by Cindy Hennessey
My 13-year-old daughter asked me last night what global warming was. Although she and her brother had watched An Inconvenient Truth with me (and heartily mocked me when I cried at the end), her question showed me that global warming is a term for which she has no perspective and no sense of urgency. She is growing up in the high-tech age, when everything is limitless and immediate and disposable. The idea of the Arctic ice cap shrinking has no real impact on her psyche.
I, on the other hand, saw a World Wildlife Fund commercial on TV showing a mother polar bear and her cub huddling together on a tiny iceberg and I burst into tears.
When I was 13, it was the mid-1970s, during the energy crisis. I remember waiting in long lines at the gas station with my parents. My mother constantly admonished me and my brother to turn the lights off as we left the room (I hear her voice in my head to this day). She and my botanist father also taught us not to litter. We picked up empty cans and bottles on camping trips and cut up plastic 6-pack holders so they wouldn’t get caught around birds’ necks, a practice I continue to this day. As a teenager, I was a self-avowed environmentalist. I took Woodsy the Owl seriously when he warned me to “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.”
And I watched empathetically as the Indian man in the TV commercial slowly shed that one tragic tear as he surveyed the polluted Earth.
Of course, there were plenty of people back then who didn’t give a hoot. A friend told me that he and his family, for example, used to toss all of their McDonald’s trash out the car windows as they barreled down the highway at 55 mph. (Kinda like the folks today who barrel down the highway at 85 in their mammoth SUVs, getting 13 miles to the gallon, max.)
But all I can control is my little corner of the world. So I donate money to the NRDC, and forward their PSA-emails to all of my friends. I buy green products. I turn off the lights. I recycle my bottles and cans and printer cartridges. I drive a fuel-efficient car.
And when my daughter asks me to define global warming, or any other environmental issue, I sit down and tell her all about it.
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