Comments from the Chair

A question I have found going around in my head is what are we doing this for? Why bother with the aims I quoted earlier from our constitution?

· Awareness raising.

It would probably hard to find any adult truly unaware of the issue of global warming, even though many are still unwilling to face the level of threat and take human responsibility for it on board. It would be equally hard to find well informed, intelligent adults who are entirely convinced that there is a realistic chance of slowing it in time to avoid more than 2 degrees of warming and the human suffering that will ensue. What’s the point of trying to raise awareness any more?

· Reducing emissions in the Teign Valley

Why not leave it to individuals to change to low energy lightbulbs and increase their insulation?

· Lobby for action.

Well we’re all disheartened by the failure of lobbying to make much of an impact at Copenhagen and the most energetic lobbies in 2011 seem likely to be around jobs, benefits and University fees. Not much space for longer term, more abstract problems.

I believe that such pessimism, seductive though it is, ignores some fundamentals of human behaviour and of change. As a species we do not think or act on our own. We are constantly influenced by others and what is accepted practice in one generation can come to be considered barbaric a few generations later. A tiny group of Quakers in America first challenged the enslavement of Africans on Christian principles. British Quakers were influenced by them and they realised that a sustained campaign was needed. As well as recruiting Wilberforce who could take the parliamentary process forward they realised they needed to win over a broader section of the British public and joined forces with Methodists and the C of E so that parish churches and Methodists congregations became involved. Wilberforce took the leading role in parliament and was attacked and mocked not just by the vested interests that held that economies would be ruined by the abolition of slavery, but by ordinary people who just thought he had a very uncomfortable bee in his bonnet. Without widespread Christian support from small groups throughout the country Britain would not have been the first country to make slavery illegal. Yet after a number of failures, when the bill was eventually passed it received a widespread rapturous welcome.

A fanciful comparison? An interesting article last Friday described Unilever’s environmental goals as set out by the chief executive Paul Polman. He is looking for long-term investors who “understand that companies need sustainable sourcing and sustainable growth”. He wants Unilever, the 2^nd biggest food and personal goods group in the world, to halve the environmental impact of its products by 2020. This applies not just to the manufacturing process but also to the sourcing and distribution of its products. Unilever emits 3m tonnes of CO2 directly from its factories and offices, but the total carbon impact of its products is 300m tonnes. Polman aims to cut that 300m by 40%. Rather more than we could ever achieve in the Teign Valley. The reason: “that is what consumers want and they are starting to vote with their wallets”. So, local groups, as well as national and international groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, like the World Development Movement, have started to influence the way the all-powerful consumer thinks and spends. Social networking sites seem likely to accelerate this process.

Of course there is some value in each doing our bit, in trying to future proof our own domestic and local needs to eat and move around and keep warm as all these things become more expensive and more difficult. Of course there is also some value in doing what we can to help those in parts of the world already hit hard by Global Warming. Even more importantly, I believe, there have to be groups like Greener Teign to keep two way communication open, there have to be thousands of such groups around the world acting as synapses in a vast neural network firing up pathways to enable us collectively to think differently, as previous generations learned to think differently about slavery, and to start to adjust our collective behaviour to a very challenging new reality. Perhaps it’s exactly at the times when the prospect seems most discouraging that it’s most important to keep going!

Mary Roddick. Chair.

mary@greener-teign.org.uk