Wales Nature Week is an annual week of wildlife-themed events that takes place all over Wales – an opportunity to celebrate the diversity of Welsh fauna and flora. Sea Watch is kicking off the celebrations with the following article written by former Research Intern Elliot Spencer-Wright. This piece debates the UK’s current stance on Climate Change and recent activist movements:
Land-watch conducted by volunteers in New Quay / Isabel Griffiths and Sea Watch Foundation
The success of April’s international extinction rebellion rallies were note-worthy, receiving greater notoriety and scope than previous protest and activism groups have mustered in the past decade.
The climate change movement has historically struggled to get off the ground when compared against other movements. To the great surprise of many this tendency was undone last month. Was that a miracle of timing? Or the rustling skirts of a new demographic tuned in to the trials and tribulations of our shared planet?
Alas, as the crisp edge of novelty coating initial demonstrations oxidised so evaporated the sense of urgency and emotion sitting volatile within this contentious topic.
It would have been unreasonable to expect tomorrow’s dawn to bring packaged and fawning at our ankles the tender steps of a new era in keeping with the XR rallies requests. Most likely our role today is to help channel and reel in tractor beam fashion a time that slowly comes to represent those requests.
Keeping up with relevant information and improving through trial and error the projection of these ideas from our daily habits and into a greater social sphere through fete’s, fund raisers and Art in its manifold guises of language, the essential extensions of the work of scientific communities into the sphere of everyday people.
Atlantic grey seals sighted on a trip with Dolphin Spotting Boating Trips / Isabel Griffiths and Sea Watch Foundation
Tomorrow is 2019’s International Biodiversity Day. Every year since 1993 a different subject has been commemorated for the focus of CBD’s (Convention on Biological Diversity) International Bio-Diversity Day. This has been done to great success and with CBD continuing to cultivate and improve acts of implementation easily discoverable through the website and related media, in a host of different languages. This year’s focus in on Food as the foundation of our health and catalyst for improving human well-being and detailed information, videos and ‘implementation’ packs can be found via CBD’s website.
How far have we come? How far have we slipped? No doubt we have made and lost ground but in the fashion of someone who takes two steps forward and one back, has our trend been towards change for the good of a shared planet?
It’s easy to feel disenchanted looking around us for signs of change, or having your eco-savvy pep talk swiftly shot down by the (good if not incorrigible) golems of a well-oiled past at your local. The folding walls of our musty coffin, bearing our signature seem to close doors and as the vestiges of clean oxygen in-take and out-take peter out our minds turn towards the here and now, the unbridled acquisition of our wants and needs here and now without consideration for a future pre-determined to be lost.
Volunteers removing plastic waste from the ocean on a recent boat survey / Leah Freshwater and Sea Watch Foundation
Yet it is our unique ability to do differently from those who came before us, to detect, uncover and solve the riddle of problems profoundly complex as we had once solved riddles of social, material, industrial, technological. Who could ever have perceived the route from any one of these stages to the next? We navigate and read the journey of time and human activity as if solely through a rear view mirror, our front headlights dead. The notorious lady has not sung her song yet and we bow out or paw at the curtain draw-string in a dishonest and pre-empted defeat rather than from an educated conclusion.
Wales Biodiversity Week is a great opportunity to re-invigorate the spirit of Aprils XR rallies and to get wise on the informational treasure trove provided by CBD’s recent International Day of Biodiversity, and previous celebrations of Wales Nature Week.
“From individual species through entire ecosystems, biological diversity is vital for human health and well-being. The quality of the water we drink, the food we eat and the air we breathe all depend on keeping the natural world in good health.” – António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General
“Biodiversity is the food we eat, the water we drink, and it is also the air we breathe. More than that, biodiversity is part of us, as we humans are part of nature.”- Dr. Cristiana Paşca Palmer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity
You can read more about Wales Nature Week here.
