Village people go green

I have little in common with Scarlett O’Hara, the feisty protagonist in Margaret Mitchell’s chick-lit-on-the-plantation tome, Gone With the Wind . Unlike me, Scarlett had a waistline with the circumference of a runner bean and fancied the pants off a bloke with a moustache. Okay, I had a waistline, once, but, I swear, the nearest I’ve been to full-blown whiskers is opening the tin for the cat. But where Scarlett and I do coincide, and I suspect I’m not alone in this, is in our ability to procrastinate, to “think about that tomorrow”. My biggest head-in-the-sand issue is the environment. I conveniently fall asleep during Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth , I skip over news items about melting ice caps, drowning polar bears, frenetic tornadoes and scorched continents. And despite my all-too-frequent visits to the bottle bank, I’m about as green as the Kalahari, regularly finding myself jumping into the car and lashing down to the supermarket to raid the frozen-food cabinet because, suddenly, it’s dinner time and my children are threatening to eat each other and I’m strongly considering eating the keyboard. As for getting to grips with environmentalist James Lovelock’s Gaia theory (which suggests that the Earth is a vast self-regulating super-organism that will rebalance itself as it sees fit, regardless of how many of us are camping on its surface), well, don’t even go there.

The Irish Times