Wycombe Environment Centre Position Statement, 2023.

Wycombe Environment Centre was founded in 2001. Its charitable objects are to advance education and community participation in environmental conservation and sustainable development.  The primary activities at the start of 2023 are to ex- pand the scrap store into an upcycling centre, to assist  people in reducing their environmental impact through what they buy, and to assist with the cost of living crisis by helping to remove the stigma that can be associated with not being able to afford brand new.

The plan is to bring the scrap store and the repair cafe together into an upcycling hub which can provide the ability for people in southern Buckinghamshire to live mainstream modern lives while consuming a fraction of what we have been consuming in recent years.

As individuals, the ‘stuff we buy’ causes roughly 1⁄4 of our carbon footprint each year. Wycombe Environment Centre is focusing on this, because it is a system in which we can have a positive disruptive influence, to effect the change that is needed locally and globally. Our ambition is to ‘mainstream’ repair, re-use, repurposing, recycling. and in so doing generate creative opportunities which provide a sense of agency to those involved, which will also help to contribute towards good mental health. The need to reduce our carbon emissions is the most pressing issue of our time. We are the first generation to understand the impact that our lives are having on the planet, and the last generation that can do something to stop the worst excesses of planetary instability.

As Johan Rockstrom, Professor of Environmental Science  and Director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Im- pact Research says, “What happens in the next 10 years  [2020-2030] will likely determine the state of the planet we hand over for future generations. Our children have every reason to be alarmed. We need to get serious about stabilising our planet”, see his Ted Talk here.

Stabilising our planet requires system change, and that cannot be done alone. Nor, given the pace at which change is urgently needed, can it be done gradually, waiting for the tipping point when what seemed unusual is established as the new normal.

To stimulate system change there must, therefore, be a level of disruption. Wycombe Environment Centre wishes to be a ‘change agent’ in this process. Some are undertaking civil disobedience in order to affect change. Wycombe Environment Centre respects that this has a legitimate role to play, but it is not our chosen path.

There is no scientific question about the need to radically reduce carbon emissions. For many people it  is hard to come to terms with this fact, and its implica- tions. For thousands of years humans have sought to  adapt the world about them to give them greater com- fort. It seems preposterous that these tiny acts, each of  which is, in the global scale, insignificant, could add up to such a dramatic change in our prospects. Somehow, we all need grasp that this is indeed the situation, so that we can adapt and change, because we need to do so quickly.

The 2015 Paris Summit sought carbon neutrality by 2050, and depended on a dramatic decrease to half emissions by 2030. But emissions have continued to rise. The more green house gases there are in the air, the higher our temperatures will be, and the greater disruption that will be caused. Carbon dioxide is one of nine planetary boundaries our activities need to remain within in order to achieve planetary stability. Another is biodiversity. They are all interconnected, and an excess in one can trigger negative feedback mechanisms in others.

One-and-a-half degree Centigrade is regarded as the maximum global temperature rise that avoids these dangerously interconnected tipping points. If we take immediate action in cutting carbon emissions now, so that they are dramatically lower by 2030 (ideally ceased all together) there is a very slim chance as a world we may keep around this limit, although the International Panel on Climate Change, a UN scientific group, has  stated that ‘there is no credible pathway to one-and-a- half degrees’. 

Working together, there is a possibility that this could be an opportunity for tremendous human flourishing, as we bring about ‘the great turning’. As David Bellamy memorably remarked, “if we win the ‘war with nature’,  we will find ourselves on the losing side”. Just as individ- ual small acts have brought us to this brink, so individual  small acts, taken together, can contribute to resolving it. Wycombe Environment Centre will play its part in helping people in southern Buckinghamshire be part of our shared solution.