survival

Walking through a puddle in a nicely wet park this morning, Olle said, "I do think we should get a rainwater tank" (a subject we'd been discussing earlier).

"I'd like to get one, but they cost a lot of money", I said.

"I'll put in all my money", he said. "I want to survive".

************************************************************

Brian at LP has a post usefully summarising the debate about targets for cuts in emissions.
TipThePlanet is a wiki with lifestyle tips on reducing carbon footprints.

Comments

[Ariel]

Ohhhhhhhhhh. Smart kid. Mine gets mad with me when I empty the bath without bucketing it out to water the garden. It's nice to have children as environmental role models. Yours has a very good point about why that is.

[suzoz]

Quite often recently he has been frightened about global warming - he's said he wishes all the factories could be torn down. Of course it's not that simple - but his fears do act as a spur for me to address myself to the issue on his future behalf.

[Fiasco da Gama]

Tell him if all he wants to do is survive, he'd better start learning to fight to protect scarce water resources. Like, uh, Mad Max with a watering can.
Ultra-violence is going to be at least as useful in future distopias than the bourgeois consumption of household goods from Bunnings or the pursuit of home improvement.
That said, if you want a tank for all of the sensible reasons there are to get a tank, ask your local council about potential rebates on tanks, you might save a bit of cash.

[suzoz]

Fiasco, it has certainly crossed my mind that today's children might face a Mad Max world when they're adults - especially if the powers-that-currently-be continue to be in power. Even so, I'd not want my child to take the path of survival through ultra-violence. I'm doing everything I can do now to make sure such a scenario doesn't come to pass and everything I can do as a parent to raise someone who'll resist that kind of society.

[Fiasco da Gama]

Well, I tend to disagree. Utopias and distopias both are by definition unattainable, as much as they aesthetically please the futuristically-minded. (Wasn't Terminator 2 a great movie? Best action movie ever made, AFAIK.)
The point is that if he's concerned with his own survival, and he sounds as closely concerned with survival as the medieval Europeans were with their own salvation, or as other kiddies were in the era of Cold War and Palm Sunday rallies, you should tell him salvation's not going to come about through buying stuff. Or, for that matter, through self-absorbed anxiety and sleepless nights.

[suzoz]

"you should tell him salvation's not going to come about through buying stuff. Or, for that matter, through self-absorbed anxiety and sleepless nights."

Fiasco, perhaps you didn't realise there was humour in the anecdote, in that he has no money at all to contribute to any tank-buying that might occur. And 'buying stuff' is not our preferred modus operandi in life.

I don't accept that anxiety about climate change is 'self-absorbed'.

[Fiasco da Gama]

perhaps you didn't realise there was humour in the anecdote

Sorry, I didn't. I misread the post and thought you were aiming for pathos---I was quite wrong. I apologise entirely. As for anxiety about climate change: carbon emissions/petroleum fuel usage and water usage are two different problems. Saving potable water in a rain-soaked coastal city is one thing; reducing carbon footprints in an industrialised first-world country is quite another. And in thinking about the two, I say hot soapy showers are an essential concomitant of civilisation.

[Valerie]

My son too worries about global warming. I'm not sure what to say to him about it. It *is* scary -- his father and I worry about it too.

[Mikhela]

My 6yo nephew worries about the polar bears drowning because of the lack of icebergs. I think it's ineffably sad that little kids worry about the end of the world.