‘Loving Earth’ to keep Climate Emergency ‘in public eye’

Chief Executive David Butterworth has said ‘Loving Earth’, a travelling exhibition that has arrived in the National Park on its way to the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, will help to keep the climate emergency in the public eye.

Speaking outside Bainbridge Quaker Meeting House, where ‘Loving Earth’ will be showing from 16-27 July, Mr Butterworth said that climate change caused by human activity was affecting the National Park, not least through more frequent extreme weather events, and that all organisations and individuals needed to consider what they could do to ‘make a difference’.

Panels from the Loving Earth National Collection will be displayed at the Meeting House together with textiles made by local people and pupils at Bainbridge, Askrigg and West Burton Schools.

Exhibition organisers have said that some people are feeling overwhelmed by the problem of climate change and that meditating on the panels could be an empowering experience.

David Butterworth said: “The evidence that climate change is affecting the National Park is clear.  We can see it in the movements of flora and fauna.  We can see it in that one-in-one-hundred-year floods are happening much more frequently.

“Increasingly urgent political decisions need to be taken nationally and internationally to address climate change. But we also need to look at what can be done locally; with the Government’s recently announced funding promoting the changes that are taking place in upland farming being a good example. We can also all look at our own lives and ask, ‘What is it that we can do to make a change?’ 

“The ‘Loving Earth’ exhibition will help to keep the climate emergency in the public eye and I hope it will inspire those who come to view it to see that people can, and are, making a difference.”