Panel Discussion
- The panel discussion featuring Diana Liverman, Mark Lynas, Robert May and Tony Juniper (see picture), attracted over 200 people, and generated plenty of discussion.
- We've got multiple copies of 'Six Degrees' by Mark Lynas, and 'How Many Lightbulbs does it take to change a planet?' by Tony Juniper. Borrow them and be the first Climate Change bookclub!
Conjuring the Heroic
The ClimateXChange workshop ‘Creative responses to Climate Change - conjuring the heroic' workshop was sold out well in advance, so we'll be running a further series of creative writing workshops and events. Contact us if you're interested in being involved.
The workshop stimulated some inspiring and heartfelt writing, some of which is featured on these pages. The writing focussed around three themes - two of which are reflected below in the writing of Emma Howell and Jenny Barrett.
Theme: 20:20, a dystopian vision of the future. "For evil to triumph it is only necessary that good men and women do nothing" (to misquote Edmund Burke)
My son
My son cannot breathe. He lies in a room where the darkest blinds cannot fight off the sun.
Warnings from the radio - 1 degree higher tomorrow. His chest moves rapidly, pearls of sweat run down his face.
I watch. I hold his hand. I pray that the weather will break, that the hospital wards will empty, that my son will breathe again.
Feverishly dreaming he tries to talk, remembering summers from twenty years ago. Raspberries growing in the garden, all the effort of dragging water from the rain butt to the dry cracked soil. Chubby hands, determined green fingers.
Like my son, the raspberries are fading, withered by ultra violet, parched, desperate.
I wait. I hold his hand.
© Emma Howell (for a son with pollen asthma)
SHIPPING FORECAST
Sunset
Scarlet ibis glide in
to nest for the night
as the swamp breathes a sigh
of relief
Breathes
Bamboo boatmen slide out
from under the house stilts
to scavenge for not yet rotted flesh
reciting the ancient rhyme:
"Visibility poor..."
© Jenny Barrett 2007
A USEFUL LIFE
You feed me
You till me
You water me
You plant me
You harvest me
You plunder me
You demand of me
You waste me
You watch me dry out
You watch me flood
You send people to harvest me
who haven't enough to feed themselves
You think I've always been here
You think I always will be
You're wrong
I can slide
I can subside
I can sink
I can erode
I can expire
I can end
my useful life
Somebody stop me
© Jenny Barrett 2007
Theme: Carbon Rationing - the new Austerity, or a 'Call to Adventure? Values in a carbon-neutral society ...
Guerilla Gardening
I skulk and sneak and move in shadows. An agricultural apparition, a dream that may have happened.
I propagate and regenerate, reclaim and redistribute.
Robin Hood of the trowel and compost, ensuring that Goldilock's bowl will always be full.
You turn and turn again, bemused by the bulge of raspberries on roundabouts, embankments aglow with Cinderella's pumpkins, tomatoes abundant on grass verges.
And then I move on.
Learn from me, share the secret, take the seeds and the hidden spaces, the unused earth and eat and give and prosper.
Emma Howell
A MOTHER'S MANIFESTO
I propose
- to keep a goat in the cellar and heat the house on the methane
- to warm water through black plastic pipes on the roof
- to filter waste water and use it again
- to share what we have with those who have not
Turn me down at your peril
© Jenny Barrett 2007
