Greta Thunberg in her speech today in Bristol did not stray far from her usual stark summation of matters:

“Still this emergency is being completely ignored by politicians, the media and those in power… Basically, nothing is being done to halt this crisis despite all the beautiful words and promises from the elected officials.” [1]

Kate Andrews, associate director at the Institute of Economic Affairs, on Politics Live [2] responded predictably enough, by challenging the veracity of this statement, and I might even think she has a point when I see the number of windmills in the Galloway Hills – despite much local hostility to their visual impact. Something, I might have thought, is being done.

But George Monbiot, also a panelist, was quick to fill in the gaps of Greta’s rhetoric: “Nothing commensurate with the scale of the problem is being done.“

Extinction Rebellion do have a tendency to reach for hyperbole in relation to their vision of what awaits us if we fail to take appropriate action; however, I stumbled across a radio programme this week, Only Artists [3], in which the playwright Simon Stephens was in conversation with the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. In the midst of a thoroughly interesting exchange, Simon Armitage said, with reference to the environment, that he’d felt

“…for a number of years: we’re stuffed.”

Ah! This is the kind of thing I like to hear from my Poet Laureate.

Armitage’s poetry, has a similar quality of the demotic and in this case there is no mistaking his meaning. I’m thinking: perhaps we’ve been listening too closely to the scientific consensus; I’m willing to bet that there is a consensus – perhaps even a unanimity – amongst poets, in relation to what is happening to the environment, though few would sum up the matter quite as bluntly as Armitage.

He does go on, by the way, to explain why he thinks “we’re stuffed: I can’t really see a way out of this, there are too many interested parties who have no appetite or incentive for taking their foot of the gas.”

But then he says something a little more hopeful; that his despondency in relation to the environment has “slightly been toned down recently by the amazing radiance that’s coming out of young people and how for them environmentalism is not a marginal activity, it actually exists in the middle of their thinking.”

This is a great programme by the way, if you have any interest in poetry or theatre or indeed contemporary music: before he became a playwright, Simon Stephens was a member of Scottish art punk band The Country Teasers. I’d have to admit I’d never heard of them. Armitage too is a musician and a founder member of his band, the Scaremongers, so there is a fair amount of chat on this theme, particularly on their shared interest in the music of Mark E Smith and the Fall.

If I were you, I’d just pass on the Politics Live and listen to their conversation, and find out, amongst other things, why the word “playwright” is spelt the way it is.

And let’s hope that “amazing radiance” is not just a poet’s fancy.