“You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot, some little … And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage.”— Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The mantra of ‘Climate Emergency!’ has been a central feature of the exhilarating and deeply necessary climate-movement that has swept the world since 2018. In this essay, we ask uncomfortable questions: What if climate is not an emergency, but something much more difficult? Worse: What if the drive towards declaration of emergency is just another form of immunity to deep change, in disguise?

There are many ways to have a ‘greener’ more ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘sustainable’ Christmas although most of them still rely on some level of consumption but what if you want to go further still? Rupert Read has some thoughts.

Reader, I want to propose a new way to address the great issue of our time: how - even now, at the twelfth hour - we might turn ourselves away from our current path of self-destruction.

What is required is the building of care, ethical sensibilities, and precautiousness into the very warp and weft of our lives.

...something which particularly concerns us in the leaked documents is the unsurprising but nevertheless depressing fact that the US Government is clearly pressuring our Government to drop the ‘Precautionary Principle’. This is a key protection for us and for nature; if the Trump and Johnson Governments had practiced precaution in relation to the coronavirus pandemic (as some other countries such as New Zealand did), they wouldn’t now have hundreds of thousands of graves on their hands and consciences. This would therefore be a particularly absurd moment to ditch the Precautionary Principle.

The precautionary case is strengthened by each of these points: it is a case for suppression/elimination, and against the reckless willingness to infect most of the population.

Evidence is accumulating that there is a significant link between low levels of the vitamin and higher mortality rates — although most agree it is too early to categorically say one way or the other and more work is needed. One piece of this evidence was very suggestive data from Italy showing extreme Vitamin D deficiency in most of those in a set of Covid-19 post-mortems.

Indeed, throughout this crisis, when our government failed to act in a precautious way, we the people made the right moves – together, encouraging and encouraged by our family, friends and community.