Jess's Letter

To my brother Chris,

Hey Chris,

Well here you are in the future. If my maths is any good your 50th is coming up!

I'm writing to you today, 1 October 2022 so we can remember how far we've come as a society in just 8 years.

It's Big Green Week and a national day of action around the country with the message, Enough is Enough. The demands seem so reasonable it's hard to believe they have to be made here in the UK in 2022. A real pay rise, slash energy bills, end food poverty, decent homes for all and tax the rich. To this I would add stop greenhouse gas emissions and support nature. The thing is, focusing on these two things will help with the others (I'll remind you how this works in a bit).

As you remember, our generation failed to recognise the damage our overconsumption was doing to ourselves and nature. We put money above all else, forgetting that business, government and the economic systems we created should be there to serve the people - not the other way around!

Right now it feels like we'll never turn things around. We'll be facing old age in searing heat - droughts, fires and devastating storms even here in the UK. Our childhood home in Australia will become unliveable.

So I'm writing in the hope that we've sorted our shit out and finally changed our value system to put people and nature before profit. By the time you read this, an economy investing in net zero and nature will have boosted skills, productivity and wages. Renewable energy will have stopped our reliance on finite resources, cutting energy costs for good. Restoring soil health and farming sustainably for local consumption, while reducing food waste, will mean there's food for everyone. Retrofitting old homes with insulation and double glazing will be keeping them warmer in increasingly extreme winters and cooler in our hotter summers. Alongside building genuinely affordable energy efficient homes, this will have created jobs and improved lives for years to come. Taxing the rich to pay for this - the super rich and the companies who have been profiting from people and natural resources for decades - well, it's a no brainer isn't it!

Got to get off the bus now to go to a protest. Hoping we've kept speaking out, doing it for all the people and plants and creatures we'll never know but who will somehow know we gave a shit. Love you!

Jess xx