Reader Writes January 2023

Dear Granny and Grampa (sic), Well, Happy New Year! You’ll be a little surprised to

receive this letter. I am wondering myself how this is going to work since I am writing to

you from the year 2099; and I’m now roughly the age you both passed away some 70

years ago. Yes, you have both been gone a long time now, but I feel confident that

somehow you will know what I want to say to you. Of course, first, thank you over and over

again, both to you and to my parents, for what you meant to them, and to our wider family.

We somehow became pretty adaptable and managed to cope with the serious challenges

this century has given my generation.

At the risk of saying the blindingly obvious, but none the less for the record, it must be

faced that your generation failed to save our one and only planet from biodiversity and

climate disaster. Astonishingly and shamefully there were climate protesters back in the

twenties who were put in prison for causing public inconvenience when they disrupted “life

as normal”. The succession of COP summits failed to agree life-saving measures to

reduce carbon emissions, let alone take sufficient practical steps. Even worse, political

leaders entertained fossil fuel lobbyists and wilfully hid behind “green-wash”. Short term

expediencies compromised the vital imperative of carbon reduction. There was even a

new coal mine approved by your government in 2022 at the very moment the world was

waking up to reality!

Very shockingly and painfully our planet became uninhabitable for more than a billion of

us; sea-level rise, polar ice and glacier melt, extreme drought, violent storms, floods and

fires both. Existential threats for those of us fortunate enough to be living in more

temperate climates included food shortage, mass climate immigration and extreme

weather events. That was the well anticipated consequence of letting our mean

temperature increase by 3c, and rising. If you had mobilised to treat the situation with the

huge urgency it required, you would have set an example and exercised radical carbon

restraint.

It was so perverse that saving our planet meant changing life-styles in ways far far less

costly than coping with the wreckage my generation lives with now. Air travel; do you need

it? Shipping across the world; was that safe? Eating so much meat? (Don’t worry farmers,

we need you more than ever.) Building with cement? What we all really value, beyond the

trivia of needless consumption, are our families, our friends, our communities; and of

course even more essentially, our faith in God who made the earth and called us to enjoy it

and care for it.

Well, I’ve had a moan at you all from 2099. If only we could just wonderfully turn the clock

back to the twenties. We would have shouted “wake up grand-people!” and start leading

by doing. Put consumption restraint into law; tax carbon, prohibit avoidable emissions, just

stop new oil (and of course new coal). It was partly thanks to you that I became a believer;

and like you I trust in eternal life. Through Jesus Christ our spiritual destination is certain;

and one day he will return and transform our damaged and exhausted world. We’ll come

home to a new Eden where God, the Creator, intends for us to belong.

Robert MacCurrach