“I promise that I will do my best”... The problem with pledging

At 8.30 tonight it is Earth Hour in the UK – our timeslot in a worldwide initiative led by WWF to get everyone to turn the lights off for the same hour to make a point about energy consumption and climate change. I like the idea and took part last year. This year I have plans to go out which were arranged long before I realised and so we won’t be home to turn the lights off and it’s a big ask to get the babysitter to do it. But anyway, that’s not the point I want to make. What this made me ponder was the gap between the pledge that you make when you join a campaign and changes in peoples' actual behaviour.

Social and environmental campaigns have gone global over the last few years and there always seems to be a big media event trying to capture our attention. Whether it be Red nose day or Race for life, there are plenty of good causes to pledge your allegiance to. But this is my problem: while effective communication is great, what is the long term impact of getting people to buy a bracelet or switch their lights out for an hour? My worry is that, just by pledging, we actually feel we’ve done our bit.

I have two examples to illustrate this point. The first was that big sexy Make Poverty History campaign which attracted the world’s most famous to front the ads and click their fingers. I always remember with a wince that moment when Will Smith started clicking in rhthym with a massive concert audience in Philadelphia to illustrate the pace of child mortality in Africa – that kind of dumbed death down a bit too much for me.

But there were other awful moments – most memorably the celebrity endorsements. There were posters of various famous types looking serious in white shirts and wristbands all with the simple tag: Make Poverty History. The one that stood out particularly for me was of Ashley Cole. I was struck by the incongruity of a premiership footballer who earns £35,000 a week standing there telling me to do my bit for poverty. It seemed the most enormous hypocrisy, and yet, because he had pledged himself, had lent his name, he was therefore helping write off third world debt. Making poverty history takes quite considerable more work than that in real life – it takes diplomacy, legislation, cancelling national debts, capacity building and equality measures – some of which Bono might have had a hand in, but Ashley Cole wouldn’t have been seen for dust. Needless to say, a few years on and poverty has somehow not been made history and Ashley is still living in a £7.5 million mansion near Haslemere in Surrey (well he was until Cheryl kicked him out).

And then there is my own tale of shame. Earlier this year, alongside Colin Firth, the Conservative party and other celebrity tree huggers, I signed up to 10:10, the big campaign to reduce carbon emissions in the UK by 10%. Nice idea. Nice website (http://www.1010uk.org/). I took the test and worked out what I needed to do to make my 10% reduction in carbon that I had promised to do. I know I need to insulate the loft with 400mm depth lagging and I need to replace two windows. But three months and a £300 gas bill later, I have done nowt about it. So it is now time to bridge that say/do gap and get my arse in gear, because if I don’t get that insulation up, then effectively I am no better than Ashley Cole: lending my name to a cause but actually doing sod all about it.

Tonight I wish Earth Hour all the best, but rather than leave the babysitter in the dark, my Earth Hour pledge is to work harder at reducing my everyday energy usage and actually do something about climate change rather than just talk about it.

Confessions of a shopaphobic

When I was writing about hand me downs the other week, I made a quick mental calculation about my own annual expenditure on clothes and I realised that I only bought three items of clothing in 2009 and 2010 so far. While I would love to claim that this was in aid of saving the planet, it is actually because I hate shopping. I really cannot understand the appeal and I go to the mall only when I really have to. This weekend, however, I was dragged against my will into the Southside Centre and (even worse) into Primark by my 12-year old stepdaughter. Under normal circumstances (ie: the need for a replacement school skirt) I’d find an excuse to wait outside while she grabs what she needs and waits for ages in the queue to part with her fiver, but this time she convinced me to go in.

My God it is a terrifying experience.

The amount of tat that you can buy for two or three quid is just extraordinary. You can’t help but think of sweatshops when you look at the piles of cheap shirts, but whether the clothes are made in sweatshop conditions or not (and it’s important to note that I have no knowledge of poor working practices at Primark), it is the culture that comes with the cheap fashion phenomenon that is the real problem.

My stepdaughter loves Primark. “It is so cheap, you can just wear it once or twice and then chuck it” she said. This made my heart sink. I tried to talk to her about the environmental impacts of the clothes that she was buying but it was not the conversation she wanted to be having on a Saturday afternoon. And this girl is no tween airhead, in fact she is a very smart, cool kid, who has actually studied sweatshops in school, but while she really does care about the state of the world, what matters most in her life is her friends and their common interests, and what 12-year olds like to do in their spare time is shop.

So, maybe she’ll grow out of it... Not if my favourite futurist Ronald Inglehart is to be believed. His hypothesis is that individual values (eg. materialism) are embedded as a child reaches adulthood, and very little changes thereafter. He says: “The relationship between socioeconomic environment and value priorities is not one of immediate adjustment: a substantial time lag is involved because, to a large extent, one’s basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s preadult years”. So if shopping is the most common cultural activity for a kid during their early socialisation years, their future as avid materialists is pretty much set in stone.

So what can we do as parents or activists to stem the tide of materialism and help kids see that there really isn’t the need to have more and more stuff? How do we help them see the long-term consequences of buying clothes and then chucking them after a couple of washes, especially when retailers like Primark are so good at catering to their needs? I don’t have the answers. I’m not sure I know what gave me my distinct fear of shopping. Actually yes I do... I worked on the cashdesk at H&M in Oxford Street for the best part of my teenage years. Seeing shopping from the other side of the counter must have put me off it for life.

That’s what my stepdaughter needs then – a job in Primark.

True to my word... I made some palm-free biscuits

However, I might be the only one in our house willing to eat these biscuits as they're a little bit burnt on the bottom. Senan turned his nose up straight away and even my husband hasn't had a second one (which is a very bad sign). Ah well... I'll keep trying!

Why the right choice for baby might be the wrong one for the Orangutan

The other day I was idly looking through the ingredients of the Organic baby biscuits that I had paid so handsomely for and to my horror, even though they are organic, I found that they contain palm oil. So I pulled out the rest of the biscuits I had in the cupboard (of which there were few as nothing keeps in our house) and from this unscientific study of one biscuit tin it seems that practically all shop-bought biscuits contain palm oil too, probably because it’s the cheapest source of vegetable oil. But its price belies its real environmental cost because generally speaking, most palm is grown on land that was once home to the vast rainforests of Borneo, and the natural habitat of the orangutan.

Nine years ago I went to Borneo. It was an extraordinary place full of lush forests and mangrove swamps. But even then, the conversion of forests to palm plantations was occurring on a massive scale, with large-scale logging and road networks being built. According to http://www.orangutans-sos.org/ it is these factors that are responsible for the loss of over 80% of orangutan habitat over the last 20 years. On our trip in 2001 we visited a protected area called Sepilok which is dedicated to the rehabilitation of orphan orangutans, where 80 apes now live free. It is an amazing place where I saw for myself the extraordinary likeness between a human baby and an orangutan infant and was left feeling powerless about the demise of this beautiful creature as a result of deforestation.

But the really sad thing that I am coming to realise is that as a consumer in the West, it is my consumer power that is actually (unwittingly) fuelling demand for the orangutan’s habitat - because I buy biscuits. Looking into this issue further I found a BBC Panorama investigation into clear-cutting in Borneo which claimed that the thirst for land on which to plant palm plantations is actually growing exponentially. The programme also criticised manufacturers for their dubious sourcing policies. The BBC said: “Many of the big manufacturers who buy palm oil via European wholesalers say that while they are starting to find oil from sustainable sources, they are not yet in a position to trace the origin of all of the oil they use. Currently, only 3% of the world's palm oil is certified sustainable, meaning it comes from plantations that pass an environmental and social impact test."

So as a consumer I have to make a stand. While I will watch with interest the progress of UK retailers and manufacturers who have joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the best thing for my baby in the short term is home made biccies. I'd better get those recipes off my mum. That will be my small contribution to saving the rainforests. Whether he’ll like them or not is another question...