022 To my children's, children's, children,

We live in a century devoid of faith, and it is you my future children that will reap the consequences of our disbelief, our lack of faith in science. I am as useless as a war journalist reporting to those who have seen it all before. This bulletin comes to you too late, from a battle fatigued generation that knew so much but did so little, a generation too busy committing politicide to notice the ecocide.

I am outside on a warm afternoon in June, our first flush of summer. My feet nestled in the lush mown grass, shaded by a canopy of rippling green, Willow, Ash and Beech. The waterfall cascades into the pond and I look up and relish the foxgloves and lupines that are just coming into bloom. A wood pigeon's coo-coo interrupts the chatter of the sparrows and blackbirds as bees zip busily amongst the early flowering clematis, and for a moment I am content.

Is this English garden no more than a picture in your history book, because too many of us buried our heads for the sake of short term gain? If you could, would you tell us not to be so foolish?

I wish that you could travel back in time, bring the proof, for we have signed up to prolicide ' the death of the human race. But if you could show us how you have to close the shutters against the April sun that burns and wilts the palm trees in your garden, scorching desolate beds and borders in a shimmering haze of blackened grass, then might we be able to believe?

Does the Amazon burn in a grotesque parody of the northern lights?

Do you watch, powerless, as nations starve and Islands slip beneath the sea?

Are Polar bears the stuff of myths and dreams?

The saddest thing of all is that we had the knowledge to minimise the damage, to protect the weak and the vulnerable. But we, the custodians of a planet so special, so unique, acted like spoilt children, the future forgotten in the greed of the present.

Have you ever dived amongst the teeming life of a coral reef?

Have you ever belly laughed at a penguin catching fish?

Have you ever strolled through a cool avenue of Beech trees in an English forest?

Faith is a tricky thing, but it's you, my children's, children's children who will suffer the consequences of a generation who knew so much, but believed in so little. And I'm sorry that I stood by and watched the ice melting, the seas rising and¦ the earth dying.

The biggest war is yet to be fought and we haven't even begun, maybe we never did, maybe there is no one to left to read this, maybe this land has turned to sea, maybe it's time for us to relinquish our strangle hold on this planet once blue, scorched as red as Mars. Maybe thousands of years from now, our world will be rediscovered, our history lain out in glass cases as a warning to others of the destruction wrought through greed.

All I can offer you are hollow words, I am sorry, such an ugly sentiment without intent. Maybe I deserve it, but you don't, and it is you, my great grandchildren, my own, my hopes for the future, who will pay my dues.