Time to make a difference locally
Fifty years ago there were plenty of tadpoles and hardly any obese kids or lifestyle diseases or climate change.
I am 54 with school age children. I remember when I was at school, there was one overweight kid out of 500 and it was because he had some strange medical condition, so less than one per cent.
Take a look at the kids today and it seems more like 20 per cent of the kids are quite seriously overweight, and apparently these lovely youngsters will likely end up with diabetes and have a difficult life.
The doctors say the main problem is poor diet. I say it is convenient processed food that has little nutrient value.
My Mum has Parkinson’s and my Dad dementia. I have Crohn’s disease and my wife’s mother died of cancer at 59. I think I’m right in saying that these are all lifestyle diseases.
To the sceptics that think climate change is not happening, and is not caused by human activity, read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change latest report.
I guess we all thought that smoking tobacco was okay once upon a time, until the message finally got through.
Now that I have kids, my wife and I took them to the Ashley River to see the tadpoles, as my wife had when she was little. We found none.
I asked myself why not and I assumed it has something to do with the degradation of the water quality.
The thing that ties all of these things together is fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels have allowed amazing changes in the way we live. Pre fossil fuels, the majority of people lived and worked on the land and had little in material terms.
The advance of technology that fossil fuels have allowed has brought significant benefits and allowed us to migrate to the cities and enjoy some level of sophistication and huge material wealth and convenience.
Fossil fuels allowed the creation of chemicals and modern fertilisers that are ruining our soil, water, plant and animal health, and in turn ruining our public health.
Fossil fuels are causing climate change.
It has all come at a cost and I wonder if this cost isn’t too great. It seems to me that this has all been unsustainable.
History tells us that our governments will be too slow to act as they are weighed down by having to get the right polls.
We need to take action for ourselves at a local level.
I have simplified what is a very complex systemic issue in the hope of raising awareness and also to find a few people who want to do something about it.
* A Public Meeting on ‘‘Planning for our future at a community level’’ will be held at the Ashley School Hall on October 20 from 7.30pm