Jo Gibb's Letter

To my children Isla and Alex ,

I desperately pray that in 2030, your teenage years are filled with hope, rather than despair.
That our country has made a massive transition to becoming carbon neutral, and with it a huge cultural and societal shift. We shall be powered fully by renewable sources; our homes will be warm and insulated; we will have greater connected communities with locally grown food, efficient and well connected public transport, and a society which re-uses rather than consumes.
Our joy will be found in being connected with others, growing food and cooking together, fixing and making things together, working on small patches of land to restore nature. We will have built stronger and more resilient communities.
And how will our country have done this? By our Governments taking decisive and brave action; through windfall taxes; by taking us away from oil and gas and investing heavily in renewables; by training up a huge workforce of tradesmen to retrofit homes; by enabling communities to buy land and to provide resources to empower them to make change happen at a local level; by strengthening rather than weakening the legislation and policies which protect and restore nature. And communities will have responded to the clear and decisive direction Government is finally taking and are empowered to make change happen.

And if our Governments don’t do this? If they continue down the road of ‘grow the economy’ then I dread to think… I cannot bear to think what your future will hold. It breaks my heart.

But we will do all we can to hold out hope, to push for change and make our Governments accountable. Because yours, and each and every life on this earth is precious and a miracle, and cannot be squandered. We will make this future happen.
Love mummy