This is a letter by John MacIntyre who built our 'Message in a Bottle' buoy.

Dear Sirs,

I am writing because I want those people who will be alive a hundred from now to inherit the rich hospitable sun lit leaf shaded and life tangled world that I grew up in. I hope that our literature and art can be saved and that our children will have time to write and tell more stories. I hope that they will be able to wander and dance and to fall in love in the moss deep northern forests still filled with the flight of birds. I hope that whales, tigers and the great apes will not have disappeared and become mythological.

I am also writing because I have spent my entire adult life working as a scientist and owe it to those people yet to live to speak.

We are living in a blizzard of change and yet act as if nothing is changing. My parents were born soon after the first aircraft flew. In their life times radio, television and the BBC were created, atomic power and the fusion bomb, jet engines and air travel, cars and motor
ways, computers and electronics, the population of the planet quadrupled and we have burnt about half of the oil and coal. Even our education system is not so much older then they are, yet we behave as if all of these things are unchanging.

The climate and ecology of the world are finely balanced and easily shifted from one state of almost equilibrium to another. Ice ages start and end as the amount of sunlight falling at high latitudes alters imperceptibly. The oceans act to slow the change for a while and then the world warms or cools and life must move and adapt to the change. Many times the world has changed and life has changed with it sometimes coming close to being extinguished and sometimes so changing the environment that it has almost extinguished itself.

Now we have walked into a trap. We didn't know we had and we didn't intend to but we have. The oil that we have burnt to fuel our
technology and agriculture has altered the composition of the atmosphere and is changing the balance of the climate so that our civilization will be overwhelmed unless we act. There is no doubt about this. The same mathematics and science that allowed us to make aircraft and computers also allows us to describe and understand why this plant grows here and not there, why the forest ends where it dose giving way to a sea of grass. How the earths orbit changes across deep time and what sunlight is made from.

If we are to escape the trap we must act quickly and do many things all at once.

We must learn to look ahead and to plan for change and for stability over hundreds of years. We must live with less and to use what we use more carefully. We must reduce the population of the planet at least ten fold. We need to create a sustainable agriculture that depends less on fossil fuel, uses the land more efficiently and dose no great harm to the life that shares the earth with us.

We have the knowledge to do all these things.

Yours sincerely

John McIntyre

To see where the letters have got to now click here.