Campaign against Climate Change

This is a little off-topic, but I hope people won't mind; I guess creative writing can sometimes be as informative as purely factual posts (see Jo's cool sci-fi piece, 'Energy Future?'). It's a piece I wrote last term about the trend towards ecological housing; sadly it wasn't accepted for publication by the student paper. There may be good reasons for this :) and I'd appreciate anyone's comments on how to improve my writing style. The content's pretty accurate, though presented in a journalistic-y style, which is always easygoing with exactitude...

THE BUDDHISTS OF SUBURBIA

Guy Shrubsole A NEW FORM OF GREEN UTOPIA is emerging, and it’s closer to home than you think. Take a look at the housing estates that at present are mushrooming almost daily across the South of England, and you’ll notice that not all are blandly identical. Some of them have solar panels. Some of them are built with more than their usual share of varnished wooden slats and glass. Some even come with a communal electric car to share with the neighbours. Watch out, Middle England: the Greens are coming your way. There’s ‘BedZed’ in south London, a development of 82 homes that all run entirely off renewable energy. And ‘Go Zero’ in the little parish of Chew Magna in Somerset, the first local authority to commit itself towards zero-waste status. Even my home town, Newbury – not a place renowned for its green credentials, given its synonymy with Greenham Common and the Newbury Bypass – has a few ‘sustainable’ housing projects on the go. There ought to be a word for these emerging districts, just as the Edwardians coined the term suburb for their out-of-town middle class retreats. One might call them eco-banlieue. Or perhaps, following after green guru E.F. Schumacher, who preached an ecological form of ‘Right Livelihood’, Buddhist suburbia (with apologies to Hanif Kureishi). Still, it’s one thing to usher in a new style of domestic architecture; another to tempt in buyers. What prospective homeowners really want to know is: what are the neighbours gonna be like? And would you dare invite them to a communal nut-roast? It’s time to contend with accepted notions of the Eco Bunch and figure out what it means to be both green and neighbourly. Some of the stereotypes are very old – a hundred years old, in fact. The migrants to Letchworth Garden City, founded way back in 1903, first established the image of the muesli-munching, sandal-sporting, smock-wearing eco-aesthete – a strange hybrid creature spawned of late Victorian Romanticism and an older hair-shirt monasticism. “We don’t want people to go and live like monks,” the new mean, green Tory leader, David Cameron, has assured the British public. After all, Britain has spent too long having a good laugh at attempts to live like this. An Edwardian cartoon of the denizens of Letchworth has a strange resonance with more recent satires on hippie life: “Nuts sold here for the bald-headed nut-peckers”, reads one of the cartoonist’s captions; “Visitors are requested not to tease the citizens.” Green-baiting is less and less a national sport nowadays – its star player, a Mr Jeremy Clarkson, increasingly on the receiving end of the taunts (and, sometimes, projectiles). So are we destined, then, to gravitate to the opposite extreme - to all become rather puritanical about each other’s environmental credentials? There is, it must be said, a greener-than-thou streak to environmentalists. We - I confess myself an adherent - can get a little preachy. I once heard a friend living abroad recount that in deeply-green Germany, the first greeting he had from his neighbours was to berate him for not sorting the recycling waste correctly. As the eco-banlieue spread in Britain, perhaps we can expect similar behaviour. The problem is that were environmentalism purely a personal act, a lifestyle choice, there would be no need to ask others to follow the same code. But cutting one’s own polluting habits, no matter how good it feels, makes not one iota of difference if you’re the only one. Letchworth’s aesthetes adopted their ways not to save the Earth but to act out personal moralities. I am afraid that modern environmentalists tend to be rather more evangelical. The modern drive for environmentally-friendly communities grew out of the 70s commune movement. Their green innovations are one of the few aspects of this now-legendary social movement that has spread to wider society. Acid guru Timothy Leary once exhorted hippies to “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out”; nowadays the slogan has been altered by the energy-conscious, to “Tune in, Drop out, - Turn off.” Gone are the experiments in participatory democracy, in communal dish-washing, in dubious attempts at polygamy. But Alternative Technology and sustainable development have gone from being radical topics to trendy buzz-words. Of course, there’s the fear that excessive trendiness is an indication of shallowness and ephemerality. The claim that “we are all environmentalists now” has been made variously by Margaret Thatcher, Australian PM John Howard, and William Safire, speechwriter for Nixon. In other words, by individuals lacking fully green credentials, but seeking to burnish their reputations. (A word has been coined for corporate attempts to falsely talk the talk of environmentalism: ‘greenwash’. Friends of the Earth proudly present the Greenwash Awards each year to the biggest bullshitters.) Still, the concept of sustainable development has gradually become absorbed into the language of government and business, and they are starting to walk the walk, too. Perhaps, at last, it really has made the big time. And for those who do live according to the pages of Good Housekeeping, it becomes ever cheaper and more hip to live greenly. Surely it’s not long now until the lifestyle gurus start cashing in on sustainable development. Look out for the first programme on BBC2 to feature a Domestic Green Goddess – sort of like a cross between Nigella Lawson and those old army fire engines. Well, maybe. And on a more serious note, neighbourhoods acting sustainably will hardly suffer from their inhabitants looking out for one another a bit more. By living closer to work, having community transport or car shares, and tending a group allotment, we might reclaim a sense of that lost community that modern urban life has largely banished. So as Britain finally begins to ape its continental neighbours in going green, keep an eye out for the quirky shifts in social mores, for the vaunted fads that come and go, for the birth of new social stereotypes and the death of old ones, for the ways that local communities contend with living that bit more closely. We may yet all Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Being Green. We can still save the planet. We might even find we enjoy doing it.