Peter Mewton's Letter

To my grandchildren ,

Dear Grandsons and Granddaughter,
When you were 11, 8, 6 & 5 years old respectively the World, Earth the planet you and everyone lived in was in great danger. The activities, mainly the industrialisation, fuelled by fossil organo-carbon reserves, of many generations, including mine, had changed the world’s climate. This caused terrible floods, drought, fires loss of wild habitats and consequently extinction of many species and endangering many others. My generation and the one before it were the worst perpetrators of this damage, because of rampant consumption encouraged by those who monetised the value of everything. They were capitalists fashioning society to enrich a few and impoverish many.
However some of us realised what we had done and started to try to change politics and lifestyles to become more planet and climate friendly. We had to act if you all were to have a decent future. So we drastically cut down flying of aeroplanes, driving of cars and polluting home heating systems and generated energy from natural sources, solar, wind and water power and so cancelled any more mining of fossil fuels and eliminated bit by bit , as quick as possible any use of fossil fuels . Because we acted now, at my time of writing, we were able to limit the rise in climate temperature to 2 degrees celsius. Unfortunately climate disasters were already happening and we were powerless to stop that but stopped it getting worse. If we can reverse the temperature increase, say to 1 degree it will greatly improve your future lives.
I am sorry for the damage we caused and handing down to you a world less diverse in life and less beautiful than the one we inherited. Hopefully what we have preserved is still able to sustain your lives and happiness.
We also had to change the economic system and social hierarchy by levelling down those with control of money and power creating a system in which everyone had means to control their lives.This enabled everyone to be fairly and equally rewarded for the new jobs that had to be done in our new climate and nature friendly ecological society.
These things we had to do now. We had no choice. We don’t want or deserve any credit for that action. We are just grateful that we won the battle against the opposing forces of capitalism and autocratic, divisive politics. We hope we did enough to allow you to have reasonable and peaceful lives able to care for those who were displaced because of irreversible damage we did. I am sure that you will be living very different lives in harmony with and mutually reliant with all the wonderful species that still populate the planet with you.
You must be happier for that but once again sorry for my part in handing on to you a degraded but thankfully still living Earth.

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