Let’s talk about Climate Change (don’t roll your eyes!)
This is my little sister, Beatrice. She loves to play the violin, dance, and sing. She is also 12, which means she is just on the verge of becoming a teenager and is really diving into the pre-teen sass. She has a dialed-in and a spectacularly edgy eye-roll and an incredible “ugh” noise each time my mom speaks.
Luckily I have preserved the role as “cool older sibling” and she comes to me to talk about things going on in her life. Let’s just say I am up to date on all the grade 7 gossip. My role of “cool older sibling” goes beyond agreeing that “the assignment Ms. Fenn gave out this week was totally not cool”. I’ve got to help bring this pre-teen into the world. I get to introduce her to all the new and exciting and sometimes scary things out there.
One of these new and scary things is climate change. Bea has grown up in a world with big wildfires and nasty floods. This isn’t a topic we could just ignore. But where do I start? Climate change seems like a big huge scary monster, one that I want to protect my sister from. So rather than trying to slay the big scary monster all at once, we started small.
We started with plastic. Plastic is a material that doesn’t biodegrade - it can’t be broken down by organisms to be returned to earth. Check. Plastic can be dangerous when it ends up in animal habitats. Check. Lots and lots of the things we use every day are covered with plastic. Check. How can we reduce our plastic waste and push to eliminate plastic altogether? We set a goal. Our family is going to do our best to stop using single use plastics.
Is this going to defeat the horrible monster of climate change? No. But it is a step in the right direction and it allows me to talk about climate change in bite sized pieces. We can take shorter showers and turn off the lights and reduce our use of plastic and build ourselves a more sustainable home one step at a time. Because no matter how many eye-rolls she throws your way - Bea deserves a healthy future too.
