One day last October I found my five-year-old daughter, Rosa, leafing through my passport, which I’d left on the kitchen table in readiness for a work trip. She was studying it with a frown and I assumed she was upset by the boggle-eyed menace of the photo-booth portrait. But she was actually closely scrutinizing several pages of blood-red immigration stamps marking multiple entries to the US. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
“How many times have you been on a plane to America?”
“About 40.”
“And how many trees have you planted?”
“No trees.”
“I’m going to tell Miss White.”
For the past year, my three children and I have been living in Redland, a leafy middle-class enclave of the port city of Bristol, England. A survey conducted last year by marketing company CACI found it to be the greenest place in the UK. This means that eight in 10 people in the area counted themselves as “enthusiastic greens,” compared with the less apocalypse-averse people of Basildon, Essex, where four in 10 count themselves as “environmentally unconcerned.”
I moved here from Brixton in south London. I was not ready for the culture shock of an ultra-green existence. Everything is recycled. Whistling men in a green truck take it away on Thursdays. Stuff that I would put on eBay is offered around Redland in a spirit of green neighborliness.
I am writing this article on an office chair sourced from the pavement outside. There was one of those giddy notes saying, “Please help yourself!” attached to it. I’m wearing socks from one of the charity shops on nearby Whiteladies Road, which are better stocked than the new £500 million (US$719.5 million) Cabot Circus mall in the center of town.
OK, so the buses are rubbish, but guilt levels among local drivers mean you might be offered a lift. Twice before Christmas I got approached by eco kerb-crawlers: “I just feel less guilty carrying someone else in the car,” one of them told me. And he seemed genuinely disappointed that I only lived 200m away.
Yes, this is a green world, and the ozone layer sits a little thicker over Redland.
And then, of course, there is school. Miss White is Rosa’s year one teacher at St Peter & St Paul’s RC Primary School. In the past year, I have noticed Rosa has begun to recycle and energy-save and spout eco policy with exquisite fervor and zealotry.
In the past six months I have been confronted by Rosa, who’s like a recalcitrant, chubby-cheeked mayoress of an eco-town, over the following issues: energy-saving light bulbs (I use them in hallways but not in rooms where I actually want light instead of that jaundiced low-energy syrup); paper recycling; turning off the tap when I brush my teeth; carrier bags. And plane journeys.
I have begun to feel there are larger forces at work.
I suspect I am a pawn in a covert re-education program. I fear “pester power” is being organized to leverage pro-environmental awareness in parents — we are being bullied by a generation of pint-sized “eco-worriers.”
UNDUE INFLUENCE?
A friend of mine who agonized about remaining anonymous for fear of upsetting her son’s school told me how, as part of environmental awareness, all the children in her boy’s class had their lunch boxes inspected for high food-miles products and non-recyclable packaging.
I know a Brixton parent concerned about her son’s school’s walk-to-school initiative because it is dangerous. I know a father who was apoplectic when his daughter was asked by a teacher to account for the carbon footprint arising from two foreign holidays.
Miss White is lovely. She has done a great job with Rosa’s numbers and with her spelling. But I have started to wonder whether she now has a hand in choosing what tomatoes I eat, how long I spend in the shower and whether I can go to work by plane.
“It’s a difficult area,” she told me. “I probably have influenced the class on the subject of carrier bags, because we’ve looked at pictures of them in the sea. And I may have told them that for Mrs Colley’s [the school secretary’s] last birthday we bought her a donkey in Africa instead of a conventional present. But they’re so young I would never push an idea or preach. They are aware of the issues and actually they are often ahead of me.”
I know some of Rosa’s eco-ideas come from the BBC series Pippin, where a bearded collie dog enthusiastically recycles. Others come from the book Teach Your Granny to Text, published last year by We Are What We Do, a former London community action group and now a self-styled social change movement. Its previous book, Change the World for a Fiver, was a best-seller and the new book is written by children, listing 30 ways they can improve life and the environment including “Walk your dad” and “Test your teacher.”
Rosa also has a copy of How to Turn Your Parents Green, by Bristol-based writer James Russell, which states: “Only you can make the Groans [grown-ups] behave, because only you can make their lives a misery if they don’t.”
The book suggests a levy of fines for anti-environmental infringements: 20 pence for every degree the home thermostat is set over 20°C, 10 pence for every high-energy light bulb used and so forth. In a signature moment, which perhaps illustrates the topsy-turvy power dynamic of our family, I had to read the more difficult passages of this book to Rosa first, before she could then launch her ideological war and start fining me.
In many ways, her school is quite laid-back, but it has stepped up its commitment to the environment with an application for eco-school status. The Eco-Schools program was established after the 1994 Rio Earth Summit and now 50 percent of UK schools subscribe to the program, whereby pupils audit for energy and water waste, collect litter, or even, in one case, grow their own food and sell it at a local market. They can then apply for bronze, silver and green flag awards.
SCHOOL PROGRAMS
Rosa’s last school, St Bonaventure’s, gained the coveted green flag in 2007. When I went back to meet the eco coordinator, Morwenna Thomas, the eco-reps of Class 2T were impressively mobilized. They told me about the Golden Boot awarded weekly to each class with the most people who walk to school. They’ve also produced their own reusable shopping bag and are working to get local shops on the Gloucester Road to give up plastic bags altogether.
But what really struck me about the children was their presentation and debating skills and how confidently they carry the eco message home. Eleven-year-old Layla Hall said that she is firm about making her family cook one evening meal, rather than four separate ones, to save energy. Eight-year-old Rose Bailey has taken it upon herself to lobby her brother to switch off his Xbox, even though sometimes he doesn’t listen and “throws her on to the sofa.”
Thomas says the school’s green flag status has been achieved with huge parent support. Even so, there is a political line that cannot be crossed.
“There is a point where environmental thinking crosses over into the political and you have to navigate that carefully. I don’t want children carrying guilt because their parents won’t or cannot afford to buy fairtrade fruit. And I don’t think they should feel guilty if their parents really cannot let them walk to school because it’s too far,” she said. “A subject like the third runway at Heathrow just isn’t age appropriate. That might be a subject for secondary school. We focus on little things.”
At St Bonaventure’s there is an impressive array of recycling apparatus. There is also a Silver Shoe award for the class who try hard to walk to school but don’t make the Golden Boot. And there are also lots of crucifixes. I remind myself that St Bonaventure’s and St Peter & St Paul’s are Catholic schools. I find myself wondering whether environmentalism is seen as a scientific or religious issue.
“Our position is that we look after the world because God created it and it would be rude and ungrateful to mess it up. It is our responsibility to help look after it,” Morwenna said.
The idea of pester power usually has negative connotations. For example, the UK TV regulator Ofcom banned a great deal of junk-food advertising during children’s viewing times in 2007, so that parents weren’t nagged into buying bad food. But eco-pestering has been neatly rebranded as “reverse socialization,” whereby children educate their parents on what’s happening in the world. And it seems to have official backing.
David Miliband, when he was UK environment secretary, said: “Children are the key to changing society’s long-term attitudes to the environment,” and the Eco-Schools program is partly funded by the UK government’s environment department.
Andrew Sutter runs Eco-Schools in the UK. He says he recently received a frustrated e-mail from a mother whose child had stopped her vacuuming.
“This child said she did it too much and used up too much electricity. It can be shaming to parents when children assert themselves, but I don’t think it is a bad thing. Children are more powerful in getting these ideas across than either politicians or the media. They see footage of the polar bears dying and their reaction is, ‘That is wrong. What can I do?’” Sutter said.
David Uzzell , a professor at Surrey University, England, has 30 years’ experience as an environmental psychologist. His objection to reverse socialization is less ideological. He simply says that it doesn’t work. His research paper “Children as Catalysts of Environmental Change” looked at children in the UK, Portugal, Denmark and France.
OBJECTIONS
“The key finding,” he said, “was that children do not work as shock troops for environmental change. Coming home and proselytizing is not the answer. It only works in a specific type of household where the environment is deemed a suitable topic for discussion at the dinner table and where parents are willing to play pupil and allow the child to play teacher. Basically, well-informed, middle-class families.”
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, England, and author of the forthcoming book The End of Education, objects on more fundamental grounds.
“Mobilizing children to police their parents’ behavior used to be something you only found in totalitarian societies. I grew up in Eastern bloc Hungary and I remember children being encouraged to tell teachers if their parents listened to rock’n’roll,” Furedi said.
Furedi argues that the curriculum is being used as a “policy outlet”.
“It’s as though the politicians are saying: ‘The parents won’t change fast enough, let’s get the children,’” he said.
Yet maybe it’s a policy that’s working. Last year the UK Social Investment Forum conducted a poll of 1,500 parents which showed that 24 percent of parents cited their children as a key green motivator. Only 2 percent took their cue from politicians.
When I was growing up in the 1970s I don’t remember any ideological ideas being served at school and taking them home. The Nine O’Clock News came on and my family sighed. World view was delivered top-down. I waited until my teens before I embraced generationally divisive issues such as nuclear disarmament, the Falklands War and anti-apartheid.
Today, children are being mobilized far earlier. Sometimes it occurs to me that we’re nurturing the most knowing and idealistic generation of kids. For a start, all human knowledge, for better or worse, is available to them through the Iinternet. They won’t smoke. They are wary of alcohol. They will recycle.
But are they really thinking, or just acting like super-virtuous eco-bots? And are we right to worry them with so much at an early age?
Judith Shard, mother of Rachel and Joel, has her concerns: “I support and encourage my children when they come home from nursery or school with ideas about how to save the environment, but they should not be made to bear the burden created by their ancestors.”
TURNING POINTS
I have two other children. Tommy is eight and Caitlin is 11. Environmental concerns have had less traction with them. Tommy likes dinosaurs and football. He accepts it’s too late to save the dinosaurs and concentrates on his game. Caitlin has dutifully planted a few bulbs at the school gardening club. She wrote a poem for her teacher, Mrs Brogan, on the environment, but as she reaches pre-teen age, I notice there are powerful competing consumer instincts.
A proliferation of teen tech (iPod, mobile phone, laptop), constructed under unknown wage rates in China and the Far East, have made eco soap-boxing more difficult. Also, the temptation of cheap clothes from Primark separate the sheep from the Oxfam Namibian goats.
This Christmas marked a turning point. Her friend Ellen gave her a pencil case made entirely from recycled juice cartons. Caitlin gave Ellen a slice of unadulterated aspirational teen Americana, a DVD of Camp Rock.
“I do care, but I can’t think about the environment all the time,” she said when I asked her about it.
Actually, I find it easier to talk to her about eco behavior now she is experiencing real dilemmas and making difficult choices.
Rosa’s eco-epiphany has chimed with a five-year-old’s scarily reductive thinking. If I get on a plane, I am killing a penguin. I accept I have been on a lot of planes. I accept that my counter-argument, “I don’t really enjoy take-off or the food,” is wearing a bit thin. Maybe I will plant a couple of trees. But the other day I wore a coat around the house, rather than putting on the central heating. Then I mulched the previous day’s tea bags into the brown recycling box and turned on my solar-powered radio to hear that a third runway at London-Heathrow had just been approved. I felt like I was a part of some ridiculously tokenistic game.
“I think you have every right to feel miffed,” said Andrew Simms, policy director for the New Economic Forum. “I think the government is acting like an inconsistent parent. [British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown is making grand gestures about the UK leading the way on climate change and encouraging children to recycle, yet on major policy issues such as Heathrow, he slips the leash and does something entirely different. It undermines people’s resolve — and that’s terrible.”
So while Gordon green lights nuclear power plants and third runways, the battle for the planet is being fought over domestic minutiae in a neo-Orwellian nightmare in my own home.
Rosa reckons a two-minute shower with the temperature dial set at “medium” is ecologically sound. I think certain treats are inviolate and I ignore her.
But I sense a presence through the shower door as I hum and scrub. Small Daughter is watching.
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