Climate change: the Wolvercote connection 27 September 06

[This article was penned for the Flying Goose, Wolvercote's newly-launched parish magazine. (For anyone who doesn't know, Wolvercote is my home village, on the north side of Oxford.) Perhaps because of the positive element, it brought me the best feedback of perhaps anything I've written!]

How’s this for a checklist of doom: coral reefs disappearing; ice-caps melting; mountain glaciers in retreat; rainforests burning down; droughts and deserts expanding; starving refugees swarming the globe. It’s the sort of dystopian future that environmentalists like me often talk about, and with good reason. For the past two years I have been making an almost daily pilgrimage down the Woodstock Road to the Radcliffe Science Library, stockpiling scientific reports about our likely future in a globally-warmed world. My conclusions will be published next year in a book called Six Degrees, which details the likely impacts we will all face as global warming slowly intensifies, degree by degree.

As you might imagine, what I have discovered has left me profoundly worried, particularly as some of it already seems to be happening, much earlier than scientists predicted. This July was the hottest month ever recorded in the UK, and the drought is now in its second year. If the situation continues to deteriorate, food production will be endangered across large parts of England, and rivers will dry up, leaving millions of people short of water. As I hauled bucket after bucket of slimy green water out of the canal to keep my thirsty sweetcorn plants alive on my allotment at Upper Wolvercote, it seemed that the dire predictions for the future were already coming true.

But living in Wolvercote also keeps me sane. The big picture may be depressing, but living in a village like this means that I can do my bit in helping prevent global warming. I can cycle up and down the towpath every time I need to catch a train. I can forswear the use of a car, and take holidays within the UK (flying is the worst form of transport because of its very high carbon dioxide emissions). I can shop at First Turn Stores and the Post Box rather than going to big supermarkets, and visit the crowded farmers’ market on Sunday mornings. All of these things point the way to a future which is neither doom-laden nor depressing; a future where people unite to keep the globe habitable by acting together in a multitude of different positive ways.

Nay-sayers often accuse environmentalists of wanting us all to live in caves and wear hair shirts, but my experience in Wolvercote proves them wrong. I enjoy my life a lot more because I feel rooted in my community, and through being secretary of the allotments association I have got to know a fascinating cross-section of people in the local area. Yes, we talk about courgettes and carrots, but we also talk about other things in our lives. Call me a gossip, but I enjoy the interaction so much that I feel it is no wonder that so many people find themselves depressed in our atomised and increasingly anonymous society. Who needs therapy (still less retail therapy) when you can have a good grumble to the neighbours?

So even whilst I spent all day researching the problem of global warming, I spent all evening living and experiencing the solution. We don’t all need to shiver in caves to stop the planet frying, we need to re-learn how to live in smaller communities, to travel less, to eat local foods and to generate our own electricity. It’s much greener to spend all summer lounging around sipping ale at The Plough than it is to sit in traffic on the ring road on the way to out-of-town superstores. Now how’s that for a more positive vision? Cheers!