Win a Copy of How to Turn Your Parents Green from Life Goggles

It's simple really. Follow this link, answer a question, fill in some info, and you could win one of six copies of How to Turn Your Parents Green:

http://www.lifegoggles.com/1292/win-a-copy-of-how-to-turn-your-parents-green

No, I'm not going to tell you the answer, but you'll find it around here somewhere! You've got until 21 March, so get those thinking caps on...

The Times: Let the Kids Set Green Taxes

Times blogger John-Paul Flintoff has an interesting take on the government's predictable failure to set a Green budget. Refering to How to Turn Your Parents Green, he suggests that kids take matters into their own hands by levying taxes at the household level:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/environment/2008/03/green-tax-payab.html

I was really thinking in terms of fines rather than taxes - 20p for throwing a can in the wheelie bin, stuff like that - but I'm not going to argue with a man from The Times!

The main point is, don't wait for the Government to go Green: we need to get on with it ourselves.

What Happens When Oil Isn't Cheap Anymore?

Yesterday I woke up. Well, I suppose I wake up most days, but this was different. This was like an alarm clock going off and waking me up EVEN THOUGH I WAS AWAKE ALREADY. Hmmm. Tricky concept. Anyway, what woke me up was a man called Rob Hopkins, a tall, mild-mannered sort of chap with sticky-out ears and a nice sense of humour. He was talking about something called Peak Oil - no, not oil pumped out of mountains, but something altogether different:

The moment at which the oil waiting quietly in the ground for us to pump out is less than the amount we've already sucked out and burned up.

My grandfather worked for an oil company and I always thought of oil as something that was THERE. When one lot was sucked up, you just went and found more. There had to be more, because in our Groanish world we can't imagine less. Things aren't supposed to run out or close or end in our world, so the oil had to keep flowing.

More recently I began to realise that oil would one day run out, but I imagined that we'd have found some other wonderful source of energy by then. Nuclear fusion or cosmic rays - I don't know. Until yesterday I didn't understand that oil is special. Oil is like having a whole room full of cash you can just pull out and spend. Oil is like pickled sunshine. It's like the richest chocolate brownie you can imagine, only instead of butter and sugar and chocolate it's full of energy.

Over the past 150 years this chocolate-brownie-sunshine energy has made the modern world what it is. Cheap oil is the difference between a modern Western city and a poor city in the developing world. Look around you. How many things that you see were either made or brought to you using oil?

But once oil starts to become scarce, it will be expensive, and expensive oil is an altogether different creature. Expensive oil is a luxury. Expensive oil means no more cheap plastic, or cheap computers or TVs or clothes. Expensive oil means that only rich people will be able to drive or fly. It means having to live WHERE YOU ARE and eat food that is grown nearby.

In fact expensive oil could make life a whole lot better. It will stop people rushing around, trying to be in seventy-two different places at once. It will stop people getting fat. It will force people to spend their time living instead of shopping or watching TV. Provided people are positive and make good decisions, expensive oil will make our lives healthier, Greener and less stressful.

What happens when oil isn't cheap anymore? That's up to us.

Coconut Jet Fuel and the Icarus Moment

The idea of a plane powered by coconuts sounds quite funny, but when I read about this in the papers the other day it didn't make me laugh. Instead it made me think of Icarus, the unfortunate flying boy. He tried to fly too high and melted his wings, confirming the view that people ought to stay put on terra firma and not act like gods. The Greeks had a word for this sort of behaviour: Hubris. In their myths people who put on airs and graces were guilty of hubris and generally came to a sticky end. Prometheus is another example.

Cut to 2008 and people are concerned about the environmental impact of cars and planes. We want to go wherever we want quickly, but oil is getting more expensive and our journeys are releasing ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. I don't claim to be an expert Carbon-cruncher, but wiser heads have pointed out that carbon released high in the atmosphere causes more trouble than the same amount released at ground level. Yes, we're back with Icarus...

Airlines are attracting more and more customers but they're not enjoying the bad publicity. So a certain British businessman, who owns an airline, hit on the idea of putting biofuel in the gas tanks of a 747. Of the jet's four tanks, three contained ordinary jet fuel, while the last had a mixture of 80% jet fuel and 20% fuel made from coconut and babassu palm oil. Apparently 150,000 coconuts were used, along with an unspecified amount of palm oil. I'm no mathematician, but that sounds like an awful lot of coconuts to provide a small percentage of one airplane's fuel.

The entrepreneur in question described the flight as 'historic', and perhaps it is. Perhaps this was the moment when the human race finally took leave of its senses. The Icarus moment.

Biofuels are made from living plants, which absorb carbon as they grow. The idea is that, on balance, a car or jet running on biofuel emits less carbon than one using ordinary fuel. Groans point to this and say, Here is the future of transport! And that future is bright leafy Green!

What they never mention is that all these plants - oil palms, rape, wheat - have to grow somewhere. Land which might have been used to grow food or left alone for wildlife has to be cleared and planted with biofuel crops. These are not cosy little farms but vast plantations run by big companies that want to make as much money as they can - what they do is called Green because people have this obsession with carbon, but isn't even remotely Green. It's hugely destructive. Oil palms grow in the tropics, which means rainforest is being cut down and burned to make way for them. The oran utang is losing its home so that people in Europe can put biofuels in their petrol tanks and feel all virtuous and Green.

And now people want to power jets with coconuts! This isn't Green, this is Gruesome, Grisly Groanishness of the first order. It's unbelievably stupid. By contrast, Icarus was just a kid who forgot where he was.

Confessions of an IMBY

You know what NIMBY stands for? Not In My Back Yard. It's a very handy expression used to describe people who are all enthusiastic and excited about, say, wind power, but turn against it when someone suggests building a wind turbine up the road from their house. There are lots of Nimbys in the world.

But for today I'm an IMBY, and I have a sort of confession. Our back garden is tiny. It's miniscule. In fact it wouldn't look out of place if you unpeeled it and stuck it on an envelope in place of a stamp. It's the kind of garden you have when you live in an old terraced house on the side of a hill and most of it is hidden by an enormous tree. Whereas all our neighbours have nice little flowering cherry trees or funny shrubs covered in red dangly things, someone sometime decided to plant the world's hugest apple tree in our back garden. Left to its own devices it would probably be ten metres tall and just as wide. It's like an oak.

You can see where generations of desperate homeowners have hacked branches off this monster. I pruned it pretty severely a couple of winters ago and in the meantime it has grown and grown. Last summer the tree's dense foliage shaded the whole garden, more or less all day. On the plus side, though, it was a happy hang-out for our small local population of streetwise bluetits and blackbirds.

So I was torn. I venerate the tree - we've even wassailed it - but having written a book about orchards (Man-made Eden, published by Redcliffe Press) I know you shouldn't be sentimental about such things. I thought about having it cut down, then hit on a compromise, and instead gave it a really good pruning, I mean more or less a pollarding. It's about quarter the size now, but still alive, and the garden is light again.

The only losers are the bluetits and blackbirds. Of course I could say, well, it's just one tree, there's plenty of other places for them to go, and it could be true. But then I think of my neighbour who hacked down and burned every green thing in his back garden and turned it into a sort of box, with decking that stretches its length and breadth and a patio heater for decoration. And I think of all the other people in the city, and the county, and in England and over in Amazonia, people who need or want to tame their bit of nature to make their lives better.

But at least I didn't cut the tree down completely. It will grow back. The bugs are still there for the bluetits. Perhaps I've stumbled on a happy medium between the needs of nature and the desires of people. In My Back Yard.

Green Freedom

How to Turn Your Parents Green is going places. Copies should be appearing in Greenish shops near you, and could well be heading across the Atlantic soon. More importantly, we were attacked by one of those blogs that aims to protect the good citizens of the world from a Government-backed Green Conspiracy. We're obviously doing something right!

But this kind of reaction is a good reminder that the Green world is still small and quite self-contained. Most people have some idea of what global warming is, and many people love nature and want to help birds and animals. But those same people tend to react badly if you make practical suggestions that don't fit with the Groanish philosophy of MORE CHEAPER and MAKE LIFE EASY.

It's the principle of the guy stuck in rush hour gridlock, complaining about the traffic. He hates the traffic, but he'll defend his right to sit in it because it's what he does and what he knows. Changing the way he travels might involve changing his whole life, and who wants to do that?

Greens have a habit of knowing better than everyone else what's good for them, and nobody likes a know-all. Especially a know-all who is also a party-pooper. It's always amazed me that a movement which is all about promoting happiness should have such a reputation for being worthy and not much fun. It always seems to be about having less and doing without. There's a sort of Puritan ethic that most people don't like at all.

To turn parents and others Green I think we need to stop making people depressed with Carbon Footprints and all that, and start making them feel that Green is a better alternative, for them, personally. Not just for future generations or people in far-off lands or creatures that live in ponds, but for them and their families.

As you read this, brilliant Green minds are at work, trying to work out how to do this. But for now, perhaps we could spend less time telling people how to live and more time demonstrating - like someone showing off a new hoover - the pleasures of a Greenish life.

Review from Obviously.ca

Book Review: How to Turn Your Parents Green
By Kayley. Posted on 7:00:00 am - Wednesday, January 30, 2008.

Presented in a poignant and witty way, How to Turn Your Parents Green tells the tale of the Greens versus the Groans in explaining the effects of Ghastly Global Warming. In targeting an often-forgotten, but very powerful, audience, author James Russell reaches out to “kids age 8 to 80” and shows them how to take control of the state of their current and future environment, namely by influencing their parents, caregivers, and teachers to change their behaviours.

How to Turn Your Parents Green begins by discussing the current state of the Groans, and comparing them to the Greens. The Groans represent those people in today’s society who fail to think about the environment when making choices, whereas the Greens are environmentally-aware individuals, whom we should all aspire to emulate.

“Look at Dad. He’s obviously been enjoying some festive cheer. Now he doesn’t feel too great. His feet are cold because blood scarcely reaches them, so he demands more heat and chomps another packet of chocolate digestives. Green Dad keeps trim by raking leaves, walking to the shops, and riding a bike to work. His heart pumps happily, so his feet are warm and he doesn’t need the heating on.”

In this UK-based saga, Russell teaches kids how to become Eco-Warriors and to hold the older generation responsible for their actions, by having them sign the “Glorious Green Charter” and imposing necessary fines while acting as “House Rubbish Inspector” and keeping an eye on “Water Wasters”.

How to Turn Your Parents Green covers all the range of areas in which environmental choices can be implemented, including travel, shopping, the importance of buying local, electronics, and how to influence your teachers to become more environmental. With a sense of humour that pervades How to Turn Your Parents Green, Russell provides many examples of Groan stupidity when it comes to the environment.

At one point he writes, “Once upon a time, a TV was either On or Off. Then someone invented Standby and now TVs and all our other appliances burn energy twenty-four hours a day, wasting millions of pounds a year. But for what? Surely a TV which is Off is just as ready for action as a TV on Standby- all you have to do is push a button, for Heaven’s Sake.”

At another point made is that, “[p]lums grow like crazy in Britain, but nobody wants them. Blueberries don’t grow here at all, and everybody loves them. If Blueberries were meant to fly, they’d have wings. Welcome to the world of Groan logic”.

These witty lines make sense on many levels and teach kids environmental lessons without talking down to them. Russell does a great job of breaking down often hard to swallow environmental information into chunks that are easily digestible. He provides simple solutions for big problems and teaches everyone can be a powerful instrument of change. Readers are asked to “imagine if every child in the country channelled their Pester Power in the service of the Glorious Green Future. Imagine if, instead of whining for DVDs, everyone griped and grumbled about organic carrots or environmentally friendly washing powder”. He also highlights the power of new communication, stating “Email is a wonderful thing. Nobody will guess your age from an email. You can write to newspapers, complain to Council, take part in planning protests and express your opinions on consumer websites and forums, just the same as an adult.”

Russell’s final lesson resonates with Kermit, children and adults alike: “It isn’t easy being Green. We’re only human, after all. But if you follow Groan philosophy you’ll be unhappy, stressed, overweight and, quite probably, under water.”

How to Turn Your Parents Green is great if you have parents, or friends, or happen to know people. I certainly learned a lot and enjoyed a hearty chuckle at the same time!