Fight The Good Fight

A rallying cry from Norfolk Wildlife Trust evangelist Nick Acheson

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I am not good at autumn. The dizzying splendour of May - when each blossom-laden hawthorn pulses with the song of chaffinch and whitethroat – the endless days of June, these are my habitat. For I belong in the light. Autumn, moody and grey, when a moment’s daylight is shaved from each passing day, when the robin’s song tells of brief, cold, gloomy days ahead; autumn is a time of sadness to me.

The geese come, bringing the shrill gossip of the tundra, and the scoters gather on the frigid surf, and I love them – really I do – but my heart longs for the hopeful days of spring.

Even were it not autumn, my year’s nadir, there would be scant cause for hope. The Amazon is aflame, its millennial riches, its climate-regulating beneficence, torched. Last summer saw record ice melt in Greenland, the world’s second largest ice-sheet haemorrhaging into the rising sea. But hope we must. For without hope there is no fight in us. And fighting is needed now more than at any time since humanity first stumbled across the dust of this green, blue, bounteous planet.