climate change

Parenting in an age of planetary crisis

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As a parent of young children, reading anything about the planet’s current direction of travel is at best depressing and at worst completely terrifying. We are far from the first generation of parents to have very real reasons to fear for the future of their children – imagine being the parent of a conscription aged boy in WW1, or facing the Cuban missile crisis and knowing one false step by either side would lead to mutually assured destruction. But these threats were all things that might happen. Climate change is definitely, unequivocally already happening, the only questions now are matters of degree. Particularly, are we going to do anything serious to prevent ecological collapse.

As this article suggests (and I warn you, it’s one of the more depressing and terrifying ones) a sort of perfect storm of interrelated and largely irreversible events are accelerating warming such that many of the targets set in worthy international agreements like the Paris accord are almost certain to be missed. Limiting global temperature increases to 2 degrees on current projections is a pipe dream.

Even 10 or 20 years ago climate change might be something you considered a minor threat to the lifestyles of your grandchildren, now it’s something that could change the world in our own lifetimes and will certainly be creating new challenges by the time our young children reach middle-age.

Here are some things that are already happening (I recommend ANOHNI’s 4Degrees as the perfect soundtrack to this section):

  • We are in the middle of a mass extinction event the likes of which has not been seen for many thousands of years. We have lost 50% of the world’s wildlife since just the 1970s. This is rarely talked about. Indeed, better qualified critics than I have noted that beautiful, celebratory nature documentaries like Planet Earth make us think everything’s fine and breed complacency. Nature is, indeed, still quite wonderful, but we’re killing it. Not we might kill it, we are at a rate of 2% of wildlife a year.
  • The Boy’s best friend is a cuddly monkey he has slept with pretty much since the day he was born. The Girl’s nursery is decorated with wall stickers of monkeys swinging from trees. Before they were born when we were carefree travellers of the world, we spent an amazing few days in Borneo with Orangutans and Proboscis monkeys. The fact that over half of primates are threatened with “impending extinction” feels, then, quite close to home and to the hearts of my children. Whatever your kids’ favourite exotic animals are, you can probably find equally upsetting trends. They may not get to see them up close in the wild as we did.
  • A huge antarctic ice shelf is on the brink of collapse. Ice shelves themselves don’t raise sea levels, but they do act as a buffer, insulating the glaciers that do and slowing their decline.
  • Permafrost, which covers 20% of the earth’s surface and stores huge amounts of carbon and methane, is melting. If warming continues at its current rates, large swathes across Siberia and Canada will thaw as soon as 2050. So a bit of warming creates much more warning in a fun cycle of impending doom. YAY!
  • There is debate about this, but some researchers suggest that if current rates of soil degradation from intensive farming go unchecked, there may be as few as 60 harvests left. So by the time our darling daughter reaches 60, it may be impossible to grow food. At all. At least in the way we do currently. That’s likely to cause the odd problem here and there.

I am far from an expert climate scientist, these are just a few of the low-lights I’ve come across that make fear for humanity and, by extension, my children. Without much work, I’m sure you could find many similarly terrifying nuggets that I’ve missed.

All this was already happening and already frightening the bejesus out of me and then, of course, the Americans went and elected a corrupt, insane raging egotist to the office of President. As well as being a racist misogynist who self-identifies as a sexual abuser, he is also a climate change denier. He claims it is a hoax made up by the Chinese. He has appointed the CEO of Exxon to be America’s most senior diplomat and therefore likely a protagonist in any future international climate negotiations. He has appointed a climate change denier who believes the Environmental Protection Agency should abolished to head up the Environmental Protection Agency. We’ll need the next generation to be bright and well informed, so the great news is that he’s appointed an education secretary who is demonstrably and idiot and has no experience either of attending, sending children to or administering public education. She makes Michael Gove look like a leading expert in pedagogic theory and practice.

His actions so far have included removing all references to climate change from the White House website, banning the National Parks service from tweeting actual scientific facts about climate change (with only limited success), reviving the Keystone oil pipeline and telling the EPA to remove climate data from its website putting the fear of God into scientists who are frantically trying to save it. We’re like a couple of weeks into this shit.

I’m not even getting into his nonsense Muslim ban and the fact he’s got the nuclear codes here. I’m sticking to climate stuff, frankly I’m not sure I can deal with all of it at once.

But don’t forget, it’s not just the clusterfuck that is the current status quo in the United States of America that’s at issue. It’s likely that Brexit, our very own homegrown clusterfuck, is at best a small net negative where climate change is concerned as it makes negotiations more complicated. Many fear that, post-Brexit, when the Tories talk about deregulation and removal of red tape, one of the things they mean is stripping away environmental safeguards. Here’s Lord Snooty/Walter the Softy mashup tribute act Jacob Rees-Mogg declaring exactly this intent.

Sorry for bringing you down, but this stuff is sort of important. It isn’t ALL bad though. Some pretty awesome shit is also happening which may at least stay our execution:

This last point is an important one the context of a parenting blog. The relationship between population growth and climate change is unequivocal. If you’re worried about this stuff, how then can you possibly justify having children? Not just because of what you might expose them too, but because of the contribution they will make to the problem over their lifetime. That is certainly a legitimate argument but a defeatist one. I kind of feel like if you want the human race to overcome this challenge and prosper, you sort of need to keep providing the world with humans who are equipped to help deliver the possibility of a prosperous future.

All of which sort of brings me to the point of this post (quite a lot of preamble, wasn’t it?) When there is so much to despair about, where the best case scenario is a much more challenging and hostile world than we have grown up in and the worst case is widespread ecological collapse, what the actual fuck can you do as a parent to help?

Well, I’m not saying you need to go all Sarah Connor and take you kids into the desert to train them as paramilitaries so they can defend their water supply when the ecosystem collapses. This might be what our grandchildren have to do, but probably not us. What I am saying is there’s a need to ensure the generation that follows us is well placed to recognise the challenges they face and come up with solutions to deal with them. A good deal of that is that they’re sensible enough to elect leaders (or be leaders) who are in it for everyone and not themselves. What it boils down to, is ensuring they make the world better for everyone in some way, however small.

That all sounds quite hard. Actually, I don’t think it is. I think it just means doing the things any decent parent would probably do anyway. It’s just these things take on greater importance when living on a planet spiralling towards a genuine human crisis, one which most people are wilfully ignoring.

They will need to be curious about and interested in the world around them. Children are curious anyway, all we must do is encourage it. Do this by identifying and sharing their enthusiasms (even you don’t really, e.g. writing lists of numbers for hours). A wiser man than I once said “do not teach, enthuse” – give a child enthusiasm for a thing and they will learn all about it for themselves and that will be far more powerful than any directed or rote learning. Curiosity will lead to an interest in otherness and, by extension, empathy – with other people, with wildlife, with the world.

Encourage them to consume fun, interesting and challenging things. Reading is a big part of that, but it’s not the only part of that. Dancing shapes, Max the Glow Train and surprise eggs on YouTube have taught the Boy as much as the stories he loves to be read – just as television and film inform and challenge me as much as books or articles. The point is to encourage them to both find stuff out and stimulate their imagination – but also to challenge them and their thinking in a variety of ways. If this habit of consuming interesting stuff remains with them and remains fun as they grow older, they’re likely to be open minded and thoughtful.

The diversity of what they consume is important too, as discussed further below. We’ve managed to invent for ourselves some cosy echo-chambers, just being a voracious consumer of interesting stuff may no longer be enough, you may end up in a rabbit hole of bias and social confirmation.

To defend against this, they will need to be skeptical and critical of what they consume. Encouraging this is a bit of a pain in the arse as it will almost certainly mean they’re skeptical and critical of your perspectives and beliefs about things – but having those challenged is probably good for us too, even if it’s annoying. The toddler’s incessant and repeated “why” is an established trope with good reason. But it’s necessary and, I’m afraid, to be encouraged (unless they’re just doing it to be dicks which, let’s face it, is sometimes the case.)

It is a lack of skepticism and critical thought that allows plainly false claims like “we’ll give £350m a week to the NHS” and “we may be a group of corrupt billionaires but we’re definitely anti-establishment champions of the working class” to be effective. Encourage them to compare different sides of the same story, to empathise with different characters. Encourage them to ask how they know if something is true, to think about who is saying it and why. Encourage (and this is the hardest bit) them not to accept something just because a figure of authority has said it to be true. The absolute antithesis of “because I said so.”

An extension of this allowing and encouraging them to have their own point of view and to think about why they have it. Discuss things and get them to explain why they think or feel a certain way, how they came to it. Obviously, tell them if you disagree, but explain why. Teach them how thoughts are constructed, argued and counter-argued. Teach them to accept if they have been shown to be wrong (I am not good role model on this front) and to value other perspectives even if they are different from their own. Again, this sounds very grand, but really it just means talking to them, asking them what and why and how and trying your best to answer when they ask you the same (which they will do, constantly.)

Above all, encourage their creativity. Do not confuse this with encouraging them to be artistic (although there’s nothing wrong with doing that too.) Creativity isn’t being able to draw or act or sing. It’s about having ideas, regardless of medium of expression of those ideas. A new algorithm or chemical compound is just as creative as a new song or painting, we will need them all the way the planet is headed. Ideas (and by extension creativity) are able to flourish in environments where trying new things is encouraged and failure is not punished. Again, many assume this to be a denigration of competition or the will to succeed – not at all, it does not mean celebrating failure, but rather recognising it is an essential part of any creative process of discovery – not a good thing, but a necessary thing. Build an environment where trying new things is celebrated regardless of how that turns out.

The other mistake people make about ideas is that creative people pluck them from nowhere – that ever misleading light-bulb metaphor. They don’t. Ideas are rarely genuinely new, they are combinations of things that already exist – those that appear most radical or transformational tend to be combinations of more disparate disciplines (cf. Faris Yakob for more on this sort of thing.) This is something else you can help to nurture and encourage. Partly by doing all of the stuff I’ve already covered off further up (consuming diverse and interesting stuff, being skeptical, having a point of view etc.) but also by resisting Western education’s unerring focus on specialism. We need discipline specialists and experts, of course we do, but many of the great leaps forward come from those who span, subvert or cross established disciplines – expressly because they are able to bring together diverse existing ideas to create something new.

It’s clear that a gradual reduction in carbon output brokered in political deals isn’t going to be anywhere near drastic enough. Salvation will come from a generation of creative disrupters producing thousands of tiny revolutions in a wide range of disciplines all over the world. Our generation isn’t going to save the world, if anything, we’re making things worse. But if we get the parenting thing right, our kids between them just might.

 

PS. I know this is long and serious and that’s not going to be the normal vibe on here, but some things are just important, yeah? I’ll be back to swearing about the soft play and shit like that in due course.