Whitchurch Forum

As I write this the choirs sing and the bells have just ceased ringing after the symbolic time of 11am on the 11th hour of the 11th month of 2007.
Around me the windows of my eco friendly house each 111 centimetres across celebrating ,as does  Versailles built for The Sun King,the 111 year cycle of sunspot activity and a particular external energy beyond our control.

I am in the throes of writing an Obituary for an ex Kew Gardens man recently murdered in South Africa and soon I will be trawling the old records in the great herbarium at Kew for details of his life there. I have done this for nearly thirty years and I am reminded today of the time I decided to do some research to see when most people attended Kew. To my amazement the number, over 4 million, occurred in 1915. It is just over a million now.
This brought home the fcat that obviously hardly anyone knew in 1915 of the depth of the horrors occuring not very far away in those autumn and winter muddy fileds. In 1916 the Great British Public found out and attendance at Kew plummeted and it has never ever reached that level again.

We have all sorts of modern communicatons now and much more is being revealed but I do think we have a similar situation with global warming.

The lessons are there but are we empowered to do much ?