Awareness brings responsibility. Climate Change is a pressing, present ongoing crisis. It’s hard to switch off. Rest and relaxation are rare. I even work my summer breaks, collaborating with different parts of the social movement growing around responses to Climate Change.
This year I’ve been at Greenbelt Festival. The concept behind the festival is based on the “greenbelt” – a fertile piece of ground, almost forgotten, at the fringes of a city, providing breathing space, and left to Nature. The name is a reference to changes in planning laws that mandated that there has to be a limit to urban sprawl – that land must be set aside and not built on.
Greenbelt is a Christian Arts Festival, and the atmosphere is very open and tolerant, and extremely family-friendly, with good accessibility. The Festival has a deliberate policy of encouraging political dialogue and discussion and many campaigns and charities come to engage the festivalgoers with issues of the day.
I was doing some work for the network of Christian Environmental groups, helping people find literature they need, and talking with concerned churchgoers about the waste of energy in buildings, allotments, solar roofs for churches, new Energy systems, moving beyond feelings of isolation and guilt, that kind of thing.