My niece’s graduation ceremony took place in July 2019. It happened to be on the hottest day ever recorded in the UK. The event was in London, the London traffic was at a standstill. The CO2 output from the idling cars plus the air-conditioning must have been immense. That was just one capital city in the globe.
The UK parliament had recently declared a Climate and Environmental Emergency, naively I thought that this would raise awareness in the general public. However most people didn’t even know that an emergency had been declared. My family would not have been aware had I not told them. I felt a real spoilt-sport, it was a day of celebration. All I could do was worry about how bleak the future looked for us all. My anxieties were overwhelming.
Seeing a terrifying future that no-one else can see, is a very dark place. Only such anguish could create these poems. The lockdown has brought our family closer together. We now have a Zoom get together every week, and they have all been very supportive of my endeavours to raise awareness about climate and ecological collapse.