The future is a foreign place

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was a seminal piece of writing that changed the way that the chemicals that had become available after World War 2 were affecting wildlife. Small songbirds dying from the effects of agricultural chemicals that people believed to be safe were a dramatic wake-up call from the wild.

Carson’s book and visible changes to the countryside resulted in the development of a huge range of environmental bodies across the world. The Gloucestershire Trust for Nature Conservation (now Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust) was formed in 1961 by local people who wanted to safeguard the counties wildlife.

The willingness of people to make changes that benefit their communities is still alive and well. Three of the current challenges that are firing the imaginations of local thinkers are Climate Change, Food Security and Peak Oil. Each of these issues is as huge as Rachel Carson’s global alert on pesticides such as organochlorines and the ‘drins’. Books such as The Transition Handbook by Rob Hoskins are a good example of this thinking.

Localness is strong and alive within the ‘Transition Town’ movement http://www.transitionculture.org/ . Local groups are thinking about a very different future in which energy prices are much higher, food more expensive and the climate several degrees warmer that today’s.

I spoke to a very insightful group of 50 local people about the importance of understanding the need to maintain local biodiversity issues within the transition agenda. The Newent Transition Town meeting confirmed that there is a huge reserve of energy and intelligence that may provide fresh insights into how societies will adjust.

We must all adapt to rising oil prices and increased fous on local food production. But it is imperative that the mistake of not giving wildlife priority is not repeated in future strategies. If we do not accommodate biodiversity Rob Hoskins’ vision of travelling from oil dependency to local resilience will not be achieved. The environment is an integrated system. Wildlife locks the pieces together.