Articles and Press Releases
Articles written for the local press in Uttlesford and for St Mary’s Parish Church Saffron Walden as part of the Eco Church project
Plastic Treaty Failure
We have all seen, either first hand while on holiday, or in the media, the appalling tonnage of plastic waste building up in our oceans and in countries where it has been shamelessly dumped. In 2019, the WWF found that each of us could be ingesting the equivalent of a credit card o...
Read MoreWhatever Happened to the Boat Race?
Traditions are an important part of any culture and one tiny part of our national identity is the throwing in of the victorious coxes at the end of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Races. They were particularly dramatic races this year, but neither the cox of the Women’s Race nor the Men&rs...
Read MoreWhatever Can I do?
We can no longer be unaware of the facts of the climate crisis: the never-ending news stories of fires, floods and disasters; the constant breaking of temperature records; the sequence of rain and storms that make roads impassable and scupper enjoyment of our gardens. In the face of...
Read MoreThey can’t both be right
Our MP seems to be digging deep holes for herself. Not content with informing her friends in the Daily Mail that she was sacking Post Office chief, Henry Staunton, before she contacted him; she is now engaged in a high-profile exchange of accusations with him out of which only one can emerge w...
Read MoreCutting back on our Future
As the rain lashed down and Uttlesford braced itself for more floods and high winds, the Labour Party reversed its pledge to invest £28bn in our future. Ironically, they did this on the very day when the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that the planet heated by 1.5 ...
Read MoreSo how did we do in 2023?
2023 was not a good year. After what was probably the hottest July in 120,000 years, the latest international measurements put us at 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial times. Indeed, for two days in November the world registered a staggering 2 degrees above. In the Arctic...
Read MoreWhat future for our Children?
What a joy it was to see so many children processing from St Mary’s with their lanterns, eagerly anticipating the switching on of the lights! Joyful but heartrending. It breaks my heart to think of the abused and polluted planet we older generations are passing on to them. &nb...
Read MoreA Christmas Carol
We are all aware of how tough life has become for the poorest in our society, with Food Banks probably our fastest growing industry. A report by the Centre for Social Justice this month warns that the UK is in danger of slipping back into a Victorian age with a widening gap between mainst...
Read MoreConcern for the Integrity of our Politicians
The Green Party stall on Saffron Walden market last week threw up some interesting results. Passers-by were invited to put sticky dots against their priorities for the next election. There were 13 options but only 4 dots were allowed, so a great deal of thinking was involved! ...
Read MoreElection Speculation
Uttlesford seems to be full of speculation about the chances of Kemi Badenoch losing her seat following the Tories’ disastrous results in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire. However most Tories stayed at home rather than vote Labour, so I’m not sure that Labour is the most likely benefi...
Read MoreFire and Ice!
This summer, sailing to Iceland and Greenland, I witnessed an amazing combination of erupting volcanoes, icebergs and whales while the world continued to suffer the devastating effects of the climate crisis: wildfires which torched more than 500 sq km of Greece; the evacuation of Rhodes; unc...
Read MoreExceptionalism and the Bridge
In May the World Meteorological Organisation forecast that global temperatures will most probably exceed the 1.5°c limit of warming set by the Paris Agreement within the next five years. This was supposed to be the decade in which we turned things around, but we are still accelerating in t...
Read MoreNurses as Cannon Fodder
With the nurses, doctors and teachers continuing their strike actions, the government is giving out a clear message: “If you want to dedicate your career to providing critical public services, you must expect to be used as a pawn in the Government’s fight against inflation. ...
Read MoreGet it in Perspective!
The sudden and dramatic changes in the balance of Earth are sometimes attributed to the vast natural cycles of our planet. In order to distinguish them, we need a sense of scale. If we turn years into inches: · Man started using fire in...
Read MoreWomens Cycling v Ultra Processed Food
Wow! What an awesome display of physical fitness as the best female cyclists in the world swept through Saffron Walden! Such grace and power! They flowed effortlessly up hills that I find increasingly challenging each year! Cycling in Saffron Walden is growing in popularity,...
Read MoreAn Unthinksble Legacy
“Humanity is on thin ice and the ice is melting fast.” Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, doesn’t mince his words when he speaks to world leaders. You remember his ‘Code Red for Humanity’ in 2021? His latest warning came as the IPCC (Internatio...
Read MoreMinds over Matter
Eco Church has 5 dimensions: Worship, Buildings, Land, Community Engagement and Lifestyles. Very often, concerns about Church Buildings dominate our thinking. Old churches present huge challenges: how can they be insulated? Draught proofed? Heated and lit using clean energy? And how can we pos...
Read MorePotholes: our Broken Economic System
Ba-Bang! Another pot-hole hit just a mile north of Saffron Walden. I glanced at my warning lights to see if my experience of 2 years ago when I lost both nearside tyres on a vicious pothole had been repeated. Luckily not this time. No roadside rescue truck needed. Imagine the result if I&rsq...
Read MoreThank goodness Juries understand the Crisis!
January 2023 An elderly vicar and the editor of Green Christian were amongst the Insulate Britain protesters who were found not guilty of causing a public nuisance in January 2023. The crown court jury returned unanimous ‘not guilty’ verdicts despite having been instruct...
Read MoreBalancing the Carbon Budget
While Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt grapple with balancing the UK budget, with all the implications for our taxes and the balancing of our domestic finances, a much bigger and more dangerous budget is ticking away. We are living on a ‘Carbon Budget’: the amount of carbon we ...
Read MoreThe Queen has kept her pledges. It’s time to keep ours.
June 2022 During the Platinum Jubilee, we celebrated and gave thanks to the Queen for keeping the vow she made over 70 years ago to serve the nation and Commonwealth. She has been faultless in keeping that vow. At the Jubilee service in St Paul’s Cathedral, representatives of...
Read MorePaying the Price - Heat and Drought
July 2022 Let’s be in no doubt about it. Humanity is beginning to pay the price for our negligence about the Climate Crisis, and that price is only going to increase. India and Pakistan have been suffering from exceptionally high temperatures since March this year. The hot season arrived unu...
Read MoreWhat the Summer taught us
August 2022 The drought and record-breaking temperatures of summer brought home to us all the harsh reality of the climate crisis. The heat was almost unbearable. Farmers struggled. Gardens were scorched. Then the skies broke and the rains came flooding down. &...
Read MoreWhat did you do about Climate Change?
February 2022 We are probably all familiar with the First World War recruitment poster of the little girl asking her father, ‘What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’ and the look of shame and guilt on the face of the father who has clearly not yet enlisted. So w...
Read MoreDitch Desperate Dan for Lent!
Published in March Parish News Arguably the single biggest thing you can do for the environment is eat less meat. Here are a few facts:* · The carbon footprint of a beefburger is fifty times greater than the carbon footprint of a simil...
Read MoreGas! Gas! Gas!
Published in April Parish News With gas prices soaring even before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, National Insurance about to go up and inflation on the rise, some are claiming that now is not the time to make the switch to clean energy or to worry about the climate crisis...
Read MoreEaster was a Zeitenwende too!
Published in May Parish News Germany, 50% of whose gas comes from Russia, is facing a massive energy crisis. Its other primary sources of energy are lignite, a particularly polluting form of fossilised peat, and coal. Austria imports 65% of its gas from Russia and Poland: 70%. They ar...
Read MoreCan democracy save us?
Published in June Parish News I am getting increasingly concerned that democracy is incapable of addressing climate change. It has a spectacularly long record of failing to do so! It is 30 years since 154 states at the United Nations signed an international treaty to combat “...
Read MoreIt's time to get Excited!
It is time to get excited about the possibilities of a life lived in harmony with our ecosystems! The possibilities for happiness, social justice, economic and emotional fulfilment are still available on our precious and delicate planet, if we are only prepared to change now. ...
Read MoreAs ye sow, so shall ye reap!
I have greatly enjoyed acquiring a new skill this year: that of scything. Indeed, the first thing I learned is that you don’t ‘scythe’ with a scythe; you Mow. The ‘One man (who) went to mow, went to mow a meadow…’ went with his scythe and the four, five, si...
Read MoreRing out for Climate!
When this edition of the Parish News gets published, the UN Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow will be about to start, and I will be in a state of extreme nervousness! Back in the summer I was appointed as a Christian Aid Climate Campaign Organiser, with a brief to raise awaren...
Read MoreA budget for the past
I was sickened by the self-interested moaning of the Ryanair spokesperson about the delay in Rishi Sunak’s halving of Air Passenger Duty in your article last week. Looking up the costs of getting to Glasgow, a return flight from Stansted would have cost me £71 compared to a r...
Read MoreA toilet for Christmas
Fresh from singing ‘Enough is Enough’, many minds must have pondered once again how sad it is to see Christmas so commercialised and wondered what they could do about it. Politicians have completed their negotiations at COP 26, and maybe provided some reassurance that the...
Read MoreWhat is COP 26 and why does it matter?
COP is the ‘Conference of the Parties’ and the 2021 meeting in Glasgow this November will be the 26th meeting. They started following UN treaty agreed in 1994. We are all aware of the Paris Agreement in 2015, COP 21, at which countries agreed to try to keep global warming dow...
Read MoreWhat does Climate Justice actually mean?
When I take to the streets to protest about the destruction of the planetary balance we depend on, the most popular chant is: “What do we want?” &nb...
Read MoreStatement to Stansted Expansion Inquiryl 14th January 2021
I was immensely proud of the UDC councillors when they overturned MAG’s application to expand the airport. They were courageous in disregarding the shockingly one-sided advice of their planning officers, and unanimously agreeing that climate change, air quality and noise were material co...
Read MoreBeing Ethical isn't Easy
Being ethical isn’t easy, but affluent westerners with a conscience, should try harder than most. Last month, Uttlesford District Council were put on the spot by their investment in a property that is going to be leased by an American Company with a wide variety of technical p...
Read MoreMeditations on the birth of a Grandson
A few weeks ago, I raised a solitary glass of champagne to toast the birth of my fourth grandson. What an amazingly lucky man I am! But within seconds I was choking back tears to think of the appalling legacy I will be leaving him. Even if we manage to reach global carbon zero by 2050...
Read MoreOne Planet Economics
They kept coming, witness after witness, to tell the inquiry that the economy of our region depends on the growth of Stansted Airport. As if Uttlesford District Council were trying to close the airport, rather than put a cautious limit on its growth to 35 million passengers each yea...
Read MoreCrossing the Boundaries of Ethics
On Thursday last week, at a bizarre and painful meeting, Uttlesford District Council effectively confirmed its £35m investment in a property knowing that the tenant is heavily involved in the arms trade, with connections to the war in Yemen. Bizarre, because that was stu...
Read MoreHopeless Optimism
As a new year dawns, I wonder how hopeful we all feel about the future…. A constrained Christmas has saddened us, the chaos and confusion around Brexit continues, the UK Covid death toll has accelerated past 100,00 but the vaccine programme is underway. There are some very ha...
Read MoreThe Answer Lies in the Soil!
My local church has been awarded the ECO Church Bronze award for helping to preserve the environment in practical ways. Recycling, twinning toilets to support sanitation in Africa and investing church savings in carbon free, ethical funds had their role to play, but much of our work dur...
Read MoreAre solar farms 'trashing the countryside'?
At Uttlesford District Council Stakeholders’ meeting last week, it was claimed that local solar farms were ‘trashing our countryside’. I’m afraid the fact is that much of our countryside has already been trashed. A recent UN report, compiled by 300 scientists, states that the...
Read MoreGrasp the Scale of the Challenge!
532 billion tonnes of ice were lost from Greenland in 2019 – the most since records began. It is an incomprehensibly huge figure. That equates to about a million tonnes per minute; enough to fill seven Olympic-sized swimming pools per second. Mind boggling! Just a...
Read MoreThe People have Spoken!
In September the UK’s first ever Peoples Assembly on Climate change published a ground breaking report. In response to pressure from Extinction Rebellion, six Parliamentary Select Committees joined together to set up the assembly. It included people from all walks of life, balanced in terms of...
Read MoreLet's NOT Save the Planet
July 2020 I disagree with the concept of ‘Saving the planet’. It is dangerously misleading. It implies that we are greater than the planet and that, if we are altruistic and generous, we might just condescend to save it, as we might try to save giant pandas ...
Read MoreCarpe Diem!
June 2020 It has been a joy to see clear, unpolluted blue skies; to hear birdsong rise above the traffic noise and to connect with the beauty of nature on our own doorsteps. And while we’ve been doing that, daily greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) dropped 17% in April! The...
Read MoreSo this is what an emergency looks like
So now we know what an emergency looks like. Government takes swift and decisive action; they listen to the scientists, basing their policies and strategies entirely on the science; they pass swift laws that compel the public to radically change their lifestyles; they scrap the budget the...
Read MoreIs it already too late?
For someone living on the banks of the River Severn, who has been flooded several times and can no longer get insurance; for an Australian whose home has been burned down and for the 80 million animals who died in the fires; for the farmers of Kenya or the Sudan whose crops have failed and whose cat...
Read MoreSharing a platform with Bishop Stephen
At the start of Lent, before the coronavirus put paid to everything, I was invited to speak at St John’s church, Colchester, alongside Bishop Stephen, the next Archbishop of York, and the Rev James Gilder. It was part of the diocesan Lent talks on the Environment and the theme on this occasio...
Read MoreIt is time to take sides
It was clear at Davos last month that there could be no more sitting on the fence; it is time to take sides. We can side with Donald Trump, who urged us to ‘reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of apocalypse’ and claimed that it is ‘a growing and vibrant eco...
Read MoreTime for an ECO Resolution
Did you make a New Year’s resolution this year? And have you managed to keep it? How about making a resolution for the whole of the Twenties decade? One that will make all the difference to future generations? The UN published an Emissions Gap report in December, saying t...
Read MoreOur New Perspective
We have just celebrated the remarkable and heroic journey of the astronauts who landed on the moon fifty years ago. Just a few months before that, Apollo 8 had taken the first humans out of Earth orbit and around the moon. As they re-emerged from the far side of the moon, after the agonizing moments...
Read MoreMy Environmental Dream
Last month the PCC at St Mary’s Saffron Walden signed up for the journey to become an ECO church. It needs to be a journey that challenges us all. At a recent conference the speaker, Rupert Read, said, ‘This civilization is over. It will be over in one of two possible ways. Either we ma...
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