• Lester R. Brown (Plan B, Norton, London, 2003,  pp 204-5) wonders what would happen if the USA tackled climate change as whole-heartedly as it did the war effort in 1942:
  

  The year 1942 witnessed the greatest expansion of industrial out put in the (United States) history – all for military use.  Early in the year, the production and sale of cars and trucks for private use was banned, residential and highway construction was halted, and driving for pleasure was banned… the automobile industry went from producing nearly 4 million cars in 1941 to producing 24,000 tanks and 17,000 armoured cars in 1942…In 1940 the United States produced 4,000 aircraft.  In 1942 it produced 48.000.  By the end of the war, more than 5,000 ships were added to the 1,000 that made up the American Merchant Fleet in 1939.

• Airplot
  Greenpeace have bought a plot of land right on the proposed site for the 3rd runway at Heathrow.  This gives Greenpeace more ways to actively resist the building of the runway which would mean, they say, that “At full capacity, Heathrow would become the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the whole country”.  There’s an opportunity for people to become joint ‘beneficial owners’ of the land
  http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/climate/airplot/about-airplot

The 10 hottest years have all occurred since 1990

• Extract from a 1987 article, Hope in our World, by Paul Wilding:
  

  The conventional wisdom is that politics is the art of the possible. In half a century of public and professional life, (says Barbara Wootton), I have not found it so. It is from the champions of the impossible rather than the slaves of the possible that evolution draws its creative force.

  Is it possible in today’s world to be both realistic and hopeful? By hope, I mean the belief that things need not be as they are, that they can be different, that we are not the prisoners of the past or the present, that we can make for humankind a different future. In essence hope is a belief in possibilities – not that things will be better, but that things can be different

• Have you heard of the ‘Transition Town’ movement? It begins when a group come together to ask “how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?”.  There are successful examples of this wonderfully positive grassroots effort all over the world (it started in Totnes Kinsale, and Totnes claims to be the first transition town in the UK).  See http://transitiontowns.org/ for more information.

Church youth groups and schools are being encouraged to test out their green credentials – from how they travel to school to their packed lunch habits – as part of this year’s eco-themed Education Sunday.
www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr0709.html
Also includes excellent questionnaire aimed at young people.