In 2008 I became a fellow of London Zoo and attended a biodiversity crisis meeting related to amphibians. Efforts were made to create an amphibian ark as 30% of all amphibians were at risk of extinction. In my role as technical director of Green Tourism I prepared a fact sheet and we encouraged hoteliers to sponsor a frog as part of this crisis. 

We then create our own datasheet for the Year of the Frog and ZSL developed it into a project. Sadly it didn’t capture the public’s imagination and no great resources were developed and so the crisis remains and has event got worse. However I was lucky enough to meet David Attenborough and let him know what we were doing in Green Tourism and he was very supportive. As part of my own commitments I sponsored the dancing Luristan newt and David and London Zoo co- sponsored it. The newt we featured was rescued from Iran and they can be seen at London Zoo even now as I witnessed with the Coral Vitae winners from Prince Williams earth prize last year when we discussed what we could do in Maldives.

Ten years in 2018 we hit major tipping points losing major forests in Brazil, Australia and Canada losing the permafrost in Siberia and even Scotland had a peat fire which lost as much carbon to the atmosphere as all the carbon released from transport in Scotland that year.

Since then we have been diverted with Covid and seen the inadequacy of Global politics and the climate change agenda.

We have already lost the first species to climate change a cloud forest frog and now we have to mobilise urgently for everything is collapsing.

Connecting with Sir David since this crisis has awakened us to the depth the crisis most scientists are now of the opinion that we are too late and even ZSL is now planning to create a genetic species bank of over ½ million species because they are in danger of going extinct in the new few years.

Unfortunately there is no real evidence that these animals can be restored given we struggle to even recreate mammoths with existing elephants.

We need to rapidly change our relationships with society and with each other and this comes from restoring our relationships within our communities and build a more mutualistic society.

We can do this by supporting our natural leaders strengthen positive relationships in our communities and bring our teams together at social networking events which help us transition our society in a much more positive direction.

We need to move forward rapidly given we have only 8 years to make a real difference or face complete climate breakdown.

Our experiences with great events linked to the Hacienda as a social movement to improve wellbeing of the communities of the North of England during the miners strike and subsequent deprivation created a whole new music and cultural scene which is still remembered today and we can recreate that in Scotland too.

This is mirrored in how animal communities work in helping develop relationships for mutual success however if we don’t synergise these relationships under a common goal then we cannot possibly succeed. That is the mission behind Earth-Rising.

This message is from JFKs great speech and one I have included in a story and an app about earth-rising ready for Midsummer 2022 which we will be demoed by Zudu our software engineers on the night.