'POLAR BEARS.' You'll hear this soundbite before you see the
stroppy youngsters clattering around turning off lights. In my
house I get "global warming!" roared at me as my son flicks off the
standby button on the DVD player, writes
AILISH CONNELLY.
Is there no peace from it, from the haranguing, fundamental - sorry - environmental movement? Not even it seems in your own home, where you can switch off that nagging new Change ad on the TV and save yet more CO2, but you can't switch off your own child?
You place Al Gore's book back on the shelf because you have absorbed that particular message; in fact you know it so well you could chant it in your sleep. But your children are showing you up, asking, when, mammy, can we get a hybrid electric car and why, Mammy, don't we have our own hens? Since when did hens become so fashionable?
There is no escape from the guilt. A friend rings and tells me her child spent the weekend learning chicken husbandry and how to correctly mix cement. Fairy liquid keeps it pliable apparently. Useful, important information for a 12-year-old girl to learn, nuggets of information that will stay with her all the long days of her life, more useful maybe than knowledge gleaned from hanging around Dundrum shopping centre.
The back to basics lifestyle is gaining currency, with some families opting for sustainable living, from generating their own electricity to growing their own food. Which is fine and admirable and perhaps do-able if you live in a home which was built in the 1930s or 1940s, three to an acre, large solid semi-ds with huge back gardens.
Or if you live in the country with a bit of a field beside the gable. I can't imagine you could grow much of your own if you live in one of the high-density new developments and you certainly won't have the time if you spend three hours a day in your car driving to and from your lifestyle-enhancing job.
My parents had one of those semi-ds with a huge garden and practically ran an agri-business out the back. They grew cabbages and carrots, potatoes, scallions, lettuce, tomatoes, beans; runner, broad and string, apple, plum, damson and pear trees and gooseberry bushes and mounds of rhubarb. All from one suburban garden three miles from An Lár - and they weren't the only ones. Every other child I knew lived the same way; country parents as a matter of course grew their own food. It wasn't talked about, it wasn't cool, it wasn't even considered - it was just something everybody did. When did it change for us, to lose touch with our roots so much that we think we are marvellous if we manage to grow a window box of herbs? When did the concept of self-sufficiency become outmoded and when did it sneak back again as something vaguely aspirational?
We are reeling from the guilt over this mess we have found ourselves in. Guilty because we bought all those products that are relentlessly and skilfully marketed at us; like lemmings we couldn't say no, we didn't want to say no any more because we didn't have to. And because in our hearts we are five years old, salivating, looking in the shop window and suddenly realising after all those years of making do and growing our own that actually we could afford the mounds of clothes or the new gadgets or the waxed apples from Brazil.
And now we have to stop the nonsense. Because we have the knowledge. You'd want to have been living under a sustainable stone for the last decade not to know how unsustainable the consumption is. But do we want to stop? Hell no, we'll be dragged kicking and screaming into our frugal futures.
It's going to cost a fortune to reduce Ireland's dependence on fossil fuels, billions of euro, if it's possible at all. Not just in retrofitting our homes, but for food production, industry and transportation costs. It's not pig-headed to question the whole climate change issue, though it has become unquestionably heretical. Biofuel versus cheap grain: keep western civilisation's engines running or feed the developing world.
But the "what ifs" remain and some clever people are wondering - what if it's the large oil companies behind some of the counter-information? Need we be terrified into conserving this dwindling resource? What if we already have the green technology to move beyond the fossil fuel age, but "they" are keeping that technology from us to conserve the status quo? What is the point of doing much in this small island of ours, if the mind-boggling amounts of wasted energy and resources in the United States are not dealt with, if approximately two huge coal-fired electricity stations a week are being commissioned in China and India?
Then there's the issue of the heavy snowfalls in Amman, Jerusalem, Damascus and Saudi Arabia just last February, snowfalls that blanketed Athens and cut off villages in Crete and the Cyclades islands. Confused about global warming? Totally!
Our youngsters will be the true agents of change. And hens? Hens will go global.