Guest blog #1: London through the cracks

The London Letters on Climate Change is proud to welcome the first guest blog: the first letter from a normal person on how Climate Change makes them feel. What do you think? Do you share their views?

The author is Katherine Pitt, Coordinator of Hackney & Tower Hamlets Friends of the Earth.

"Imagining the future is not easy. Imagining the future in a changed climate is difficult and for a person suffering from depression, it is harder still to think about it and much less to care. Quite frankly, the human race can get stuffed.

There are, one may guess, a lot of depressed people in London. They pull themselves out of bed and struggle to work through the unnatural lighting, the unnatural proximity to strangers, the particulate-laden air of the tube, nature having long ago given up telling their dulled senses that this is not right, this is not their habitat. Their anxiety to get to work and get started on their scalp-tearing workload is randomly and inhumanly frustrated by delays and cancellations; an indifferent obstacle course of machines and humans travelling in a million different directions of space and purpose. The remains of the day are spent indoors, inhaling recycled air, in that harsh yellow lighting, gazing at a glaring and quietly humming screen as intensely as if searching the face of a loved one for a hint of reciprocal love.

Or perhaps they don't. They can't get out of bed because they can't face the day: the daylight, the people, the pressure, the pointlessness of it all.

In the face of an empty day, a concrete city wasteland, and a despairing future, though, the small things can bring comfort. The cheery dandelions that push their way through cracks in the tarmac. The tiny, indomitable wren that skulks in the scraggy weeds beside a road near Old Street. The grey wagtails that swoop and twitter above a car park in Camberwell as if they have mistaken it for a crystalline loch on a windswept Highland moor.

London is teeming with wildlife: it rummages in the discarded take-away wrappers, it hides in the brickwork, it scurries among the railway tracks and it flies home to roost in the spires and the tower blocks. It has adapted to the harsh environment and thrives in its multifarious niches. But can it adapt to a changing climate, to a London increasingly as desiccated as a desert or awash with fetid water from the overflowing Thames, or indeed alternating between the two? With the seasons merged into one mood-swinging summer of violent raging storms and overheated, sulking torpor. With swarms of oversized biting insects being all that's left of that abundance of wildlife.

Humans need to hold on to their connection with nature, for their sanity as well as their survival. The rhythm of the seasons is written into our cells and emotions, as the map of the heavens is etched into the brains of the swifts that one summer’s day are screeching above the city and the next are hurtling towards Africa. A life's purpose: to nurture what nurtures us: there's a reason to get out of bed in the morning."