Telling

Is public opinion on climate change moving on?

 

What are the great British public actually doing to combat climate change?  Certainly public understanding of climate change, its causes and effects, has moved on enormously over the last ten years and more than ever in the last three.  The language itself has moved on.  The public used to talk about “rainforests” but now that term has been superseded by “global warming” and “climate change”.  I still feel that nothing has quite caught the public imagination as spectacularly as CFCs and the ozone layer did twenty years ago, but contemporary images of melting ice caps and rising sea levels come close.

There is a tendency to present the British public as car-loving, technology consuming couch potatoes, but personal actions to help the environment have moved on enormously.  Ten years ago the only personal action most people could think of which might help the environment was saving paper (“I always use both sides..”).  That has evolved into a wider concept of recycling and now includes a range of energy saving measures.  The fact that even apparently benign actions such as google searches have an impact on the environment is now more widely known and accepted.  People often want to know what they can do to do more.

However, in my work which involves interviewing people in their homes, I much more often come across accidental sustainable behaviours than deliberate ones.  People and families are full of contradictions. I recently met a retired couple who moved close to the airport so they could take advantage of dozens of cheap flights every year, yet lovingly grew their own vegetables and recycled everything.  When I do interviews with married couples there is often a lot of bantering about who undermines who in saving energy measures such as switching lights or the heating off.

I am a passionate believer in action on climate change myself, so during interviews I do have moments of hopelessness which have to be suppressed.  One recent conversation springs to mind.

                “How do you get your clothes dry?”
                “Tumble drier”
                “But I notice you have a rotary drier outside”
                “Yeah, but I don’t use it because, um, you know, a bird might crap on it or something”

There was also the retired couple who claimed the reason they kept on two cars was to help pick up their grandson from school.  Initially I thought this fairly reasonable until I found out the grandson was a strapping lad in sixth form old enough to drive himself.  Couldn’t he get the bus or cycle, I wondered. The truth about behaviour is that most is just habit and below the level of conscious thought.   There is also quite a lot of buck-passing and spouting of excuses I have heard too many times before.  The most crushing excuse I always find is the “they can’t do anything anyway, people will never change”.

I also have moments of hopefulness.  The desire to create and nurture is strong.  I have stopped being surprised when I visit high rise council flats and find lovingly tended gardens on the balconies.  In fact I have come to the conclusion that they exist not in spite of high rise living but because of it. 

People long for community and explicitly say so.  Closer knit communities have less need to hop in the car several times a day and more opportunities to act together to improve their local space.  It’s true that British householders are fond of consumption but most people are fond of Britain too.  The Transition Town movement which aims to foster sustainable local communities is an experiment in environmental localism and dare I say, patriotism too. Complicated carbon calculation is beyond much of the population who want to experience something collectively rather than worry if they’ve got their recycling sorting right.  .  After scores of interviews with members of the public I have come to the conclusion that the right sorts of instincts and desires exist amongst people to live sustainably; we just need to find a society to match them.

Living on less

I have a deep seated fear of things running out.  Felt tip pens have an inbuilt horror for me.  I am disturbed by the onset of ageing tips, squeaky with dryness, even when they are still fresh and new.  As a child I even stopped using certain pens in an attempt to preserve their life and avoid their consignment to the rubbish bin. 

These days I like to justify my frugality on the basis of avoiding the embedded carbon involved in the manufacture, transport and disposal of any consumer item.  But the truth is more complicated than that.  At University I did not know terms like ‘embedded carbon’ and my paucity of material possessions had much more to do with genuine financial hardship, a generous mean streak and a haughty middle class disapproval of having too much. 

The sad fact is that these days I have many more possessions that I used to.  When I got married we had over four hundred pounds worth of spanking new, wedding list items delivered to our door by John Lewis in sturdy cardboard boxes.  When we last moved not everything would fit into the van that we had hired for the occasion.  I’ve gone from having no kettle to having had three in the last three years.  Sometimes I wonder, and worry, about what my own personal landfill site would look like. 

Some people are very good at taking care of their things, keeping them neat, clean and in good repair.  My sister is one of those people.  Nowadays my sister’s house is full of relics from our childhood that are still part of her life.  Her children colour with crayons that we ourselves were given as children.  Plastic picnic tubs from the 80s are used for leftovers or as plant stands.  Even the decorated pins on the pin board have not changed for over twenty years.  I have duplicates of many of these items, because of course as sisters we were given many of the same things.  But my things have been lost, broken or have somehow aged much faster than hers.  I hope the same will not be true of me. 

So many of the older rationing generation are better with their things than I am.  My Auntie melts left over bits of soap to make one big new soap.  Washing yoghurt pots and reusing bits of paper is second nature to people of my parents’ generation.  But whilst the babyboomers might have more respect for things they also seem to have more desire for them.  My parent-in-law’s favourite shop is Lidl where they can buy handy household gadgets at knock down prices.  But this dual ability for preservation and acquisition means that their house is full to bursting point with trinkets and consumer goods.

How can we become a more frugal nation?  I have great hopes for the generational backlash effect.  As the babyboomers have become bargain hunters against a backdrop of wartime austerity, might the younger generation shun overconsumption just to be different from their parents and grandparents?  It hasn’t happened yet so my imagination falls back on nanny-statism.  A tax on rubbish and a monthly waste collection?  I would almost relish the inevitable outcry like a haughty schoolmarm who knows she has the moral high ground.  What about ‘bring out yer dead days’ –a modern take on rag and bone men already in operation in some parts of the country.  I’d like to see good second hand stalls at tips and roving electrical consultants in charity shops to mend and make safe donated items.  Street ownership log posters which enable neighbours to source and borrow household items such as lawn-mowers, tools and other equipment could also reduce consumption.  But none of these things would reduce landfill by as much as we need.

One suggestions is that once shipping containers have arrived in this country and been relieved of their contents they should be returned full of waste to countries such as China for sorting and recycling.  Whilst this seems the moral equivalent of allowing your dog to poo in a neighbour’s garden, it might actually improve people’s lives by giving them jobs and valuable raw materials.  International economic trends will have the greatest effect on our landfill sites.  Worthy, environmental campaigns will be made irrelevant by the current recession as a whole generation of people, perhaps for the first time, pause at the supermarket shelf to wonder if they really need it.  And as I solemnly replace the lids of my two year olds abandoned felt tip pens, my heart softly sings at the possibility that my austere habits may finally be in touch with the times.