On Valentine’s Day, comedian and actor Stephen Fry and a half-dozen other UK celebrities helped The Climate Coalition launch a campaign that focuses on the things people love that are threatened by climate change.
“With the help of some familiar faces, expert voices and you, your friends, family, neighbours, and kids, we’re starting something special this February,” the Coalition writes. “This year, world leaders will make decisions that will affect us all. We need them to feel our love for things we could lose to climate change.”
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Fry and colleagues read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?, on a site where regular citizens talk about the things they love—from kittiwakes and herons, to coffee and skiing, to the City of London.
“Climate change really came home to me last winter, when I got on a train to Cornwall to visit my Mum and Dad the day before Christmas Eve,” explains a London resident who writes for the love of seeing his parents. “The journey usually takes about four hours from London. Unnaturally torrential rain, widespread flooding, and trees on the line this time made it an eight-hour trek.”
Flooded fields “looked for all the world like great expanses of sea, with the wind whipping up waves where previously there would have been grazing cattle,” he wrote. “Little was I to know that within a month, the whole stretch of track would fall into the sea, pummeled by relentless, stormy waves.”
