“Ask What You Can Do for Your Country!”

A Mangrove Forest

What Can We Do?

In January 1961 President John F Kennedy was inaugurated in Washington. He gave a speech which declared a major shift in US politics. It was both a strong call for citizens to serve their country and highlighted the importance of international collaboration.

He said, “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

Nowadays when countries struggle to meet targets of emission reductions, and save biodiversity, their citizens must become involved too. Of course we need government policies. However individual action spreads the word about what is needed and can sometimes make a huge impact.

Not all of us are rich enough to buy up large amounts of land to rewild. But each of us can make a contribution. I have been enormously encouraged by individual contributions to what is the fight of our lives for our children’s futures. I am optimistic that this will give you hope too.

Many thousands of individual citizens out there care enough to make incredible inputs to the fight against Climate Change. Each one is different but the fact that they are doing it at all makes my heart beat faster.

Individual and Group Contributions

Martha Agbani

The Guardian newspaper has a lovely article about a group of women led by Martha Agbani, who lives in Nigeria’s oil-exploited Niger Delta. They had seen the Mangrove forests destroyed by the oil industry, who had also destroyed many livelihoods in the area. Any protestors were severely punished.

The article describes how she became an environmental activist by planting trees. She set up a centre to support female farmers in caring for them, and to help replanting the mangrove forests. Her aim wasn’t just to put trees back in the ground, but to heal the wetlands, restore livelihoods and peace, and rebuild the sense of ownership communities had lost along with their mangroves.

They have planted more than 150,000 mangroves. The whole area of mangrove forests here is one of the biggest in Africa and it seems millions of people’s livelihoods depend on healthy mangroves. Martha Agbani continues to train groups of women to replant mangrove trees.

Sir Brian May

This is (not) Queen

Sir Brian May, a very famous guitarist for the band Queen, heard in 2013 of a farm for sale in Dorset, England. According to the newspaper Dorset Live, he bought it in the hope of creating a wildlife corridor in the area. It seems he wanted to reforest it, and has created eight fields with different trees in each, such as walnut, wild cherry , spruce, limes and so on. This, it seems is all part of his plan to save wildlife. There is also a visitors’ centre planned for the local community.

Obviously this is not something we can all do but nevertheless we can all volunteer to help!

Denice Ross (Chief Data Scientist under the Biden Administration)

For me, one of the wonders of the fight against Climate Change and all the other challenges we face, is the variety of people involved.

This wonderful lady, according to Time Magazine, realised just after Donald Trump was elected that the data she looked after may be under threat. The collection, analysis, and sharing of data seemed very precious to her, and obviously to the scientific community. She was concerned that the new President had made campaign promises to undo climate policy, and clearly her data might be a part of that. She started with a group of women all looking for ways to save the scientific data that was under threat by the new Administration. According to the article “they’re part of a vast web that’s largely emerged since President Trump’s election victory, made up of dozens of organizations across sectors, all working to keep federal databases alive and accessible to the public.” That data is still available to “inform our understanding of the world.”

Joanna Macy

Joanna Macy was an American environmental activist, author and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology (a philosophy that advocates for a radical shift in humanity’s relationship with the natural world to respect the living environment as a whole.) She died recently at the age of 95. According to a website about her work, she spent over 60 years as an environmental activist, but also worked on the psychological and spiritual issues of our times. Joanna created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

The Work That Reconnects

Joanna Macy was responsible for creating “The Work That Reconnects”. This is group work designed to be useful in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises: “this work helps people transform despair and apathy into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world as our larger living body. This perspective frees us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.”

Joanna’s work has helped many thousands of people who have struggled with despair over the situation we are in, and has allowed them to go on and fight actively to solve some of the problems we are facing.

Rewilded Bison

Ben Goldsmith

Ben is a British financier and rewilding enthusiast. He has a podcast called Rewilding the World.

Certainly for me it is one of the most exciting podcasts that I have come across. He interviews the most interesting people, and certainly he has converted me to rewilding. We really need people like him, because he is an expert, and because of his enthusiasm for biodiversity.

Elizabeth Wathuti

Elizabeth is a young activist from Kenya, a Green Climate Fund Youth Champion, and the founder of the Green Generation Initiative. This is a youth-led non-profit organization founded by her, that advances environmental conservation, climate action, and community-led sustainability. It also nurtures young people to love nature. It is clear that nature means a great deal to her, and that she has first-hand knowledge of the devastation caused by deforestation. She appears also to be a very strong young lady with a lot of courage.