What a whirlwind couple of weeks. Won Government funding to protect and improve the Thames Estuary thanks to support from Defra. Introduced South Hackney and Shoreditch MP Meg Hillier to our Wild Place Your Space project. Launched a million-pound fundraiser with Tesco's for our tropical rainforest work and I ran a workshop on Corporate Social Responsibility for some staff at the European HQ of digital imaging company Ricoh.
You'd think there wouldn't be much room left for anything else but I also tarted up my frost ravaged garden, just in time for a second forecasted cold snap to hit the newly potted-out plants, bulbs and seeds. Our climate's being very unpredictable but I'm banking on 2012 remaining dry with big swings between extremely hot and bitterly cold. These extremes are a result of climate change and it's hard to find garden plants that will cope with both. Imagine how wildlife will cope!
We do seem to be making great progress despite the economic climate. Hand on heart I can say that there are plenty of silver linings appearing round the edges of clouds; sadly there are also bigger clouds scudding across the horizon to obscure all once again.
Boris Johnson's still pursuing his vanity project of an airport in the Thames Estuary, flying literally against the tide of evidence and common-sense from residents, landowners, airlines, Government departments and conservation groups like the RSPB.
Our amazing WPYS social inclusion project in the Lee Valley is doing great things but will soon reach the end of its three-year lifespan. It recently took refugee families into the Lee Valley and gave them a sense of normality and freedom that few participants have ever experienced. On International Women's Day they'll be working with an Asian Women's Group in their wildlife garden.
Our Together for Trees partnership with Tesco is going to be great, but the global economic situation is driving illegal loggers into desperate acts of violence and smear campaigns as they increase their efforts to rape our natural heritage and launder their stolen wood and pulp through squeezed economies.
Being an eternal optimist, I know we'll overcome the illegal loggers. Wild Place Your Space will leave a legacy and a wealth of experience to help new projects bring people closer to nature; and that estuary airport will be too heavy to get off the ground. Small individual steps take us ever closer to a saner world, but the more people that join the journey, the easier and faster it will be.