Ruth Gillingham, Librarian, Milton-under-Wychwood
All 20 seats were filled for the Sunday night talk at the Milton-under-Wychwood Library on the ethics of climate change, including the speaker’s wife, Ruth the Librarian*, and our party of three. My daughter was the only one under 59.
A pleasant-looking woman sat upright, assiduously taking notes. I sensed trouble from the man opposite me who fixed a smiling frown on his face and jigged his crossed leg up and down to show he was not a believer. At question time he quoted sceptic Matt Ridley, which got right under the speaker’s skin. Professor John Broome, Philosophy Dept, Oxford University, gave us a practised summary of the science. It was excellent.
It feels like things will never change in this village and culture set in stone. But consider that the very ground it rests on, and the stone it is made of, was once the drifting bed of a tropical sea that made its way to Britain, and fused inside it, some countless millions of years ago.
Martin Jarratt, the retired forester I interviewed the other day, tells me that he saw evidence of a glacial moraine in the Evenlode River at nearby Bruern. The Library plot would probably have been on the edge of, or just tucked under, the last great ice sheet, and for long periods surrounded by bare tundra ranged by mammoths, bears, lions and species of humans, now extinct. Our own species started arriving in Britain after the last ice melt about 12,000 years ago. Humans of one sort or another have inhabited Britain on and off for 700,000 years, as the climate permitted, according to the findings of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain study.
It’s hard for people with fewer than 20-40 years on the clock, who are very comfortably situated in this temperate village zone, to take this overwhelming problem on board. No EU or British government directive can speed up the Gulf Stream or restore the Antarctic ice shelf. Prevention is the only cure. Will the village become a sauna or be subsumed by ice again if freshwater melt stops the Gulf Stream in its tracks? Will Cambridge become a seaside resort or will Britain be part of Europe again? I think the science money’s on the sauna and submersion. The incredibly warm autumn in New Zealand, by far the warmest in my lifetime, frightens me. I realise that despite being immersed in climate change science for over 12 years, I never believed it would happen so abruptly.
I commend these people, including the sceptics and Professor Broome and his wife, who have bothered to turn out on a Sunday night, bolting their dinner, having to get dressed, and then sit upright in hard chairs for 2 hours. Let’s hope that the post-Brexit vicissitudes will not distract attention from the really important issues – climate change, environmental degeneration and mass extinction of the tiny sea creatures on which all currencies depend.
More about Ruth
*Part-time Librarian, Ruth Gillingham, comes from farming stock in Owhango, Taumaranui, I was amazed to learn. She is one of the many adventurous young New Zealanders to be re-absorbed by the mother country, having met her future husband about three days after arriving in Britain on her big “O.E”. How we miss them. Ruth’s mother and daughter live in Mt Maunganui, and her siblings farm in the King Country. I discovered when I met Ruth later in her beautiful house two doors down from the Library that she and I worked in the main branch of the BNZ in Wellington at the same time, although we don’t remember each other. (I cringe to think of my hairstyle at the time.) Ruth’s neighbour also comes from New Zealand. We knocked on her door to say hello and her (visiting) father answered the door – Stuart Sheat, a sheep farmer from Geraldine, smartly dressed in a Norsewear shirt. The Norsewear “factory” shop is 3 miles from my family’s rural property nr Norsewood, Hawke’s Bay. Everything except the socks is now made in China, exporting several jobs in the process. Sigh.
