Can You Really Make Paper From Elephant Poo?

Yesterday I went to the opening of an extraordinary new building at the Green Shop, near Stroud. It's a funny sort of place, hidden away behind a petrol station on a B-road. You'll be driving along and there's this Murco gas station, then you look again and behind it there's a funky wooden building with a grassy roof and more solar panels than you could shake a stick at.

The Green Shop has been going for twenty years or so, and when you walk in from the garage you can see this evolution. First, there's a typical garage shop, with sweets and newspapers - only the herbal tea selection is unusual. Then you go into a bigger space with lots of Green goodies on display, from books and gadgets to washing up liquid and wholesome beauty products. They have solar battery chargers and little machines for making logs out of waste paper. It's pretty cool.

Then you go through a doorway and into the Glorious Green Future. The new building is light, airy, super-efficient and all the rest. There are displays of Green paints (other colours available) and rainwater harvesting gadgetry and solar gismos.

The Great Green Jonathan Porritt snipped a ribbon to open the new building in front of a happy crowd of future-makers, and he said A Few Words. He talked about other people around the country who were in a similar line of work - finding exciting new ways of doing things and laying the foundations of a low-carbon economy.

By coincidence I was reading something last night about Greens and the economy. I've already said that I'm not a great shopper, and the writer of this article seemed to be talking straight at me when he said it was our duty as citizens to shop a lot and keep the good old global economy going.

It's true that in the old days Greens tended to be a bit sniffy about shopping, but those attitudes are disappearing fast, along with droopy sweaters and Compulsory Muesli. Nowadays it's about where you choose to shop. Do you trail around Toys-a-Saurus or pop into your local toy shop? Do you follow the herd around Tuskos or get a veg box/visit a farmer's market/buy what you can find in the High Street?

At the Green Shop and places like it shopping isn't a chore - it's a joy! You can discover new ways of doing things, find brands you've never heard of and get inspired. I bought a little notebook with paper made partly from elephant dung. Elephant dung! Every time I look at it I picture a great big pooping pachyderm, and my day is made that little bit brighter.

How One Kid Turned Their Parents Green

I couldn't quite believe this when I read it. Someone at the Exeter Express and Echo had the brilliant idea of giving a fourteen year old a copy of How to Turn Your Parents Green and the licence to use it. Sure enough the kid set about doing just that, although it seems as though the poor parents were already doing better than most.

I'd love to reproduce the whole article here but I don't want to interfere with anyone's copyright so here's a little bit:

"Next, I am going to look at the water. I think we all do things like leave the tap on while we do our teeth. This is probably the only thing that I can think of we do that really wastes water.
"As I can't exactly watch my parents when they are in the bathroom, I have to take their word for it that they aren't leaving the taps running.
"My mum is the worst culprit for leaving the tap on when she cleans her teeth. The book says to fine anyone 25p if they leave the tap on while brushing their teeth. I think it came to £2, before she got it into her head that tap off good, tap on bad. So a miracle happened when she turned the tap off when she brushed her teeth. Well done, mum."

Unfortunately the author of the article isn't named (perhaps because he or she is under sixteen), but it's fantastic. For now you can read it at:

www.thisisexeter.co.uk (enter "turn your parents green" in the search box)

Rainy Week at the Seaside Anyone?

I keep coming back to this rather gloomy thought: many people still think that Greens want to take the fun out of their lives. Too many Green scribblers seem to take pleasure in the thought that our civilisation is on the verge of collapse. They love to tell us that unless we stop doing everything we like RIGHT NOW the sky's going to fall on our head.

Maybe this is true. Maybe we're all doomed. Ho hum.

Greens aren't the only ones who think like this. There are people holed up in cabins in America waiting confidently for the world to end. We think they're crazy, but that we're right. As I said, maybe we are, but why bother being Green and talking about these things if you don't have anything positive to add to the human experience?

Too often activists try to sell the Green message as if they were selling the world's worst holiday. Come and have a week in the rain, in Weston-super-Mare, with the tide out all the time! I think the Transition Man says this in his handbook, that we have to offer people a vision of something better than they have now - a sunny week in Weston, maybe, with the tide in.

Here's a great example: my kids' primary school is on the edge of a lovely city park, but until recently the playground was the traditional expanse of tarmac - easy to maintain and unlikely to make anyone muddy. Then some Greenish parents got together and dug up a corner and planted a funky little willow tunnel and some little bushes. It really isn't an Eco-anything, but it's a patch of non-tarmac and the kids love it. They play in it is if it were an enchanted wood.

There was a story in America recently about an insurance company cancelling an advert that showed a man forced to ride a bike because petrol (gas) was too expensive. Basically all the joy had gone out of this guy's life because he couldn't drive. Lots of Greens protested about this and the ad disappeared. BUT THE ATTITUDE HASN'T. Most people still think that bike-riding is a stage of growing-up between riding a scooter and driving. They will do anything to keep their car on the road, even if it means turning all the world's food into Biofuels. Yet riding a bike is usually much more fun than driving. You get the buzz of exercise, the thrill of zooming about, and in most cities these days you get where you're going quicker than you do in a car.

How to change the attitude, though, that's the question.

Pester for the Planet!

Anna Shepard just wrote an article in The Times about teenage eco-nags:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3681607.ece

Apart from painting a rather endearing picture of her younger self wearing an unfashionable Elefriends jumper, it has one important quality - the teenagers interviewed are all happy to admit their mistakes. Let's face it. We're all making this up as we go along, that's politicians and Green experts as well as you and me. Does anyone have the 'right answer' to all our eco-woes? No. Can anyone predict the future? Of course not.

Ms Shepard rightly points out that children's greatest asset is their ability to pester, nag and generaly bug their Groans (Grown-ups).

Here's a snippet from the book:

You may have heard of Pester Power? It’s the reason companies put adverts between your favourite TV shows. They’re not expecting you to rush out and buy the latest Playstation game or DVD, they’re relying on you to bug your Groans until they buy the stuff for you. And it works, doesn’t it? Groans can’t resist it, because deep down they think that buying you stuff will make you happy.

Now 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. You can change the way your parents shop, and that in turn will change the world. Pestering for the Planet! You read it here first.

Caps and Climate Change

Fear is a beastly thing, especially when you're a kid. I remember being about seven and losing my school cap. We were supposed to wear our caps at playtime for some weird reason, so for about a week I didn't go out. Nobody knew I was harbouring this secret terror of caplessness, but it was the centre of my existence for long enough that I remember it vividly.

I know it was just a cap, but thinking about it helps me imagine the kind of fears kids have about climate change. If I was eight or nine I know I'd be lying awake worrying about the weather, and a report last year suggested that lots of children are worriers like me. This same report said that when children got to talk about eco-troubles at school and started doing things to change THEIR environment they worried less.

That's sort of the point of this book. I don't want my kids or anyone else's losing sleep over global warming. Instead, let's talk about it and start making some little changes. Even as an adult I find myself thinking, OK the world is huge and out of control, but I get milk from the milkman now which means no more plastic bottles. and that's A Good Thing.

Toys-a-saurus Adventure

I'm not a great shopper. In fact I'm probably on some list of terrible non-shoppers, people who aren't doing their bit to keep our fabulous consumer economy going. The rest of the family shop slightly more than me, which is probably a good thing, but they prefer to leave me behind because I moan too much. Actually I do like some shops. There's a greengrocer's near our house where one of the staff calls out into the street, all day long, 'come and buy your strawberries, your lovely fresh strawberries' in this wonderful sing-songy voice. But anyway...

Today Fate took me to Toys-a-saurus, a store the size of a small planet - you know the one I mean. When we walked in it smelt of warm plastic, and though there were only one or two humans around there was a constant chirruppy hubbub. It was like a nesting colony of electronic birds. It was as though we were naturalists and had stumbled into a forest full of rare creatures, only these were all trapped behind screens or sealed up in plastic. A lot of the creatures were talking, saying chirpy little phrases over and over again in cheery little voices.

Somebody somewhere had designed all these things so they would move about or flash or chirp, and presumably they had designed them because they thought kids would like them. There were no kids there, though, no people at all apart from us and a couple of workers who looked a bit bewildered by it all. It crossed my mind that maybe all the kids were out playing in the park or in the woods. Maybe they were playing cricket or learning how to sew. Their mums and dads would be searching for them, shouting 'We're going to Toys-a-saurus! Right now!" and they'd be hiding, shushing the younger children, waiting for the grown-ups to go away.

Adam's Review from Life Goggles

How To Turn Your Parents Green is written by James Russell, illustrated by Øivind Hovland and was supplied to Life Goggles by Charlie at Green Books.

Aimed at kids ‘from 8-80′ How To Turn Your Parents Green is a book for a future generation of eco warriors. Presenting the challenge to be green as a battle of the Greens versus the Groans (ungreen adults) the book urging children to become green by fining their parents if they’re not environmentally-friendly.


But it’s more than that, it tries to put the pester power that kids have to good use - turn it away from sweets and candy to switching off the tap and buying local food. And it does this with the help of humorous phrases and great drawings by Øivind Hovland.

Although I make the ludicrous age range for this book, I’m admittedly quite a bit older than those it’s really aimed at. So at first the phrases ‘Ghastly Global Warming’, Hellish Halogens’ and other similarly alliterate and capital lettered ones got on my nerves. But after a while I got used to it and ‘Lazy Train to Chubville’ got me smiling.

While humorous, the book is also informative and it does this cleverly by asking questions but then often making up one of the answers just to make you smile. It nicely explained what a leachate is (rubbish sludge mixed with rainwater) and other facts are presented simply and in a way that a child could easily relate to a parent.

The explanations of subjects like importing fruit from abroad or having a standby button on the TV show how ridiculous they are and that the reader shouldn’t stand for such practices. Luckily it then tells you what you can do about them and gives examples of things done in the past - such as the boy who saved the Severn Beach railway line. Practical examples, goals and checklists make it almost an activity book and even inspired me to do more.

Apart from my initial problem of getting into the book, once you’re used to the style it makes an enjoyable and informative read for all ages. Aimed at kids changing their parents’ habits (fining them for using carrier bags etc), it also has useful tips for turning teachers green and also becoming a green citizen yourself.

Available at Green Books, How To Turn Your Parents Green costs £6.50, is 91 pages, is printed on Nine Lives recycled paper and published by Tangent Books.