John Watson
I’m standing for election as a District Councillor in the area where I reside because I want to live in a dynamic open democracy – a major part of the Green vision.
I have lived in Kenilworth for 14 years and brought up my 4 children here who all attended local schools. Until recently I worked in the automotive design sector needlessly trying to tease an extra fifteen horsepower out of a vehicle already capable of two hundred miles per hour and helping to shape an S.U.V. thirty percent larger than the model we were replacing.
I found a positive new direction by moving to work at a natural burial ground in Temple Balsall. I plant trees, I meet up with bereaved people and help them to find the right place, which can be in a woodland or in a wildflower meadow. For a sad thing, it’s possibly as nice as it can be. The bereaved often become my friends and gradually I started to learn the backstories of lives that have been well lived.
The issues that are most important to me are fundamentally environmental: combating climate change, reversing the loss of biodiversity, and giving access to clean rivers and oceans to all.
We desperately need to clean up our river systems, to stop pumping untreated sewage into them and to rewild our river valleys with even more woodlands and flower meadows.
We also need to encourage our industries to modernise effectively.
I want to initiate change in our traffic and transport systems. I aim to scrutinise transport plans from a fresh and optimistic perspective. Our economy needs this kind of positive energy to invigorate a green recovery. We should not allow pollutive industries to go back to doing what they think they know best, just because it’s all that they know.
We need a revolution in electric transport to clean up the roads that we already have and definitely not to carry on building more roads at the whim of the motor lobby.
We should link up the whole District with an integrated transport and cycle network, allowing people to enjoy a day out to explore their environment, breathing the clean Warwickshire air, then hopping onto a train home invigorated.
