Rev Pamela A F Crane's Letter

To my Grand-daughter,

My dearest girl,
You live on the opposite side of the world to me. I haven't seen you since you were seven, and now you will be a beautiful, intelligent and sensitive woman. But what world you are now living in depends, tragically, on the whims of blinkered and greedy men who will continue to do all they can to frustrate the passionate efforts of good people to reverse the pace of Earth's climate change and heal its effects on nature and humanity. As I write, the representatives of many nations are meeting in Egypt at 'the Place of Peace' in yet another attempt to turn this catastrophic tide, now that they can no longer ignore the clamour of the young whose futures are at stake - like you - and the wise. We don't know if this 27th time the conference will lead to the positive changes we all need to make.
We all had the most wonderful opportunity to start the process of change when Covid hit us; during lockdown we learned how much lovelier the world was without crowds, noise, traffic, planes. We could hear the birdsong clearly for the first time in many, many decades. We could see the stars. We made changes to our working practices that have actually continued to a considerable extent. We should have grasped that chance, and built on the vision that it offered of a new and restored world. But it is in human nature to go stir-crazy when freedoms are restricted for too long; so as soon as we began to control the virus, most populations went straight back to their old destructive habits - many, like overseas holidays, looked on as 'human rights' in our self-centred culture. So back came the planes, the traffic, the wastefulness as the voices of protest were blocked out and acts of protest were treated as criminal nuisance.
There are far too many of us, and we all want the same stuff as fast as possible, all the time. We choose not to notice what we destroy in the endless process of self-gratification. So Gaia has been making us notice. Like a body with a virus, the Earth chooses to fight us off with a fury of feverish heat. This may end up sooner or later killing us all, and you may never get this letter, drowned or incinerated with a ruined world. But while even the war-mongers are talking amid the ever more tangible crisis, we still - just about - have hope. It will be far more difficult to make the essential changes than if we had started half a century ago, but maybe we are at last desperate enough to break free of our old habits. I probably won't see the outcome as I am now an old woman. I pray, dearest girl, that you see beauty return to this precious, irreplaceable Earth. Please be part of that change. Gaia needs loving better.