Going local: how to make a big difference in small ways
Written by Patrick Barkham
For readers feeling anxious about the climate crisis, a fresh crop of nature writing is energising grassroots activism and inspiring local conservation
Confronted by climate breakdown, the extinction crisis and rising inequalities, it is easy to feel anxious and hopeless. I feel those things, but in recent months I’ve also been heartened by a surge of grassroots action, of diverse people responding in myriad ways to multiplying crises. To call it an ecosystem of resistance would be overly dramatic, but it is a flowering of good deeds and positive care for local neighbourhoods.
In my blue corner of conservative Norfolk, traditionally slow to adopt national trends, I’ve encountered all kinds of inspiring work. The Norwich Soup Movement is one of four women-led volunteer groups providing hot suppers for the homeless every day of the week. Eves Hill Veg Co is a community market garden (again women-led), which trains people in horticulture and grows healthy fruit and veg for local people. Dandelion Education is an outdoor nursery and forest school with an enlightened focus on improving youth mental health, run by two brilliant former teachers. The Felbeck Trust is one of scores of new micro-local conservation groups seeking to restore wildlife.
We are social creatures living in a time that is trying to stop us from being that
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