At times it can seem hard to know how best to place our efforts, even whether those efforts will ever prove fruitful, whether they are worth themselves at all. Above all the myriad things we may face, which do not need any rehearsal – a cost-of-living crisis where we scrabble to fix metaphorical roofs high amongst them – above all of this there is the knowledge of that great existential crisis of the climate, not so much an elephant in the room as a kind of collective howling at the door.  Is doing anything at all quite futile in the face of the scale of the challenge?  Are we all in the UK with our languid, moist and merciful, perhaps somewhat desultory summer archetypes of the famed relaxed dogs on the sofa while the walls this time adopt the metaphor, licked with flames of distant forest fires; so easy to dismiss with a click of a switch, so difficult to forget?

Perhaps it’s a question of choice.  We can choose for instance to ignore it all, to continue to ignore it, literally screen it out with a surfeit of devices and their myriad balms and distractions.  Or we can fall into embittered enmity; rehearse our woes while doing nothing to address them.  Perhaps the biggest choice is, knowing what we know, can we really not do anything at all – through despondency or lack of drive or just not knowing how on earth we can start to respond when perhaps all we need to do, if just for a moment, is listen?

Beneath the apparent disregard or callousness there’s a deep well of something else in all of us, a well that all the phones, the hours lost to films and mini-series or scrolling socials, the buzz of pints, the near oblivion from anything else we may throw down our throats or clog our consciousness with, there’s a well that none of this can dry or fathom – a well of true feeling, an almost insatiable hunger for life, true life; not a technological chimera or booze-induced haze or mirage, but a feeling of how we are all meant to be; clear, connected – in the most meaningful way – connected and sorted and free.

None of this is to say that any of these things are necessarily bad in themselves but probably most of us rely on them more than we could some of the time, and some people much more than that. But perhaps, just maybe, maybe; if we can drink a little deeper and more often from that well when the scramble for sustenance and sanity allows, we may be able to look at our various dilemmas with a kind of clarity that engenders some kind of meaningful action, a clarity that informs and reminds us that there are myriad people out there striving and endeavouring to help, that we can join with their efforts, augment them, strive to do right by the times.

If we can do so, prise open the door just about long enough, squeeze out of the bars of the cage, we may find out there lights in the darkness; pinpoints of distant semaphores or visual morse that can guide us, help us to do what we can; silent suggestions that there is still a way, that there are still things we can do.

One such suggestion, and I do not know how I first heard it – dropped like a pearl in my inbox one morning perhaps – is the initiative over the Climate and Ecology Bill.  This proposed legislation was introduced years ago now, but it was re-introduced to the ‘Commons this Spring and is set for further debate in a couple of months.

There’s a great deal you can say about the Bill – the clue’s in the title – but it offers above all two things; a constructive, pragmatic, if admittedly ambitious road map as to how we can get our house in order in the UK regarding the Bill’s twin concerns and how we as communities and individuals can get on board and contribute in a tangible, realistic and meaningful way.

You can read all about the specifics of the Bill at the national website; the 40 peers and 127 MPs of all parties already on board, the backing of eminent scientists, CPRE, the Wildlife Trusts, the Co-operative Bank and many other businesses, 30,000 members of the public. You can read all about its suggestions, its scale and its rigour and its hope.  What is perhaps more important is that any one of us, anyone at all can play their part in its promotion and – beyond the scope of wider goals of lobbying, whose only real limit is that of the imagination – it can be a very simple thing; as simple as writing a letter.

If enough MPs are contacted these next few months by sufficient numbers of voters it would stand in good stead not only the prospects of the passage of the Bill later this Autumn but also those of the domestic environmental agenda in general as we move forward to the New Year and the prospect of an eventual election.

It may seem a thin hope at times that any of this can address the true scale of the problem.  But it may be enough, just in time.  What is clear is that, when faced with the prospect of looking future children in the eye, when all that may need to be done may be still, if just about, within our grasp, there is no decision at all; just the surrender to effort, in the knowledge that we may stand a little more resolute, that we may win a little time for the next pearl to drop into our hands, the next sweet opportunity, in the hope our mutual lights may be seen across a diminishing void, that others may still find their way ahead.