Kate hadn’t even noticed the beech trees an hour earlier when she’d been on her way to the doctor’s. Her mind had been elsewhere. All she could think about then was getting there on time. The appointment was at 8.30 a.m. It was unfortunate timing because it clashed with the arrival of the school buses which were offloading pupils all down the road, making it difficult to overtake.
As it happened there was time to spare, time to read the paper she’d bought on the way in. It was full of news about the Cop30 climate summit taking place in Brazil. The world’s biggest polluters weren’t even there. Trump had long ago withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and India and China were conspicuous by their absence.
‘Typical,’ she said out loud. The woman next to her seemed to be nodding in agreement.
‘Just as the Secretary General of the United Nations announces that the world is about to miss its target of reducing temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade above preindustrial levels, Bill Gates sees fit to step in and claim that it’s time to stop worrying about carbon dioxide emissions and focus instead on relieving world poverty.’
There was no response from the woman this time, but it helped to vent so she carried on.
‘He’s no better than the other tech oligarchs, who want to further their own interests and increase their profits by prolonging the use of oil and fossil fuels to power their AI data centres. They seem to think that climate change can be dealt with by technological solutions, rather than by garnering political will.’
The woman’s name was called out, and she left in a hurry.
It had been a long wait for this appointment. Kate had tried not to read too much into it, but her anxiety had only increased in the meantime. It felt like her world depended on the results. But it was good news. The doctor had reassured her there was nothing serious to worry about. She was elated. All she wanted to do was get home, have a coffee, take it in.
On her way back, she was struck by the sight of beech trees just past where the old community hospital used to stand, before they knocked it down and turned it into houses. The leaves on the other trees in the vicinity had been blown off in heavy gales the weekend before. Only the beech leaves remained. They were floating down to join the carpet of leaves on the road. The colours ranged from auburn to burnt orange and were set against a grey, cloud-ridden sky, giving the impression of a Pizarro or an early Van Gogh.
Who’d had the foresight to plant beech trees in that particular spot and for what purpose? She wondered. Were they put there as a windbreak, or to obscure the ugly cement works across the way? But the hospital was originally built as a workhouse, and it was unlikely that anyone had been considering the sensitivity of its inhabitants. Hopefully, the residents in the new houses appreciated the trees. They would have to go a long way to find anything quite so resplendent.
Once home, she sat down with a coffee. The news was all doom and gloom. She didn’t want to become a doomster. That was what climate change deniers had taken to calling climate activists these days, to try to minimize the seriousness of the problem, and make people think there was nothing they could do. It was important to stay optimistic. She’d go for a walk in the afternoon, up to the crossroads to sit on her bench. That would do the trick.
She’d first started calling it her bench during Covid. It was in the early days when the population was being fed all sorts of misinformation about the virus. The bench was just past the crossroads in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest town. After a mile uphill it was always a relief to have a sit down, until that day when she’d been unceremoniously turfed off it by an over-fastidious policeman in a patrol car, who was adamant that the virus could last up to seventy-two hours on a hard surface. Ever since then it had served as a reminder of just where a lack of scientific knowledge got us.
Kate plonked herself down on the bench. Sitting at 1,000 feet above sea level, looking across a beautiful valley, gave her a different perspective on life. What was needed was a sea change in society, she thought, like the one that happened in the 60s, when Harold Wilson enacted Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech, which he’d made to highlight the end of the British Empire, or the sea change in Europe in 1989, made famous by the Scorpions’ song, when the Berlin Wall came down, heralding the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union.
But which way would the winds blow this time? These climate change deniers and minimisers couldn’t keep ignoring the scientific evidence, or the evidence of their own eyes when it was staring them in the face. You only had to look at the forest fires burning in the Amazon, or Australia or California, see the floods and storms increasing in Europe and the Philippines. In Jamaica, Hurricane Melissa was a testament to the danger of rapidly rising temperatures at sea level, that could whip up a colossal tropical storm and wreak devastation in minutes.
Thankfully, she wasn’t the only one who thought so. A host of Indigenous leaders, scientists, environmental activists, and forest defenders, along with representatives from 195 countries from around the world, had gathered together in Brazil to discuss how to preserve the planet. They weren’t giving up.
As she walked back home, the sun was just setting. The sky was streaked in pink and white clouds and there was a rosy glow spreading across the valley. And in the West, there was a golden globe, as the sun disappeared behind the horizon. The colours reminded her of the beech trees she’d seen in the morning.
About the author
Jenny Palmer writes short stories, poetry, memoir and family history. Her collections 'Keepsake and Other Stories.' 2018, and 'Butterflies and Other Stories,' 2024, were published by Bridge House, and are on Amazon. 'Witches, Quakers and Nonconformists,' 2022, is sold at the Pendle Heritage Centre, Barrowford.
Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)
No comments:
Post a Comment