My Little Letter to my M.P.

I might be a little way round the globe, but I’ve taken a little time to write to my local Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment in Eng­land. I’m writ­ing from an area of the world where the wishes (and votes) of the cit­izens are routinely under­mined by power­ful, cor­rupt politi­cians. Liv­ing in a demo­cracy where your voice can still make a dif­fer­ence is a lux­ury you may take for granted.

Dear Mr. Hope,

As a mem­ber of your con­stitu­ency I have an import­ant plea for your con­sid­er­a­tion, from my cur­rent loc­a­tion in Yerevan, the cap­ital city of Armenia.

I left my home in Middleton in June 2007 on an exped­i­tion to travel round the globe by bicycle. Over the last 8 months, I have ped­alled my way through 14 coun­tries, cov­er­ing 7,500km by pedal power to my present loc­a­tion in the Cau­casus. Although this is only a frac­tion of the total dis­tance I expect to cover dur­ing the next few years, my jour­ney has revealed in real­ity import­ant world­wide issues that I was only pre­vi­ously aware of in theory.

I have dealt with the stu­pendously hot spring and con­versely wet sum­mer of West­ern Europe in 2007, pick­ing ripe black­ber­ries in June in Hol­land and again in Octo­ber in Bul­garia, while read­ing news of tor­nadoes in Lon­don. I saw gla­ciers in Switzer­land that were shrink­ing annu­ally rather than advan­cing through the moun­tains. I heard an 80-year-old Turk­ish fish­er­man lament­ing the rar­ity of snow­fall on the Black Sea coast over the last two dec­ades. I endured the freak minus-20-degree winter tem­per­at­ures — the cold­est in 25 years — in Geor­gia, and listened to the dir­ector of WWF Armenia telling me he hoped that his daugh­ter would be able to play in the snow in the future. I thought back to my own child­hood, when snow in winter was com­mon­place, and tried to remem­ber the last time a sig­ni­fic­ant amount had fallen in England.

These extreme weather pat­terns, chan­ging cli­mate trends, and effects on the envir­on­ment itself, that I have now seen with my own eyes, in addi­tion to the wide­pread evid­ence provided by the sci­entific com­munity to any­one with the guts to listen, are the reason I am writ­ing to you now. I implore you to add your vote to the Cli­mate Change Bill which, based as it is on now-obsolete inform­a­tion, should be amended to include a car­bon diox­ide reduc­tion tar­get of at least 80% by 2050.

This is a global issue, and coun­tries such as ours with the capa­city to lead by example have a moral oblig­a­tion to act NOW to pre­vent a future in which the gen­er­a­tions of tomor­row must spend their time on the planet deal­ing with the con­sequences of our actions today.

Should you be inter­ested, a web­site with more inform­a­tion on my jour­ney can be viewed at www.ride-earth.org.uk.

Please add your vote to amend this Bill.

Yours sin­cerely,

Tom Allen

If you feel strongly enough to spare a couple of minutes of your time on Planet Earth, you can send your local MP a let­ter from a purpose-built web­site by WWF UK, which will find your local MP’s address based on your post­code, and even write a draft let­ter for you, before email­ing it dir­ectly or mak­ing it suit­able for print­ing and post­ing. These MPs are wait­ing to hear from you — that’s their job.

If you live in Eng­land but you’re still not con­vinced about this issue, you may be inter­ested to read this art­icle. More gen­eral inform­a­tion can be found at the WWF’s own site. And in mil­lions of other places all over the world.

And if you want to find out how you can eas­ily reduce your own demands on the envir­on­ment, it actu­ally could not be easier, thanks to the WWF’s One Planet Liv­ing pro­ject. Don’t feel bad for brush­ing it under the car­pet. Feel good for doing your bit!