Alia's Letter

To my unborn grandchild,

Dear Jo
I’m writing this to you now before you’re even born, but if you’re reading this, then hooray, love and optimism overcame logic. It means you were born and you should be all grown up now. Your parents at the present time are in a huge quandary. They don’t think this is the world to bring a child into. They’re looking at our world and are seeing the temperatures rising, the ocean levels rising, they see drought and floods, hunger and disease, our politicians reneging on every promise, people becoming less tolerant and forgetting to be kind to one another. This is just not the world to bring a child into and I agree. My advice to your parents, should they ask, would be that possibly, just possibly you or another of your generation might be the one to actually help us out of this crisis.
I just hope the ‘world’ comes to its senses. We can’t eat money. We can’t drink money. We can’t breathe money. We need clean air, good nutritious food, clean water, shelter and security for all the world's inhabitants and I just hope that this is what you have in your world.
I was a late baby boomer. I enjoyed all the fruits of fossil fuel, and of course am responsible for my part in the damage done. I clocked up my air miles travelling the world, I enjoyed driving my fuel guzzling cars, I had the convenience of plastic. I heated my house with fossil fuels. I had antibiotics that worked, I put fertilisers and peat on my plants and probably ruined the soils. It just seems so shocking now that we were so uneducated and so naive and had no idea and believed what we were told. Namely, that we should be striving for more, we should all be getting richer every year and having more every year and there should be a growth, growth, growth. As if the planet could expand without limit and keep on providing.
Well, I’m sorry, I am really sorry. And I just hope that you are reading this, and I hope that you understand that in my small part, once I was informed of the horrors that we were facing and how we were abusing our planet, I did try my best to put things right in my own small way with my team of WI Climate Ambassadors. We did what we could and went out encouraging everyone to do what they could to try to make a difference. We lobbied our councillors and our politicians, to little effect I have to say, but I just hope that enough was done to make this a secure world for you.
Know that I love even the idea of you. You represent my greatest hope that there will be a future.
Your loving grandma Alia xxxx