Climate Change Soup
As a child, my grandmother would sit next to my bed at dusk and read to me from a large book of folktales. I can remember her soft voice lulling me to sleep with these tales, but there was always one that I’d stay awake until the end for. It was the story of Stone Soup.
In the folktale, villagers are apprehensive to share their food but add small tidbits of ingredients to a pot — a carrot here, a dash of seasoning there — until a wonderful soup is created and able to be shared by everyone.
Now, even all these years later, this story has stayed with me. It’s just soup perhaps, but what if instead of soup the objective were a cleaner, more secure future? Just like the villagers in the story, we all have unique and important ingredients to give — whether it’s a five minute conversation with your MP about why climate change matters or the vision to transform energy in your community — and if we all believe in and contribute to this future then it will indeed take place and each of us will be able to reap the benefits.
And this is why I believe in the power of the Speak Up Week. It is an opportunity for each of us to not only put our ingredients into the pot, but to transform them into something even bigger by telling our MPs why we are doing so and encouraging them to do the same by advocating for cleaner communities in Parliament.
One of my favourite stories of a group of people doing just that is from Climate Friendly Bradford on Avon who took part in the Speak Up Week last year by holding a community lunch and encouraging their neighbours to share local produce with each other.
“We’ve seen how climate change can affect us directly,” said Rowena, one of the event organisers, “Bradford on Avon was impassable because of flooding on Christmas Eve in 2013 and my own house was flooded too. We have a good culture of food in this area and thought it was great to link that with raising awareness of the Week of Action.”
One of the most exciting parts of events like this is they help to break down the barriers between you and your MP, and create opportunities to learn from each other. They are, after all, not that different from you and I — they are our neighbours, people living in our same communities, who too want their families and children to thrive in a fairer, more secure world.
Michelle Donelan, the MP for Bradford on Avon, attended the Speak Up Week lunch and ended the day by saying, “I always enjoy meeting with the members of Climate Friendly Bradford on Avon who do so much to champion the important issues of climate change and global warming. The lunch was a good opportunity to discuss these vital topics with a dedicated group of campaigners, meet with community energy projects and take part in the national Week of Action to speak up about the impact that climate change is having on our planet.”
The changing climate can feel big at times — bigger than any single one of us — but the other side of the equation is the reminder that its solutions are made up of a lot of small parts and that your own ingredients, your own actions, are meaningful to confronting it.
