We’re all climate deniers. No - we are. All of us.
Sure, you might not be the kind who thinks all news of climate breakdown is an evil global conspiracy every scientist somehow magically signed up to – as in, just a hoax to take your SUVs and Big Macs away.
Or the kind who thinks the massive wildfires, storms and melting ice sheets are evidence of a natural climatic trend that was bound to happen anyway.
But even if you admit all those things are real, and that human activity caused them, you’re still probably the kind of denier who thinks “what a nightmare”, and then, “but sadly there’s nothing I can do.”
I’m that kind of denier. I mean, let’s face it: who wouldn’t be in denial about something as massive as this?
About the fires, storms, floods, food shortages and mass migrations that are already taking place because big companies who don’t pay tax got really good at addicting us to a load of rubbish we don’t even really want, let alone need, and because vote-hungry short-termist politicians have done almost nothing to secure our children’s futures?
Who can bear to think about their own deaths, let alone those of millions of others? Who can face the weight of that? I know I can’t. And so I watch a boxset and think about something else instead.
Or at least, I did. And then somehow my mind was turned. Maybe it was David Attenborough, or maybe it was Greta Thunberg, or maybe it was just the news: every day another cataclysm, another extinction.
I looked at my two young boys and thought, good Lord, what have we done to them?
What kind of a future have we set them up for? And they’re the lucky ones, with a decent home in a wealthy country…
I make films for a living, so I started to make a film about these feelings, and what you can do about them.
I went to meet people who maybe had some answers – not experts, just ordinary folk doing what they could, in local climate groups, from all walks of life, who shared the same concerns, and had done the one thing I hadn’t – gotten off their sofas, met up and taken action.
And it turns out that, when people get together, they are powerful, and caring, and also a lot of fun to be around. Plus, all you need to do to get going is very little: spend one evening a week getting to know some new people.
Yeah, yeah, but are they really making such a difference?
You bet they are. Don’t believe the haters: from local council campaigns up to massive corporations and national politics the job is getting done and you can be part of it.
But my mild-mannered involvement in climate activism still didn’t quite answer a big question for me, which was: how do you break it to your kids?
How do you tell them that the world they’re growing up into is going to be palpably worse, poorer, less secure, more terrifying, than the one I got handed down to me?
And that at some level, that’s on us - their parents’ generation? Because: we knew. We’ve known for ages. For as long as I can remember pretty much. But we mostly just sat there hoping someone else would sort it out.
How do you put all that to your nine-year-old? Do you swerve it and wait until he’s fifteen and throwing it in your face? But what if he doesn’t throw it back at you?
What if, even worse, faced with the overwhelming confusion of all this, he spends too long on the internet and becomes a full-blown reality denier because you never sat down and broke the facts of life – and well, death – to him?
So I talked to people including a few therapists who’ve looked at this from the outside as well as the inside. Now of course, there’s no one answer when it comes to kids. Everyone’s an amateur at parenting: we’re all making it up as we go along.
But something I found is: you can’t hide things from children, because they’re going to find out anyway. Just like the birds and the bees, they’re going to form their own ideas about it all.
So it might be better to be in on those ideas in case they get the wrong idea.
At first, though, I went a bit too far.
For the next two weeks I had a six-year-old asking me in fear if we were all going to drown. I had to backpedal, ad-libbing weird answers like “don’t worry, er, it’ll only be… people in... er… other countries.. and not for ages….” Cue face-palm.
But then I got a bit better at it. Because yes, the world is breaking, but on the other hand, we can fix it, and fixing it might be interesting. And fun!
We can tell our kids who the bad guys are, and then we can write them a letter together, or stand with some other people outside their headquarters and talk to them politely as they come out, which kids can be surprisingly good at, especially if you bribe them with ice-cream.
Thing is, kids get it better than we do. They see what’s good and what’s bad with a clarity we’ve lost.
Whatever you think of Greta, it had to be a child that said what she said – and if she got up your nose, not unlike your own kids probably do when they say things you don’t want to hear, well there you go then.
But come on, we can take it: we’re the adults aren’t we?
So I’m glad I had those talks even if they didn’t go perfectly at first. And I’m glad I joined those groups. I met some fantastic people and things are starting to get somewhere.
When my kids are old enough, I’ll encourage them to come along with me. And what I hope they’ll say is, “er, yeah, no thanks Dad, you do you. I’ve got my own climate group.”
* MY EXTINCTION is out in cinemas. Find a local screening here: www.dartmouthfilms.com/myextinction
