When you turn on the news and hear that the
Arctic may be "ice free" during the summer in as little as 10 years, it's obvious that something dreadful and dramatic is going on. What exactly are we doing about it, and do the majority just assume someone's already working on solving these issues, so why bother? Today is
Blog Action Day '09. More than 8,000 bloggers have agreed to post something today on the most important issue of our time - Climate Change. Here's my bit.
The first thing to say is that everybody needs to do something, and I know I'm not doing enough. As a family we recycle, we use low energy bulbs, and we try and watch our energy consumption, but that's always a little difficult in a house full of gadgets and technology. I'm a great believer in putting something back in to the community - I'm chairman of my local parish council - Sandridge in St. Albans covering about 5,000 homes (that's the third tier of local government here in the UK and nothing to do with the Church). We are proud to be a carbon neutral council, in that we use green energy within our two community centres, we've installed solar panels on one of them to promote the idea of renewable energy sources, and we've planted a lot of trees in our woodland park. You should be checking out your local council, councillors, MP and seeing what their Green credentials are like. Factor that in to your decision making in the upcoming general election.
Here are two practical things you can do to find out more:
Go and spend 90 minutes watching
Yann Arthus-Bertrand's movie HOME. This is a simply stunning documentary about the change that is happening all around our planet with the most amazing aerial photography I have ever seen. I have no doubt you will be deeply moved - to me it has significantly more impact that
Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth (which is still good in parts). Go and download Home on to your iPhone from the App store, or
watch it on the web.
Find out about
Carbon War Room. This is an initiative started by Richard Branson, Jonathan Porritt and others that breaks down the battle in to 7 theatres of war. Their site is full of good resources, widgets and wisdom enough to make you think about this topic. It has this great quote from Winston Churchill:
"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."
Above all, go do something.
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