In my blog of 24th Feb I was moaning about rubbish, particularly plastic, and the damage it causes to sea wildlife and more generally. This one isn’t going to be too cheery either. Someone on the radio recently said that he thought it was “hubris” to think that humans are affecting planet Earth. What a load of nonsense that view is! All you have to do is look around you and sniff the air to detect our effect, and pretty much every day the news tells us of some new problem: a species dying out, an oil tanker run aground, a glacier melting that shouldn’t be, bumble bees dying unexpectedly, deforestation, insufficient recycling, etc. etc. The common factor in all of these is us humans doing things to the planet that cause devastation on smaller or larger scales.

The problems that will be faced by the next few generations will be serious and hard to handle: overpopulation, high levels of population, diminishing supplies of fresh water, increasing cost of food, risk of global conflict with “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and so on and so on. We are handing future generations a poisoned chalice.

As individuals, there is little we can do on a global scale: an ant cannot deflect an an elephant. But if enough ants get together they can make a difference and for their small stature, ants are relatively very strong.. There is much we can do (and this is only a very small list):

Recycle more
Turn our heating down by 1 degree and wear a jumper,
Walk and cycle for short journeys
Use more public transport
Buy more efficient vehicles
Use energy saving light bulbs
Avoid buying over packaged produce
Try and buy local produce
Eat less meat
Write to your government representatives and tell them how you feel

This last one is perhaps the most important. If governments don’t know what the public think, they won’t be doing the right things.

My mum arrived as planned, and we had a lovely walk on the beach with the dogs and a lovely reddish sunset that looked quite a lot like the one above (perhaps not a delight for shepherds as it‘s a grey day this morning!). We’ll be having a nice long look round the shops in Aberystwyth soon.

Cheers, Tom.