So, why was I interested in attending a climate cafe? And why have I continued to attend, month after month for several years?

A number of years ago I attended a writers workshop mentored by George Elliot Clarke. Although I think he was singularly uninterested in the jottings of a (then) middle aged white woman he did make one remark which I found quite enlightening. He said everything I’d shown him had something about nature in it, and I should try to find out why. I’d never realised this. So I considered my accumulated writings dating back to schooldays and for the most part he was absolutely right.

My earliest memory is of sitting on a blanket surrounded by things I did not even know the names of yet, but it was grass, and a little way away, rather blurry to my eyes, bright colours of flowers and more green of the leaves of trees. I was born in Africa and some of what I remember of those first years were sunflowers towering over me, a hedgehog, white ants, and later a desire to be taken to see animals like lions and giraffes. I never was. I had to wait to go to zoos in England and North America for those.

As a child at summer camp on the Northumberland shore, a tween and teen on holiday in Cape Breton, an adult with a home which boasted a big backyard with a wild patch at the end of the property, and only a block away from the harbour, I’ve always found peace in being surrounded by the natural world. My deepest regret about moving from that home to where where I live now was losing even the meagre night sky which city dwelling allows. Only once since moving have I seen a sky with enough stars in it to pick out a constellation or two, otherwise it’s the moon, a planet or several, and once a star I was able to identify as Fomalhaut, one of the brightest stars in the northern sky.

So, climate cafe. It is profoundly distressing to me that this miracle planet is being wantonly destroyed by a type of great ape which is too smart for its own good yet severely lacking in good sense. Human population has roughly quadrupled in my lifetime. During my lifetime instead of most human habitation still being islands of humanity surrounded by “wilderness” – i.e. Nature – it has all flipped, and humans now surround shrinking islands of spaces untouched by us. There’s little an individual can do, unless that individual is head of a powerful country. So we little people do what we can. If we can afford it we buy items with lower environmental impact. We teach our children to honour the natural world, to value all the non-human creatures who also call this planet home, and we suffer as we watch little bits and pieces of an already damaged patch of natural world constantly eroded by our collective actions or inaction.

Climate Cafe helps to steady me, to know that there are many who love the Earth as I do.