Today is a day of international protest against climate change. You can find details out through Friends of The Earth website and in many other places online. This is clearly an urgent and important issue for the whole Human Species, and as our young people’s lives stretch out before them, they are rightly demanding change now

However, I would like us as a community to take a lead with action that will make a small but real difference. There is a very simple way we can begin to reverse the problems of climate change which is explained beautifully in National Geographic. Plant trees– lots of them.

On 20 July, the 50th Anniversary of the Moon Landing I launched The Discovery Society, based here at The Bewdley School. The charitable object of the society is “To advance the education of the students at The Bewdley School by providing and assisting in the provision of facilities [not required to be provided by the local education authority] for understanding of and engagement in exploration and scientific research.” I will be speaking to our Youth Forum about the society over the next few weeks.

I would like its first activity to be to take some real action on climate change, and this is how. We will set up a charity fund to raise money, lots of it. We will need tens of thousands of pounds, maybe forty thousand to start with. This fund would be used to buy unused pasture land, which we would plant with trees. This new woodland would be a tangible asset, and whilst we would plant mixed deciduous woodland, it would need to be managed, and the funds raised from selling wood as the woodland is managed would be put back into buying more pasture land to plant more woods.

You will hear more about this over the coming months, but please join with The Bewdley School in restoring much of the beautiful woodland lost over the last 500 years. In doing so, you will be helping to reverse climate change, and assuring the future stability of the Earth’s climate for generations to come.

Dave Hadley-Pryce
Head Teacher