WHILE YOU WERE GONE

As we continue to come to terms with a global pandemic, the end to which is very very far from in sight, so we have grown bored, indifferent, or in denial of the very real, very continued threat of that old adversary Climate Change.

Boring, right? I’m bored just saying it, writing it, even thinking it.

But hell, you know, it’s been two years since we were warned we had twelve years to put the brakes on, and that even if we did everything in our power we would still get a minimum of 1.5 degrees of global warming.

Those tides are still going to wipe away your expensive waterside residence. They are still going to submerge your holiday paradise. And I mention these because clearly very few are bothered about the millions and millions of people very soon to be displaced from their homes, from permanently flooded land across the globe.

So

With no significant action taken, and precious little planned, we can only see this as an inevitability.

No point getting angry or trying to scare people, the time for that has passed already.

What is left to do?

We need to learn to be less comfortable and to reassess our idea of what comfort and necessity actually mean?

What is it you really need?

We need to get back in touch with nature, her vagaries and power and unpredictablity

this film, this blog, this magazine

Is part revelation of our unwillingness so far to do so, and a meditation and exploration on how we humans might adapt

On how we might still find some hope.

A return to the wild

Will we stand in a shower of ashes or a shower of blossoms?

Can we learn to accept a life lived in harmony with chaos?

We talk to those who have chosen to live away from the slavery and the demands and the materialism of modern life, people who have chosen to live in remote communities like Skye and Arran.

We call them THE OUTLIERS

We talk to the young of the Inner Cities, ignored, marginalised, angry and indifferent, who inhabit a New Sparta with its own rules and tenets.

We call the THE DISENFRANCHISED

We talk to the middle class young, who know all too well what is coming, who continue to press on, with their education and their jobs and friendships, knowing with daily conscious dread that it may soon all be gone.

We call the THE FEARFUL

We talk to the bankers and the developers, still hacking away at squeezing the last bit of juice out of the planet, the last remnants of fossil fuel, the last scrapings of human resources.

We call them THE INDIFFERENT

We talk to the scientists, activists, authors and communicators who have tried every way there is to highlight our road to nowhere, to little avail.

We call them the STILL-HOPEFUL

And all of these, we call THE FUTURELESS