I’m going to say the things about climate change everyone else is too frightened to say

Written August 2025 by Zoë Hughes.

This past week I’ve been musing on the deep grief for the future of the Earth, that I used to carry. Grief about what would happen to the animals and trees I loved so much, about the hole in the ozone layer, global warming, and mass extinctions. A world of human destruction, a time of consequences yet to come.

I say ‘used to carry’, intentionally here. Back then, the apocalyptic stuff felt far way, in the distant future. As a wee kid I felt huge amounts of sadness for all the loss we were on track to have. I realised, this has changed in recent times, because we are now living in the long predicted future of climate change. The consequences are now our reality.

Things have moved on since I was a kid. The decades of scientific predictions about climate change induced catastrophes has brought us to this point. The projections have slowly ground us down to the present moment.

Climate change is no longer a warning. It’s here. Now

Over the years, the grief I felt has slowly morphed into shock about just how normal climate change is becoming to us. Often in an unspoken way. In our small talk, for example, we talk about the drastic changes in our weather or the fewer numbers of bees with an air of detachment. Rarely do we state that this is the effect of our extractive relationship to nature.

It reminds me of the pandemic, when we all talked about when it would end. It never really ended. We just slowly learnt to live with a the virus and the possibility of more pandemics in the future.

This normalcy of horror is what I’ve been curious about recently.

A present full of heatwaves and droughts, extreme storms that bring down older generations of forests and crush human dwellings to rubble and wildfire that blaze through ancient mountains up and down these islands. Flames claiming more land than Scotland or England has ever seen before. These are the consequences.

This summer marks the driest and hottest summer on record ever. Many parts of (usually) soggy Scotland have experienced severe droughts this year. The situation is so bad that that the whisky industry, which depends on water to distill whisky, is under threat from significant water shortages. Even in wetter weeks, the average rainfall has vastly decreased.

This summer has been glorious! There is no doubt about it, but behind it is a darkness that I don’t think many people want to admit. The natural world is entirely dependent on seasonal changes. The heatwaves have forced this natural rhythm into a scattered series of events, out of sync with the centuries old predictable beat of life.  

Here in Scotland we’re having an abundant year for fruit. The hawthorn is laden with haws, the brambles are generously offering us a buffet of big juicy berries and the trees are gleaming with sweet plums for the birds, bugs and creatures (like us, human creatures).

It’s another story down south, where the heatwaves have been relentless and totally dry all summer long. I was visiting my city of birth, London, last week. In the park, near where I grew up, there used to be a big old greasy south London pond with geese and ducks and a scummy litter flecked island in the middle. My heart dropped out of my chest when I saw the new field that the pond has now become, no hardy urban pond dwellers in sight. It was covered with wee puffs of dried up grass and other autumnal signs of this year’s plant growth. It looked like it had been a field for many years. Due to ever decreasing water levels that pond was long gone. I can’t help but wonder what plight those geese and ducks endured as their home dried up and disappeared.

You see signs of the new drier warmer climate everywhere you look in London, even down to the new trees the council plant along the streets that are ‘drought hardy’ making it feel like Barcelona. This, my foraging friend, is climate change happening now right in front of our eyes.

The most shocking thing to witness was the condition of the fruit. The brambles look like they hadn’t fully developed this year. My family all grumbled about how bad the brambles are this year, but my heart broke for those same birds, bugs and creatures that won’t have that abundant source for food.

Remember, the other creatures don’t have supermarkets or international imports to get their food from. They need the wild stuff. When it falters, so do they. In fact, eventually so do we. All food comes from the same natural rhythms that govern nature. Our supermarket food is no different, wild food is merely an early indicator of change.

This year on Arran we survived a large wildfire and a series of big storms that brought down many beloved old trees, destroyed food producing polytunnels and left parts of the island without electricity for a week. We know how fragile our utilities, roads and food supply are here. Every time I nibble on those ample brambles I remember how grateful I am for the wild & free sweetness of fruit.

Drought, heat, storms and fire are already becoming more and more part of our everyday lives than ever before. They are slowly seeping into what we consider normal. As I write, I remind myself, they are destructive not normal. They are the consequences of human over extraction.

I am allowing myself to feel the grief of this.

Call me sensitive, but I find the denial of this in the mainstream absolutely baffling. I feel like I’m mourning a dying grandparent, in the stage where you’re not fully hit by the loss yet. Yet everyone who passes keeps telling me how lovely the weather is, again and again.

I do not have an answer to this. I’m not selling you a solution. There is no solution to grief. But I do know that grief is the product of love. You only grieve things you loved and lost, you’ll never grieve things you didn’t care about. It’s the shadow of love, and I like to whisper this to myself of this when I feel it. I’m mourning this because I love nature, I love the forest, the sea, the bugs, birds and creatures (especially the humans).

To love nature right now is to feel the loss of it.

Foraging is my invitation to you. An invitation to step through the gateway of this grief and into a new reciprocal relationship with nature. A relationship based on mutual respect, not destruction or extraction. An open invitation to participate in the natural world in a new-old way: A remembering, a listening, the beat of an ancient drum dormant in each of us.

More about the role of foraging and nature connection in Part 2 of this foraging journal.