Stop the waste and decrease your waist

Opinion: Environmental campaigns need to break out the emotional blackmail.

After sitting through about four hours of Live Earth recently, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe all this “turn off your light bulb” stuff was a bit misguided. People really need to be told about how they can help the environment sure but more importantly, how to help themselves as well at the same time.

As a student in an all-girls school, I’m privy to the non-stop discussions of diets and boys that dominate most teenage girls’ conversations. I’m also privy to the perverse mixture of laziness and liveliness that is inherent in the majority of girls. A large number of the girls have memberships in many of the more salubrious gyms around south Dublin; these girls are also generally the ones being chauffeured to school and their numerous social engagements by parents driving monstrous 4 x 4’s.

These are also the girls that are getting lifts to the gym instead of doing like common folk and getting the bus or, dare I say it, walking. The idiocy of getting lifts to the gym is not lost on me but obviously it has been lost on them. These are the type of people that need to be informed of the harm that these little trips are doing to the environment.

Saving the earth has to stop being considered an issue disconnected from all others, but an issue with effects which seep into too many other issues of concern to all of us. We need to start twinning the issue of obesity and the environment.

All these parents driving their 4x4’s are the parents that are probably paying for expensive grinds for their darlings and of course the usual tennis, ballet and piano lessons. These are not parents that don’t give a damn but when it comes to the environment, they haven’t been made to see what’s in it for them and their family.

Environmental campaigns need to break out the emotional blackmail and they need to lay it on thick. Parents might not care that much about the polar bears going hungry but they sure will care about little Mary-Jane not fitting into BT2’s best.