Contributed by John Cossham
Today, Autumn 2016
I’ve just come back from a gig in Burton Constable, 10 miles cycle from York, but the wind on the way there made the journey tough. But the client paid me well for the three hour gig, and the kiddies were so excited with being able to have a go at making balloon animals. I never cease to be overjoyed at their happy faces even after more than 20 years working as Professor Fiddlesticks.
I’ve got a huge amount of fruit to process, as it’s the season for me to be inundated with apples and pears, many of which I dry on my woodstove. It’s a good blackberry year so I’ve made quite a bit of blackberry and apple fruit leather. I’m pleased that my involvement with ‘Abundance’ means I can pick unwanted fruit, keep some (quite often the ones which fall on the ground) and donate the rest to organisations which can use them, like the homeless hostels, refugee centres and the Food Bank in Acomb. Some of the recent apples I’ll take to the Tang Hall Community Centre and the nearby primary school. But fruit preparation takes time and I’ve got a presentation to put together on ‘green funerals’ for the West Yorkshire Humanists. Fortunately I’ve a slide show which I can adapt and rename, but it will still take several hours to get it to how I want it. The amount of time I put into these presentations is not matched by the low fees I get for public speaking, but it might be laying the foundations for something bigger and more important in the future, who knows?
I’m worrying about my teenage children. Neither of them knows what they want to do with their lives, and both of them have absorbed some of my fears and worries about collapse and extinction, but haven’t got the busy social life I’ve got which gives me meaning and reason to keep going. However I’m pleased that Adrian from Biochar in York has offered to ask my eldest if he wants to use one of the biochar retorts to start a mini-production line, using some of the woody wastes I get from my gardening work. Maybe if society starts to take carbon sequestration seriously there might be some money in carbon negative activities.
10 years time, Autumn 2026
Today I’m excited to be heading off out to the UK’s first Composting Burial Service Opening Ceremony. The unit has taken 18 months to build and test, so as usual I’m cycling to the site in Bishopthorpe. But today’s special, and I’m wearing my suit, as Prime Minister Corbyn is officially opening it. Some people have joked that he ought to be the first body in it since he expressed his support for this low carbon technology half way through his first term, but we’ve had plenty of people already give their remains to the project, and we’ve put them through for free. But today we start operating commercially, and have a competitive price to standard burial and the obviously high-carbon cremation. My role has been part of the PR team and carbon flux advisor, drawing on my PhD, a detailed carbon footprint analysis of the methane emissions of standard deep burial compared to shallower woodland and meadow burials and some existing work on the emissions from composting fallen stock. My son ought to be there too, as he’s been developing the active carbon sequestration part of the system, using biochar. Working with this team has been a welcome change from my Professor Fiddlesticks activities, which have been getting increasingly tiring as I’ve got older. However, the income from the Composting Burial work has meant I have been able to fit a high capacity electric propulsion system to my bike and trailer, so I’m now not as hot and sweaty when I arrive at a gig. I can get about 10 hours assisted ride with it at about 15 mph, so I can easily do a gig 30 or 40 miles away, which is further than I used to be prepared to cycle.
Tonight is the fortnightly York Climate Change Support Group meeting. Although we started in 2015 following the scarily accurate talk given by Dr Guy McPherson, there was little interest until the Great Flood Of London in 2020, which devastated so much of the capital’s infrastructure, and forced the seat of government to be moved to temporary accommodation near Birmingham. That seemed to shock the nation into accepting that climate change was real, was affecting us in the UK, and triggered a wave of introspection about our lifestyles and fierce debate about policies to deal with the probably-too-late levels of CO2, which reached about 420ppm that year. Thank goodness that airlines are now having to pay for the damage they’re doing, and the number of flights is down another 11% after the punitive taxation was imposed in 2022. This was part of a suite of ‘equity’ measures brought in by the government who were elected during the immediate aftermath of the Great Flood, with the Prime Minister showing great leadership and refusing to fly, preferring to ‘attend’ international summits via video-link, or travelling by train if less than 24 hours transit time. Although the 1% are still bleating on about ‘natural cycles’ and ‘economic growth’, they are widely despised, and many have been victims of the Climate Riots which followed the rationing of high carbon foodstuffs such as meat and alcohol which the masses blamed on the Capitalist minority. Rationing was seen as a fairer way of reducing consumption, less regressive than taxation, but it still has it’s detractors, and there’s a thriving black market and significant home production. Guinea pigs have never been so popular!
But along with the social unrest and disruption caused by the disasters, shortages and increasingly bad weather, there have been many positives come out of these tough times. There’s been an increase in expressions of solidarity and inclusivity, a sort of ‘we’re all in this together’ mentality. We’ve accepted a huge number of migrants, many from Bangladesh since most of that country became uninhabitable, and a significant number of Dutch, although many of them have been able to go home due to the successful drainage and restoration of their damaged dykes. This has added greatly to York’s diversity and culture, which I’m enjoying.