Taking responsibility
Alison Leonard looks back at Christmas 2015 and reflects on the past year
It is strange to look at our photographs of Christmas Day last year. All I see in our faces is a kind of innocence. It was the last day that I knew climate change was the overwhelming issue of our time but still assumed it wouldn’t actually affect me. Of course, I knew that the valley we had just moved into was regularly flooded; members of our family had lived right next to Hebden Water, which flows into the River Calder. They had heard the wartime warning siren at the time of the last flood, in June 2012.
But nothing prepared me for the sound of that siren at 7am on Boxing Day 2015. It propelled me out of bed and round the corner – about thirty yards from our house – and I saw, where the main road usually took traffic through our village, one long, wide, filthy lake. It went over the entrance to the petrol station, through the doors to the Co-op and was washing into the primary school. The sight hit me like a physical shock.
An earlier shock, a few months before, was the arrival of hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants onto European shores. I had felt then that we in the UK should have known this was coming. We made an empire out of our own emigration; we negotiated a raw deal for our newly independent colonies; we embroiled ourselves in the foreign wars that now engulf millions. We have brought this on ourselves.
When it became clear that the floods devastating Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd were also sweeping through Cumbria, York, Leeds, Manchester, and areas of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland north and south, I felt the same: We have brought this on ourselves. We know that fossil fuels must stay in the ground, yet we fly. We know the consequences of rearing cattle and sheep, yet we go on eating meat. We know that renewables and public transport are essential, yet we opt for fracking and the private car.
This is not Christmas cheer, Friends. If these two issues come together – as they will, as they are already doing – Bangladesh and other countries will be flooded and their populations will be desperately knocking at the doors of Europe.
We can do nothing to change the behaviour of the climate-change-deniers currently warming their powerful chairs over the Atlantic. The only behaviour we can change is our own. And we can try (something that is far more difficult, I find) to be courageous enough to challenge our friends – and Friends – to do the same. Fly only if you must. Treat meat as a luxury. Reuse, repair, recycle. Believe that the End is Nigh, and act accordingly.
I find it as difficult as anyone, and fail as often. But it needs saying, and it needs us to help each other to say it and to do it. Happy Christmas, Friends, and a different new year.
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