On Sunday 3rd November I, along with many thousands more, attended the ‘March for Clean Water’ in London and it was clear that significant numbers of the population of these two countries, England and Wales, felt the urgent need to travel to make some noise for clean water in this country, the UK, one of the richest countries in the world. How did we let this avoidable situation happen and what hope for the future. When we allow our leaders to continue to divide us, and just look at The USA right now, we have no chance of turning back from the brink.
Most people in the world want us to solve the problems that we see on our screens, big and small, beamed at us all over the world. We are united in viewing but not in care it seems. The greatest danger we currently face is indifference and despair that we seem to have so little influence to change things for the better.
So as wars rage, the wealthiest corporations and individuals become even more powerful and influential and the weather even more extreme, where is the beacon of hope on the horizon? It comes as a small, seemingly irrelevant, often unnoticed green plant goes about its rapid life cycle. A plant capable of solving the greatest immediate problem our planet faces, the climate emergency.
This tiny plant is deceptive because by rapid replication every two days means it is potentially bigger than any tree that takes hundreds of years to fully mature. In 70 days, this tiny plant, if starting at one ton in mass becomes over 32 billion tons in mass. This tiny plant also is so easily grown and harvested. Kept solid and stored it can solve our problem of excessive atmospheric carbon. Duckweed can be cultivated easily in multi-layered propagation trays, effectively creating as many Earth surfaces as necessary to achieve the goal we set for it. Rather poignantly, duckweed is very good at depolluting water and many sewage companies already use it for that purpose. Farmers building flash flood trenches to capture excess rainfall which is heavily laden with fertilizer washed off the fields is where propagation can most easily commence. Propagation of duckweed, commencing here firstly on farms, would start to solve both linked problems we have created.
We will only achieve this by us all being aware of its saving potential and unite on this one subject to work together across the globe to grow the micro version of duckweed and store it at the same time as realising that we need to steadily reduce fossil fuel usage, the cause of our immediate climate problem. By having a success working together solving such a big issue we also have the chance of realising that we need to take care of all nature and that includes our fellow human beings.
A better world for the future starts with us uniting to solve the climate emergency and i4one is the means to do that, along with the knowledge of how we solve the climate conundrum with multi-layered propagation worldwide of duckweed.