Rory Fitzgerald
My wife and I were test-driving an electric car the other day, when my 10-year-old son announced from the back seat, “This might be the car I learn to drive in!”
He was right, too. He turns 11 this autumn, and we could easily keep the car for another six years. In six years’ time, we’ll have a grown man who is driving cars. Yet six years ago, we had a four-year-old boy, playing with his toy cars. I’ll never understand the tricks time plays.
I love the movie Boyhood, which was filmed over 12 years, so that you actually see the boy actor grow into a man during the course of the movie. It is a tender film, beautifully portraying the transformation we all go through, during those short years when we morph from children into adults. I often feel like I’m living in such a movie, watching our little characters grow up, as time slips by in a haze, punctuated periodically by moving scenes, when I suddenly notice some poignant new marker of the kids’ maturity. It might be their suddenly increased height, a glimpse of their future adult face, increasingly grown-up conversation, or some new grown-up skill, such as casually making scrambled egg on toast for the entire family.
When I consider time, I think of how rudely short our existences are on this Earth. It seems that we are only just settling in, when it’s time to leave. Yet it also strikes me that, a child born today need only live until 79 to do so. Then I think too of the world we are bequeathing them. It’s improving in many ways, disimproving in others. Where possible, we try to play some small part in trying to improve it. Whether the more apocalyptic warnings about global warming are overdone, I do not know. Yet we already see increasingly violent storms, fewer frosts and a longer growing season. The effects on Ireland will be less severe than elsewhere, where drought, heat and desertification are feeding into devastating events such as the Australian bushfires. It’s surely reckless to continue to merrily produce greenhouse gases, given what we know.
Our family’s small efforts to go green have been proven quite fun and interesting for the kids. They helped enthusiastically with harvesting our own timber for our new stove, which has successfully heated the radiators in our house all winter. We’ve used very little oil as a result, and as we regrow the timber, the wood is carbon neutral fuel. The kids proudly bring in logs for the fire, knowing the work they did back in the summer is helping to heat the house.
We’ve also beefed up our insulation and switched to renewable electricity, and we try to run appliances at night. The kids set timers on the dishwasher, practising their sums by adding on the number of hours needed to ensure it runs after 11pm. Meat is now less frequently on the menu, and we’ve discovered some tasty vegetarian options.
Buying an electric car as our second car seems like another positive step to take. While each step involves some initial outlay and effort, in the end it just makes life easier, the house warmer, and saves money. Children learn much more from what you do, than from what you say. Teaching kids to think more about the environment is interesting, since it requires consideration for other people, who may live very far from us, or who may not yet be born. It also involves considering of the needs of other species, fauna and ecosystems. It is an acknowledgement that we are not islands, but connected to and responsible for others, including those yet to be born. We are reminded in a broader sense that even our small actions have consequences, and what we do, and how we treat others, can echo long into the future, and reverberate far in the present too.