Turning the Parents Green? It's Eco Child's Play!

Thanks to Jennifer Lance for this thoughtful review on ecochildsplay.com:

http://ecochildsplay.com/2008/05/20/eco-kids-books-how-to-turn-your-parents-green/

Funny to think of Jennifer sitting in the wilds of northern California, in her off-grid, self-built house, surrounded by kids running about and playing American versions of the universal child games, reading this odd little book. Which was written, incidentally, in a south Bristol terrace built a year before Victoria died, with a view over the trees and rooftops and lots of sky in the window. In the summer evenings a sound like a cow snorting tells us a hot air balloon is overhead, the pilot turning on the burner to get that balloon over our hill.

It isn't what you'd call wilderness round here. Our wildlife is as urban as we are: the frogs in the pond and the swifts in the sky are city-dwellers, so are the herring gulls which started moving in when the Clean Air Acts were passed forty-odd years ago. The gulls are big, aggressive and unafraid, and they love it here. No one has any idea what to do about them, though the city has tried some strange and wonderful ideas, such as stealing the eggs and replacing them with fakes. They've tried introducing predators like peregrine falcons to scare them away, but the gulls are used to predators and don't take any notice. They've tried culling them, but more just arrive to take the vacant rooftop apartments.

We're entwined with nature, even here in the city, and all of our actions will have consequences we could never imagine.

Viva Greenpeace!

It's hard to be positive when you come across stories like Goodbye Froggie. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read them. You just have to read them, think a bit and then do something. No one's expecting you to go charging around the Southern Ocean like the rainbow warriors of Greenpeace are doing right now. There is, as they say, more than one way to save a whale. Or a frog, come to think of it. This is what 'How to Turn Your Parents Green' is all about: direct action you can do at home.

Take the poor frog. In this green, wet country of ours there used to be lots of frogs, toads and newts. Witches didn't have to look far when they needed a bit of amphibian for a spell, they just looked in the nearest patch of weeds. There were ponds and streams everywhere, full of green, slippery creatures.

The modern witch has to look much harder, because there are less amphibians, and there are less amphibians because there are fewer places for them to live. Our growing towns and cities cover land with tarmac and bricks and concrete. We use strimmers and weedkillers to get rid of vegetation. Even in the countryside you have to look quite hard for a pond because people have filled them in.

So what can you do? Here's a clue: in our tiny city garden we have anything between five and ten frogs. They live in the flowerbeds around the world's smallest pond, feasting on the thousands of slugs that live in the garden. They're protected from local cats by the thick, messy foliage that we never cut back. We don't use any poisons. In fact a lot of the time we don't do much. It's a bit of a jungle, but paradise if you're a snail, a slug or an urban frog.

The gardening chapter of 'How to Turn Your Parents Green' has lots of tips for the greener gardener, so why not check it out?

Goodbye Froggie

The other day I was lucky enough to interview the producer of the new BBC nature series Life in Cold Blood, which is all about Reptiles and Amphibians. He told me a story which is featured in the series, about the Panamanian Golden Frog. It's one amazing creature, this frog, bright yellow with a black stripe. The male of the species will sit on the riverbank and, when it spies another frog, wave at it. To other male frogs, this is a bit like a shake of the fist - look at my muscles! To a female it's, well, much the same, only with a different aim...

A couple of years ago the producer contacted scientists in the region to talk about this frog and they told him, you'd better get here quick because we don't know how long this frog is going to be around. Apparently there's a nasty fungus which is spreading along river systems all over the world, and it is killing amphibians at such a rate that people are comparing the situation to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Anyway, the producer rushed over to Panama and filmed the Panamanian Golden Frog, which he described as a truly amazing creature. Scientists went along too, and did experiments to see whether the frog would wave at its own reflection or at a frog on a TV screen. And then, some time later, the fungus reached the homeland of the Panamanian Golden Frog and local scientists scooped up the last remaining population and took them into captivity.

The frog has waved its last in the wild, but it is about to become a TV star.

As a producer of nature programmes I suppose you get used to extinction, but I found this story disturbing. What you're wondering though is, are we to blame? The answer is, quite possibly. The killer fungus seems to have travelled from Africa along with the South African Clawed Frog, which is used by people all over the world. You see the South African Clawed Frog is very useful to us humans, because if you inject one with the urine of a pregnant woman it will produce eggs. Yes, this particular frog is a living pregnancy testing kit.

What does this tell us? With their thin skins, amphibians are incredibly sensitive animals. A frog may help us detect a pregnancy, but perhaps the rapid decline in species across the world should give us another kind of warning.