!! MELTDOWN !!

Is that ICE or just another BANK ??

Everyday something else seems to collapse. What next? The Coral Reefs? The Health Service? The bee population?

The ice in the picture is part of the vanishing sheet on Greenland. Parts of it are melting three times faster than just five years ago.

I really doubt that we have the resolve or power to do anything effective to turn things around. In fact, quite the opposite: we're belching out smoke and chomping up resources faster than ever.

(Read climatologist James Hansen on the "tipping point".)

If climate change hasn't already gone past the point of no return it seems inevitable that it soon will - so here we go for six degrees plus with all that entails.

So what to do? Well for me it's time to head for the hills and woods, to start walking my talk and start to live a low impact way of life, even if it's a step at a time. For the best chance of survival for our children in the future I believe we will need to be as self-sufficient and resilient as possible. The more we can grow, make and do for ourselves the better. To me the best bet is WOODLAND to provide food, fuel and materials, ideally with plenty of water running through it on a south facing slope. So I'm starting to look for suitable places to live and work in some kind of co-operative woodland group.

There's stuff we can do in the cities too: check out Guerrilla Gardening. Let's plant trees and raspberrries and stuff in those bits of waste ground. There's also inspiration in how Cuba coped after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of their cheap oil supply: The Power of Community.

Long live the tree!