Richard 's Letter

To my family ,

At the age of 52 I have witnessed the decline of nature around me for many years. They call it shifting baseline; each generation is used to the biodiversity that surrounds them at the time, and we were saddened but kind of resigned to its seemingly inevitable depletion. Growing up in rural Dorset for my first ten years, farmers would spray crops from the air, the toxic chemicals depleting insect life and all the creatures that depended upon them. They talked of ‘tidiness’ where anything that doesn’t look like an arable crop was flailed. At the age of 10 we moved to the New Forest for a few years, and it was striking how the absence of commercial agriculture took the harshness of the hand of man off of the natural World.
Back in Dorset I saw the further intensification of agriculture and it hurt to see its effects.
In recent years it felt like a shift was occurring, there was talk of rewilding and wildflower meadows were being appreciated for the treasure they are.
But suddenly in 2022 politicians strangely talked of ‘progress’ at the expense of nature, they didn’t seem to care and dismissed anyone who does care about the important things in life as an ‘anti growth coalition’. Crazy. But all of us that cared about the good things of the World; biodiversity, clean rivers, clean air and the end of fossil fuels stood up and firmly said no to the backward, greedy politicians who seemed intent on making profits for themselves and their friends over nature. It was a seismic shift in political thinking but hopefully you can see, in 2030, that this beautiful World matters far more than the misguided human greed of the politicians in power in the Autumn of 2022.