Grappling with being green

I first got interested in the environmental movement in the run up to the 1987 election. It was the second time I could vote in a general election and already I had become sceptical about what the mainstream parties were saying. The Green Party in those days were very much a pressure group with electoral ambitions and I didn’t agree with everything they stood for. But in their environmental policies they spoke in a way that resonated with me. In essence, the way we were carrying on as a global human species was unsustainable and no-one was doing anything about it.

So I joined the party and immediately incurred the butt of many tree-hugging based jokes from most of my friends. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to achieve, but I paid my dues, read the material and tried to get started anyway. I had a couple of friends who were similarly inclined, and who actually advocated some action – I seem to remember not being allowed to flush the toilet at their house unless there was something particularly unpleasant to get rid of! I started recycling more and tried to persuade others to as well but if I’m honest it all seemed a bit hopeless and pointless.

By the mid-90s I had all but given up taking a stand. Everyone was getting a bit more ‘green-aware’ and changes were starting to appear in terms of both warning signals that the climate was in trouble and policies to improve the situation (renewable energy, banning CFCs, recycling). And so I got on with life and pushed it all to one side. Looking back I think that ever since then I have been carrying a sort of unprocessed toxic feeling about the unsustainability of the way things are and my inability to do anything about it.

As the global situation continued to worsen I couldn’t find a way to ‘get on the pitch’ and it has been a topic that has made me angry and/or miserable on a pretty consistent basis. To make matters worse my own lifestyle had developed in a very unsustainable way. My job had involved me flying round the world a lot and my homes were getting bigger and more costly to heat. So the things I was doing to help seemed to be outweighed by the damage I was personally causing.

I re-joined the Green Party in 2010, mostly out of guilt but also to try and find a way on to the environmental pitch. I put solar panels on the big house, but in every other way I still felt part of the problem. I even stood in a local election for the Greens in 2015. And still the global situation worsened…

Then in 2017 I had a very clear dream – actually more of a nightmare. It is sometime in the future. We are sitting round a dinner table. The global situation is much worse than now and we are talking about it. My children have their own teenage children (so it’s at least 15 years from now) and we are talking about the problem and one of them says “Grandad, if you knew this would happen all that time ago, what did you do about it?”

In my dream the scene froze, with everyone looking at me expectantly for my answer. It’s a dream moment I’ll never forget. The killer question, puncturing my heart with its potency. “Grandad, if you knew this would happen all that time ago, what did you do about it?

The dream continues a bit with me flailing around with an answer that we all realise is unsatisfactory, and then sort of fades out to blackness

I woke up determined not to let the dream become a reality. I might not be able to change the trajectory of the global situation but I could provide an answer to the dream question that I was not ashamed of. Since then I have found Drawdown, and Deep Adaptation, and others. I have become more interested, hoping it will lead to becoming more active. I’ve done a lot of work on my attitude and made some smaller steps on my activism.

And so this is where my grappling has got me today. “Grandad, if you knew this would happen all that time ago, what did you do about it?” I’m still not sure what my answer will be but Still Waters: Becoming an eco-citizen is my exploration to find out.