The little girl and the polar bear

A little girl sits on the carpet, looking up at her teacher. Her eyes widen as she learns that the icecaps are melting and that soon, the cute polar bears will have nowhere to live. Teary eyed, she speaks out about how unfair it is, how we must save the polar bears and their little cubs, and how we must stop the greenhouse gases.

Her teacher agrees and explains that if we all do our bit, if we all reduce, reuse and recycle, we can fix the problem, together. If we stop littering, if we stop using plastic straws, and if we just stop burning fossil fuels, the world and everything that lives there will be saved. With a general sense of hope, the little girl and her classmates head to breaktime where she plays ponies in the school field.

That was 20 years ago and, as little girls do, she grew up. She found that, although her teacher rightly promised there was a solution, nobody did anything about it. Nobody saved the polar bear’s home. Instead, they fed the destruction. And it was no longer just the polar bears who had nowhere to live. Every year koalas find their homes burning in wildfires. Orangutans see their homes demolished for palm oil. Plastic chokes the oceans meaning turtles’ homes become aquatic landfills. Together, these animals are forced to flee their homes, as humans follow behind.

Now 25, she feels like that same helpless little girl who thought that switching to metal straws and sorting the recycling bins would save us all. She looks around at the world and wonders how something that was deemed so important and pressing that it ended up on the national curriculum has been completely and utterly ignored. She wonders why the adults, who knew where we were headed, continued to overconsume and elect governments who were against us. She wonders why the children from that 2002 classroom are left to clear up the mess.

She finds herself in July 2023: the hottest month on record. We’ve surpassed global warming and headed into a new stage: global boiling. Tory MPs spout nonsense, noting that more people die in the UK from the cold than extreme heat and so a little warmer weather would do no harm. They forget, of course, to mention that these winter deaths could be avoided if a good and compassionate government stepped in and provided its people with affordable utilities. The winters experienced in the UK are far from Baltic. People are dying in their homes where they should be safe and looked after by a state that cares. Instead, our government welcomes climate change to counteract the blood on their hands.

As Europe burns and Brits are advised to embrace the climate crisis, people and animals alike sit terrified in their homes - the one place where safety should be a given. These governments have the power and funds to make real and substantial change but can we put our trust in officials who put profit ahead of life?

As we head into August and enjoy our summer holidays, it's time to stop and think. How did we get here? How did we fail that little girl so completely? How did we highlight a problem and so quickly turn a blind eye? What are we going to do now?

We need to change history and we need to start today. We need to look towards the future so that in 20 years time the national curriculum focuses on how humans stepped up, came together, made sacrifices, and saved this beautiful world, for the polar bears, the turtles, the koalas, for every living being, and for that little girl who wanted to save them all 40 years prior. We need to act.