Back to the future…
Over the past few months, I have found myself thinking about my grandparents more often than at any point since they died. My Dad has spent lockdown rummaging through the archives and found old family photos and a very densely packed and neat exercise book containing my grandma’s wartime notes on how to inspect de Havilland aircraft… In October, it would have been my grandad’s 100th birthday. But more than anything the memories are bound up with the course in sustainability that I have embarked on at the University of Cambridge.
When they retired, my grandparents left London for the countryside. Cambridge was their local ‘big city’ and where they went to do the occasional ‘big shop’ for the things that they couldn’t get in their superbly well-stocked village store.
It was with my grandparents that I first visited Cambridge, fell in the love with the place and set my heart on going to university there aged 18. I wanted to join the ranks of students that we encountered in the local Sainsbury’s supermarket. Thrifty to a fault herself, my grandma was always amused to encounter students in the food aisles counting every penny in their pocket and weighing up whether to buy an extra tin of baked beans, or save the money to buy another pint in the college bar.
It has taken a little longer than anticipated to join their ranks. Nonetheless, when I mentioned the course to my Dad, his first words were, ‘Just imagine what your grandad would say to have a granddaughter at Cambridge!’.
But the connection rendered by this course goes far deeper than an accident of location. Just a few weeks ago, I remarked to a colleague that I thought I was in fact turning into my grandma, having spent several weekends on the trot making chutneys and pickling vegetables to preserve the excess harvest. Chutneys and pickles that would be stored in Kilner jars that had once belonged to my grandma.
As Wales emerged from the first Covid-19 lockdown, my husband and I went walking from our flat on the edge of Cardiff Bay, along the Glamorgan coast path with an ice cream tub in hand to pick blackberries from the hedgerows — something I’d barely done since my grandma and I used to go out walking round the lanes of rural Cambridgeshire in the 1980s.
Fed up with all the plastic, I have swapped to getting fruit and vegetables from a local greengrocer. I should have done it years ago, but my delivery now turns up in brown paper bags redolent of the ones that my grandma used to get her groceries in daily from the shop in the village.
That’s on top of the general thriftiness that I inherited from my grandparents. Early on, they instilled in me the importance of looking after your things, maintaining them regularly and repairing where necessary. My bike that I use daily is over 35 years old. One of my pairs of tap shoes is of a similar age. I have clothes from the 1960s.
And it appears that I am far from alone in this…
A recent article from The Institution of Engineering and Technology urges us to recycle many of our grandparents’ ideas (https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/10/recycle-our-grandparents-ideas-and-make-a-difference/). Walking, cycling, shopping locally, eating seasonal foods, maintaining, and repairing things… These are all skills that many of us need to relearn if we are to reduce our personal carbon footprint.
But is it really as easy as living by the wartime slogan of Make Do and Mend?
Just as we need to learn to read and write before we can create a blog, a novel, or even just a shopping list, is there also some fundamental knowledge we need to understand how our everyday activities have an impact on the planet? The Carbon Literacy Project (https://carbonliteracy.com/) would argue that there is.
It suggests that to be carbon literate is to have ‘the knowledge and capacity required to create a positive shift in how mankind lives, works and behaves in response to climate change’ and that we all need to go back to the classroom to acquire those skills — though only for a day. Within just a few hours, it is possible to understand the small changes that we can all make, but also the ‘cascade effect’ that we can each have on a wider audience — at home, at work, in the community or another setting. For me, that cascade effect is particularly important to feeling that our individual actions really can make a difference.
As the company that I work for — Autovista Group — moves increasingly to fully flexible and remote working, its scope 1 emissions are automatically reduced. Yes, there are still company cars and, one day, business travel will be possible again, but there are no offices. There’s no opportunity to make a difference by turning down the thermostat, or by turning off the air conditioning.
That doesn’t mean job done. Those emissions have simply been displaced; the burden now sits with our employees who have to power their laptop, heat their homes… I know that many of my colleagues already do what they can to minimise their impact. I’d like to help them go further and gain the skills to be fully carbon literate.
Follow my progress over the next two years as I create and deliver a carbon literacy course remotely for my colleagues at Autovista Group.
