This time the Climate Action took the shape of an afternoon in the Octagon where different organisations provided information, possible actions, entertainment and food to generate a positive forum for everyone to share ideas and initiatives that everyone can do on a daily basis to have a positive impact on the environment rather than contributing to climate change.

LPHS was involved through a wonderful piece of creative writing that Eve Cowperthwaite had written and then presented it there. The Enviro group had a shared stall with Bayfield High School and had prepared messages for our political leaders - at national and local levels. We then invited people to write their own letters to these leaders that we have sent off - hoping for more action at local and national level. 

Eves read out at climate strike:

I knew a girl.

She grew up in a wheeled tin box, trundling forward through time under concrete skies that in her memory had never been blessed by blue.

Backseat watching, waiting, her years were spent listening to a thin voiced tin man over the radio. Him, her only gospel. Her only teacher, as she travelled across barren landscapes and through sizzling rain.

Occasionally she’d crack open a smeared window for a whiff of fresh air, but was always met instead with the putrid smell of fear.

It found her presence comforting, and so it followed her on her endless pilgrimage.

She trucked on through tsunamis and wildfires, and as the little box reddened with embers and condensation froze to the window, flames singed her fingertips and ocean water washed through the flung open door.

With it came the fear. Sweat turned to acid, apples left too long to be plucked and bodies left too long to be buried.

It pooled on the floor, and clawed its way up her legs until it had found its way into her every orifice, until it had wormed into her eardrums and set her every organ awash, until it choked her from the inside out.

Until the tsunamis over the radio became tsunamis of the mind, body and voice. Silencing, stifling.

And yet she continued on.

Because every journey must have an end, one way or another, and while she could not stop them herself, she knew the wheels beneath her could not go on turning for eternity.

She pushed on through the years, joined by fear and doubt and bitter bitter loneliness, but never falling into their grasp.

Sure enough there came a day when the sky started to look a little less grey, and the scrub a little more green. The water seeped back out under the door, and the fires ceased. And the thin voiced man over the radio wasn’t the only thing she could hear anymore.

It built slowly, day by day, with a chirp or a laugh or a single warm note. It didn’t start out as much, just a solitary sound that her ears would strain for.

But as her surroundings grew more saturated, with leafy greens and blues and pinks flourishing tall above her, the sound crescendoed until she could no longer hear her little tin man at all.

With her face squashed up to the window, she was encircled by babble and laughter of voices and brook in achingly sweet harmony, as brightly winged birds swooped, or scuffed through the rich dirt. She could just make out fleeting figures to-ing and fro-ing beneath the living canopy.

Whistling blurs.

Sure enough, once the sky reached the peak of bluebird, the tin box jolted to a stop, the door swung open, and, as the girl clambered out onto the dewy grasses underfoot, she sensed a smell not of rot and ruin, but one ambrosial and damp that she could only describe as a sort of blooming hope.

It felt like it came from the very essence of the earth itself, and as she inhaled again, and as her shoulders lowered, she felt like it came from her own very core.

As her eyes grew accustomed to the assault of colour, she found that the fleeting shadows she glimpsed before were people, digging and watering and laughing and crying and holding each other under the sheltering foliage. And she observed, for every tree spread above her, and for every bird scuffling at her feet, there was someone labouring to paint the bland landscape of their own creation, with a hue bright and brilliant. To rebuild atop of the grey left behind. To realise, and to make an attempt at an apology, at a remedy that would outlast even them.

Overwhelmed, the girl knelt to the ground, watching, waiting, and let herself sink into the motherly soil.

Listening.