The UK’s heatwave was not a wake-up call – it was a funeral bell

The UK’s recent 40C extreme heatwave was not a wake-up call, it was a funeral call. The wake-up calls have all long passed and we ignored them. It’s a funeral for all hopes of avoiding climate devastation and protecting huge swathes of our remaining natural world from obliteration.

The only remaining question now is whether we will continue racing towards complete destruction of our climate and the natural world, or finally decarbonise as fast as possible.

On the first of the worst two blistering days, I was at a rewilding course organised by Embercombe and Wildwise at Derek Gow’s extraordinary rewilding farm in Dorset.

As the sun beat down on us at the open-air classroom, the course leader invited us to do some intuitive writing, after we had come back from a meditation walk in the nearby beautifully wooded valley. Having spent almost every moment of the last 30 years of my life, working with so many others to protect us from this catastrophic 40C heat threshold from being broken, the day’s intense heat burnt a deep despairing grief into my soul.

And even deeper grief for the many species in the wider natural world that will now inevitably be wiped out, whether burnt alive in wildfires, lethally cooked in our scalding oceans, starved to death as plants wilt and die or simply expire from drought.

It was no surprise therefore that a poem expressing my despair emerged from my scribblings:

A CLIMATE OF DESPAIR

I was there … but I was not there.

How shall I go there, now that my hatred has been expressed?

For each new dawn, there is a lover missed.

For each new pigeon cooing, a hug is missed

But then all is croaked

And the cooing starts again

And so it goes on and on

But what I really need is ..

So why can’t they hear the siren call of the osprey?

The pleading song of the blackbird?

The scream of the wild boar?

Let them hear the cacophony at their door

I would love them if I could

But hatred comes from the fear of not being loved

Or of not being loved by the self

And they fear us, as much as we hate their actions !

And so it goes on and on …

But there are no more ons and ons …

We have passed the lines of no return

Wherefore shall we go in this furnace?

Cooked pigeon in the loft

Starved child in the desert

Drowned frogs in the flood…

And so the destruction devours our mother of earth

And still they do not hear

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It was with this pain I returned to London, as it sweltered at the peak of the heatwave. But this pain was about to be joined by a visceral anger, as I faced a bizarre round of right-wing media interviews, all determined to double down on climate scepticism and opposition to action on slashing our carbon emissions.

One interviewer for Murdoch’s TalkTV started our interview celebrating the searing record breaking 40C temperatures and berating me for not joining the celebrations. They went on to demand why I was not backing more new UK oil and gas and accused me of “being obsessed with cutting carbon”!

The headlines in the right-wing media added to my visceral anger, as they mocked those alarmed by the record breaking 40C temperatures as “snowflakes”, and shrilly opposed the sane policy response of urgently speeding up decarbonisation to 2030.

The Sun explicitly said we should only slowly inch our way to net-zero and to ignore the climate protectors. And the politicians duly obeyed.

Rishi Sunak called for more economic growth. Liz Truss called for more economic growth. And Keir Starmer tripled down by calling for “Growth, Growth, Growth” as his top priority. Meanwhile our extreme temperatures are screaming: “Survival, Survival, Survival”!

Sharing my poem triggered a bout of hot grief-ridden tears. Tears let us release our emotions roiled by these self-inflicted hellish temperatures. They enable us to heal and get up and rejoin the urgent battle to get our media leaders to help us save what we can, and join the struggle to stop our governments, oil corporations and banks from utterly destroying everything.