a little video to explain why. I also totally neglected to say that I’ll also be doing lots of talking about community climate action and the @planetcheltenhaminsta project, especially gathering lots of ideas for the Youth Climate Group. If you’ve got any questions or thoughts then let me know in the comments below. I’m hoping to do some videos while I’m up there too so stay tuned. Edit: just realised I said I was in the same country, obviously I meant in the UK! I had the most wonderful chat with Syreeta @thisisleaven about hope, kids, climate and everything in between. We met when we both attended a course run by the awesome Shaylers @markshayler @nicshayler and really connected, staying in touch over the last rollercoaster year. Syreeta is doing brilliant things over on her platform, infusing light and active hope into everything she does, check out her beautiful content, luminescent words and new courses too. For more info on the community climate project here in Cheltenham - follow @planetcheltenhaminsta for updates and ways to get involved. Photo by @clairewestawayphotography 🌍 It’s like the worst choose-your-own-adventure book ever. But there is a choice. Some news outlets and commentators would have you believe that ‘they think it’s all over’, that we’re doomed, nothing we can do. The fact is that every 0.001 degree of warming we prevent means lives saved. So every 0.001 degree is absolutely worth fighting for. ‘What can I do?’ At this point, anything! We need everyone involved, ‘there are no passengers on spaceship Earth, only crew’ and we need all hands on deck to tackle this. The only requirement to be a ‘climate person’ is to be a person, that’s it. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have. It’s fine to grieve and rage, the warming may be human induced but we sure as hell don’t all bear equal responsibility for it, it’s ok to be scared and it’s fucking inevitable to be angry at the fossil fuel industry who put us here knowingly. BUT DON’T GIVE IN TO THE DOOM. ‘Rage against the dying of the light’. If you’re local (Glos) then join me @planetcheltenhaminsta if you’re not, first thing you can do is head to @mmmoneymatter_ and make sure not a single penny is funding and fuelling future warming. Let’s get our shit together and do this thing, together. Let’s be good ancestors and leave things better than we found them. #climatechange #communityclimateaction #ecoanxiety #regenerativethinking (Image: projected warming graph from IPCC report) The Met Office has issued its first ever extreme heat warning in the UK. Here a few tips from the NHS website about keeping cool and what to do if someone is suffering from extreme heat. The first and last slides are my own, disclaimer I am not a medical professional, always seek medical advice if you are unsure if someone is suffering from heatstroke. As the climate changes it is likely that the UK will have to deal with more extreme weather events including heat waves. There is a significant gap in people’s knowledge of what to do in heatwaves, and the very real risk to vulnerable people of extreme temperatures. Take some time to check out the NHS website for more information and teach kids about how to cope with hot weather, it might be the hottest weather you’ve experienced but it’s likely this year will be one of the coolest in their lifetimes. Rest is a radical act! It’s so important to take a minute (or hour, or day, or week) from time to time. I don’t know about you but I feel like the last year of working from home has blurred the boundaries of what’s appropriate work wise, and it can be even more difficult to draw boundaries when your living is earned from something you love. In the sustainability industry there are big issues around pay because it’s seen as a passion that people have and also a ‘cause’ that people are willing to work on for free. The work will never be ‘done’ because fixing systems isn’t the work of one singular lifetime. Therefore it’s vital to recognise when it’s ‘enough’. Shifting away from extractive systems also means shifting away from extractive mindsets, labour must be adequately rewarded but we should also be working more sustainably not harder or longer. Automation and AI has long been predicted to ‘take over’ and reduce human labour, Keynes posited this in the 30s, that we would all be working 15 hour weeks. Studies show we’re actually working longer than ever and in what Graeber called ‘Bullshit Jobs’ (37% of UK workers think their job is meaningless). A 4 day week would be a game changer in terms of carbon reduction and giving people more time to volunteer and pursue hobbies, but what about service industries and other low paid jobs? I never use the term ‘low skilled’ only ‘low paid’, because if we’ve learnt anything the last year it’s that those jobs were the most valued and the least valued at the same time. We need a revolution of work and pay on the scale of the labour movements that have given us weekends and better pay and sick pay and rights. Knowing when to step back is a big middle finger to the extractive system, stepping off the conveyor sometimes and agreeing with Dolly that it’s ‘all taking and no giving’. So have that break, block out some time, and you’ll be changing the system one nap at a time.

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