We’re all doomed? Nah, I don’t think so

I’ve received a couple of letters here in the BBC Countryfile office from readers complaining that the magazine ‘preaches’ about the environment. An interesting point and I suppose, depending on your viewpoint, I suppose any advice on making a different to the way we live our lives in relation to what’s happening to our planet may seem like preaching. However, I think the environmental content of the magazine is not the stuff of fire and brimstone, but of hope.

Last night I had the pleasure, along with my team-mate Adam Stones, to attend a talk by John Simpson, the BBC World Affairs Editor. It was a fascinating evening and what struck me was the optimism of a man who has seen the results of the darker side of humanity but still believed that, ultimately, we would survive to face the future. Simpson talked about how he joined the BBC in 1966 under the cloud of nuclear war. At that time everyone believed that the world would end with a very big bang and the resulting mushroom cloud. He never even dreamed that in his 60s he would be standing in a lecture theatre talking to a group of people in 2007. In his time he has reported from 30-plus war zones, sheltered from bullets in a gutter in Tiananmen Square and has spent the last few years mainly in Iraq chronicling the events, and aftermath, of the invasion in 2003.

This is a man who, as he says in his new book Not Quite World’s End regularly sees human brains spilled on the pavements of Baghdad after bombing attempts. Yet, he remains steadfastly sure that the human race will survive. “If peace can be found in Ireland where hatred is never forgotten,” he said, “then it will be found in the middle east and if it can be found there, there will be no stopping us.”

Simpson is not sure what future world Rafe, his 18 month year son will live in, but after seeing what he thinks is real progress in the world in the 40 years he’s worked in the BBC, he believes that we can even ‘dig ourselves out of the hole’ that we so carefully worked ourselves into, when it comes to our natural environment – surely this age’s equivalent of the threat of nuclear destruction.

It was so encouraging to hear positivism about our future when it seems we continually open the paper to read, as Frazer from Dad’s Army would say, “We’re doomed!” But we do have a positive future if we do something about it. The environment is changing and the world is heating up. That’s the result of the last half-century of emissions and the way we’ve treated our natural resources. We can’t do anything about that- we’ve made our bed and now we must lie in it. Yet, that’s not the end of the story. If we make changes now, we could see a difference in 30 or 40 years time, and a positive difference at that.

Like John Simpson, I have a young child, and I often wonder what kind of environment she’ll live in. But, like John I’m also confident that we’ll find a way to survive and live through the clouds of environmental change that seem to loom on the horizon. What I have to do now is take a few steps to changing that future, in my own small way in my own small life.

Does that sound like preaching? Maybe, but I think its something worth getting on my soapbox about.