Emma Thompson: I miss bees in the visceral way I miss lost family
ACTRESS Emma Thompson has revealed she feels the loss of bees and butterflies, blamed on climate change, as keenly as the deaths of her loved ones.
The outspoken environmental campaigner makes the startling revelation in a new book called Letters To The Earth, in which ecowarriors, politicians and celebrities write messages to the planet.
Oscar-winner Dame Emma says: ‘I can remember how many bees I used to see in parks and gardens in London and on the hills of Argyll. I can remember the variety of butterflies, their miraculous beauty, strength and fragility – I miss them in the visceral way I miss members of my family long since dead.’
The 60-year-old Love Actually and Nanny McPhee star provoked ridicule in May this year when The Mail on Sunday revealed she had taken a first-class flight from Heathrow to New York after joining Extinction Rebellion campaigners in London and urging people to fly less. In the book, she writes: ‘All humans know somewhere deep – somewhere like our spinal cords, somewhere we are not used to communicating with – that our planet is suffering.
‘It’s like being in a sci-fi story where we are under attack from the Martians – except in this story we are the Martians and there is no spaceship out there poised to save us from destruction.’
Dame Emma also talks about the difficulty of reducing humanity’s addictions to scientific innovations and inventions which she says once seemed ‘miraculous’ but are now ‘agents of destruction’.
She writes: ‘It’s hard to let go of our addictions, so hard. But let go we must if we, and the greater web of life of which we are, after all, only a part, are to survive.’
Another contribution comes from actor Sir Mark Rylance, who quit the Royal Shakespeare Company earlier this year in protest at its sponsorship deal with oil giant BP. He writes about light pollution after a trip rafting down the Colorado River in America.
The new book also i ncludes the lyrics to Yoko Ono’s song I Love You, Earth in which the star repeatedly proclaims her affection f or t he pl anet and its wonders.