Hilary ROLLIN's Letter

To my great grandchildren, children of William, Emily, Florence and Imogen,

Dear darling great grandchildren,

I am sure your parents will have told you about all the efforts we made to try to preserve the planet as we had known t when we were children long ago. When I was a child we lived simply; it was after the Second World War. Life then was much simpler. Can you imagine a world without television or mobile phones? Many families did not have a car. We were lucky and we did have one.

What we didn't know then was how the world would change, or the harm that we would be doing to the environment. It was only over time that people began to realise that picking wild flowers, or taking birds' eggs from their nests, or using poisons to kill the weeds, or going by car when we could have walked, or flying to far-away countries, or using plastic ... was having a bad effect on Nature, on biodiversity, and on the climate.

Some people did realise, and we did our utmost to use less electricity, to re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose, to mend, and in general to live sustainably. But other people said this was all nonsense and they carried on consuming wildly even though we were asked not to. Big companies wanted to sell their their products and make a profit; people kept on buying clothes that released microplastics into the air. We tried really hard to use less electricity, but our efforts were as nothing in comparison with the big organisations who kept bright lights on all night, and shops that sold fruit and vegetables produced in far-off counties and brought in by air.
Many of us tried so hard, but I am really afraid that our efforts may have been too late. This is why I am writing to you, my darlings, to say sorry that you can't enjoy the same clean air, pure water, the lovely trees, the wildlife, flowers, the birdsong that we enjoyed... because our generation was ignorant of the harm it was doing, and when it did begin to know, it was greedy and people didn't take action.
With our love, and apologies Great Granny and Pop