I became aware that things needed to change when I was a teenager in the sixties. We were being told that there were too many people in the world and so even before I married for the first time, we agreed we would have two children and then foster and adopt as the feelings took us. And during the seventies that is what happened. We had two boys the natural way, fostered new born babies before they were then adopted (it helped to purge my broody feelings) and then prepared ourselves to adopt a two year old girl in the early eighties.
In 1984 the book 'E for Additives' was published which first made me aware of all the extras that are put into our every-day food. Around the same time our close friends saw a programme on tv that showed how animals were farmed to get meat on our plates. Overnight they became vegetarians and we were very pleased to receive the meat from their freezer! When they describe their new diet, we had one major excuse not to follow their example as our younger son was very allergic to nuts! However, I did include a few vegetarian dishes into our meals. By then we were living in a large house which we filled with various foster children, lodgers and foreign students, as well as our own three children. One of our lodgers was studying for his Masters in Conservation at London University. What he discovered during the day, he made sure I put into action in our home; our washing up liquid and washing powder was changed to more eco-friendly ones and the loo was only flushed when necessary!
In the nineties, I became aware of the value of organic food; less chemicals in our bodies and far better for the soil and the birds and bees and all the other tiny insects we never see.
However, a few years ago, that same younger son realised that he was not allergic to peanuts - they are not nuts, they are legumes - and promptly became vegetarian. He has put me to shame! We do like our meat, so we save meat for the weekend and eat our veggies during the week.
I would like to have an electric car but I don't think it will ever happen. Although we have a drive to park on and the facility to charge a car, my sons who each live 200 miles away live in houses unsuitable to install a charger. Also, when deciding on what car to purchase, we spent a lot of time working out which petrol car would be suitable to tow a caravan, with the best mpg and lowest co2. It was bought to last us for the rest of our driving lifetime.
I'm not sure when I became aware of the fact that the climate was warming but I know that my reaction was that I would be quite happy as I felt the cold! Especially as one summer in the late nineties, we decided to cancel our camping holiday in September due to the weather being unusually cold! What I was never aware of at the time was that climate change would affect far more than me being a couple of degrees warmer. But now we are beginning to feel the effects; the torrential rains leading to flooding, the fires, the droughts and the ice caps are melting. It is still unknown as to who was behind the hack in 2009 into the emails of Professor Philip Jones, the former Director of Climatic Research at the University of East Anglia, whose research showed the devastation of climate change by the end of this century. We can only guess, and pray that those in power come to their senses. Meanwhile we continue to do what we can.
