Climate Witness: Gregory Norminton, UK

My name is Gregory Norminton. I am 31 years old, a writer, and though based in Scotland I grew up and lived until recently in southeast England. A childhood spent among woods and heaths left me with a deep concern for the natural world which remains at the heart of my writing.

English | Dutch | Français
The weather in southeast England has undoubtedly changed in thirty years, with hotter, drier summers and wetter, milder winters. The occasional heavy snows of my childhood are almost unheard of now, while the famous drought of 1976 – the year I was born – has seen its records smashed in 2003 and 2006. The 2003 heatwave saw thousands of deaths in Western Europe, while 2007’s floods caused billions of pounds worth of damage.

But I want to focus on a less spectacular indicator of a disordered climate: our trees. Like many people, I have always loved trees and woods. Although southeast England is very crowded, there remain patches of dense woodland and these offer respite from the rush of roads, shopping centres and airports. The European beech tree has always been a favourite of mine, with its smooth, elegant trunk and dense canopy. Many of the tallest and most handsome trees in my childhood – real and emotional landmarks – were beech trees.

In the last decade, southern beech trees have begun to suffer abrupt die-offs. With their shallow roots, many mature beeches just can’t cope with alternating floods and droughts. In Windsor Forest, whole stands of beech have died in the past few years; in the wooded, chalk hills of the Chilterns (still famous for their beech woods planted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), foresters are already replanting more drought-resistant species, so that a famous landscape and its ecosystem are changing forever.

France is my second homeland. My mother was born in Grenoble, where her father, who died aged 84 in 1998, recalled being able, as a young man, to ski from the mountains to his house in the city; something which, even without urban sprawl, would be impossible today, given that snow hardly ever settles on low ground. I know the French Alps well, having spent many months there over the past thirty years. Here, too, global warming is a visible process. The massive heatwaves of 2003 and 2006 have had a devastating impact on Norwegian spruce trees. Whole mountainsides in Haute-Savoie are grey with dead spruces, killed off by drought and heat stress. Granted, Norway spruce plantations were never ideal for the lower slopes; yet seeing tens of thousands of trees die so suddenly is sad and deeply troubling.

We must all act to slow the process of climate change and to limit it to 2 degrees Centigrade. Above that, our losses will be not only economic but also moral and emotional. Business seems ready to act but it desperately needs the agreement of international governments to create a framework for making the transition to a low carbon economy. Beside that, we need a moral, cultural and spiritual transformation to help us cope with what is to come.