I was telling my daughter that teachers have the power to shape lives and create destinies….for the better and also for the worse, depending on the teacher.

As I was telling her this, I thought about my chemistry teacher. I googled him, and much to my sadness, I found that there is nothing written about him at all, just announcements of his funeral.  He was such a great but humble man, so I decided to write this, for the world to remember him by.

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Mr Clifford Haskins taught me chemistry. He studied chemistry at Oxford and returned to our lovely county (Hampshire) to teach in the local school.

I was lazy and rebellious. I had come to the school with three meagre O levels. I was also a teenage unwed mum. You couldn’t get a worst combination in a student than what I was.

“You could go up to Oxford you know,” he told to me seriously. “You just need to work a little harder.”

Well, that’s NOT what people have been telling me.

He didn’t get too annoyed when I messed around in his class and didn’t do my homework. “I was in Milan,” I would tell him airily.

“Oh my goodness me, did you have a good time?” He would reply, totally unflustered. I get the feeling he laughed at us behind our backs, or when his back was turned to us.

Towards exam time, he would get a little flustered. “Just listen to me for fifteen minutes, please!” He would beg the class, appealing to our goodwill.  But those 15-minute segments were very effective. He must have stayed up for hours in his cottage on Langstone preparing for the 15 minutes.

We listened to him for 15 minutes as part of the deal, and then spent the rest of the lesson gossiping and messing around with chemicals. But somehow, because of his excellent teaching (hard work behind the scenes, I suspect), we learned more than we thought.

“You could go up to Oxford you know,” he kept on telling me that.

When university application time came, the girl with three O levels (instead of ten) decided to try for Oxford. “Which college?” I asked Mr Haskins. “St John’s?”

“Oh my goodness me, you have to be either very rich or very clever to get into that one,” he joked, pale blue eyes twinkling. “But why not? You just have to work a little harder.”

So my dear Mr Haskins, I wish to tell you this: I got there in the end, because you told me I could. Thank you, Sir, with all my heart.

Cover photo: St John’s College, Oxford University, my alma mater (wikipedia).

A few years ago, I went on a back-to-nature holiday with my dear friend Mario. We went to Bali. Bali is a paradise for those who are environmentally conscious; at least, the part of Bali where we were.  We stayed in a little villa amongst the paddy fields and ate in a raw green restaurant called Alchemy.

I remember with fondness the coconut shell bowls, the bamboo straws and the reusable food packaging (though they were over-priced).

In a fit of environmental fervour, I started googling these products with the idea of buying them. But wait a minute….they have to be shipped – nay, flown – to me across the ocean, burning carbon as well as a hole in my pocket (postage is not cheap).

Obviously, importing reusable stuff from across the miles is not a good solution. It might reduce my plastics usage, but it creates a burden elsewhere.

For those who are wading into the plastics war, I would recommend reading the Bellagio Principles:

https://www.iisd.org/pdf/bellagio.pdf

Advocacy alone is not enough to rid the world of plastics. It will reduce the usage, definitely….in the educated and privileged classes who have the luxury of making a choice.  This is a reusable mug.

I mentioned this in a previous post about the people in my neighbourhood (in Asia) who are one of the biggest users of plastic: these people exist on breadline, and they have very little choice. I asked the lady who sells 300 drinks a day in plastic cups (and straws) if she knew about the damage she is doing the environment on a daily basis and her reply was, “OK. Plastics very bad. What you want me do?” She feeds her family on the back of this….and she has a large family, including extended family members. She cannot afford to make changes that will hit her precarious living by increasing her costs.

Any long-term changes must therefore address these three axioms of the triangle of humanity:  “People, Planet, Prosperity”.

A couple of years ago, I had an interesting conversation about the environment with an economist who had a hydroponics project going in my daughter’s school. He said that the only way to stop massive deforestation is to provide the people who live in the forest with alternative means of income (e.g. eco-tourism) so that they do not collude with the illegal loggers….you can preach all you like to them about the environmental impact of deforestation, but unless you provide them with a means  of putting food into their children’s mouths, they are going to cut down trees for money.

My question; is how do we bring people together to work together to effect positive change that goes beyond advocacy?

My daughter suggests buying 100 reusable plastics drinks cups and donating it to the lady who sells 300 drinks a day and ask her to give those to her regular customers, offering them a 0.05THB discount on a 20THB drink (because that’s how cheap a disposable plastic cup is).

Here’s a review of reusable plastic cups. Eeks, mine has only a shelf-life of 30 uses!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/04/five-of-the-best-reusable-coffee-cups

 

 

My children’s father’s most cherished books is Viktor Papanek’s Design For The Real World: If only designers could spend 10% of their time working on solutions for real problems in the world.

 

One of the things I tell my children is don’t just lecture people about your values. THINK!

For instance, we, the privileged ones, are telling all and sundry not to use plastics. But what choices do those existing on breadline have? Advocacy alone is not going to rid the world of plastics. It just generates more hot air. Thus, we need environmental stewardship to go with eco activism and I don’t see enough of that.

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Twenty six years ago, way back in 1992, I wrote a book on the Environmental Impact of Paper Recycling.

Back then, the environment wasn’t a trendy issue, unlike today. Today, each time I scroll through my Facebook newsfeed, I am bombarded with messages about saving the planet.

Twenty six years ago, when my book came out, I was ridiculed. I was called a New Age hippy, a rebel without a cause, a Sloane Ranger, a fool. Back then, recycling was all the rage. I tricked my way into a paper mill to show that recycling can actually do more harm to the planet, especially when the heavy metals used in some inks get leached into rivers.

I don’t think my fairly high profile shouting made that much of a difference back then.

Today, fortunately, much of paper wastage is eliminated with the advent of technology. We seldom print out stuff. We read online. This migration is both good and bad for humanity, but on the whole, it is very good for the environment.

But what about plastics? I hear the battle cry but what’s the solution for the real world?

Here’s the view from ground floor level:

I live in a humble part of town. The people here are normal, working class Thais. They work as tuk-tuk drivers, massage girls, waiters. You can get a drink in my part of town for THB20 (less than 40p) and lunch for THB70. These drinks and food are packaged in plastic cups, plastic straws, polystyrene food boxes.

Straws and a lot of plastic cups are most commonly made from type 5 plastic, or polypropylene. Although type 5 plastic can be recycled, it isn’t accepted by most curbside recycling programmes. When plastic straws aren’t recycled, they end up in landfills, or even worse, polluting our oceans. And they don’t biodegrade. Not for thousands of years. And in the meantime, they choke wildlife, enter into our food chain and kill us silently.

This is my local drinks stall.

In a day, during high season, she sells 300 drinks on average. That means 300 plastic cups and 300 plastic straws. Just on my road alone, there are 45 of these stalls (I counted).  Some of these stalls are a lot busier than this one. We are looking at 13,500 plastic cups and plastic straws A DAY from just one road in Thailand during high season. That’s heck lot of plastic ending up in landfills!

But here’s the fact: much of the local economy in Asia is run on this cheap, widely available plastic and polystyrene packaging. Every evening, the municipal bins are over-spilling with food and drinks packaging. Where I live, that is the biggest contributor of plastics pollution.

But on the flip side of the coin, the lady who owns the stall and her husband support their whole family (including extended family members) selling drinks at THB20 per pop. They are making an honest living and creating a better future for their next generation, though yes, at the expense of our planet.

What’s YOUR solution for her livelihood, if you are telling her not to use plastics?

It is a privilege to be able to make choices based on our values. I am privileged that I can afford to buy a Starbucks reusable flask, several cloth shopping bags and even tiffin carriers to take my takeaway meals home in. I made this cup for my friend to take green smoothies home in.

But what about the small-time traders who are the biggest users of plastics, serving a segment of the community that exists on the breadline, for whom choice is not their privilege? What would you propose for them to use instead, if you are telling them don’t use plastic?

Here are my suggestions for food packaging (for fish and chips from the UK, and for nasi lemak from Malaysia) but I have none for drinks. What do YOU think?

I am JK. I have 5 children. I write parenting books and articles. And here’s my rule for parenting:

Have very, very few rules.

Don’t confuse children with a long list of do’s and don’t’s, to the extent that they dare not fart without your permission, get confused as to whether it is OK to eat ice cream at 6am or think they’re growing up in a correction unit for criminals.

Don’t nag children either about homework, dietary choices, bedtimes, etc, because they will develop selective hearing, i.e. they will perfect a mechanism for tuning you out very effectively.

Moreover, the longterm effect of nagging is it makes you sound and look like an old hag.

For my headstrong, impatient and extremely wilful youngest child, I only have three rules:

1. Church every Sunday.
2. Score goals on the football pitch.
3. Learn Chemistry MY way.

This is the logic behind these three (only three) rules:

1. Church because it is about being part of a community. My daughter is leads a privileged life, and she has to learn to be on equal terms with children whose parents do not own cars and who and to walk for miles to school. She needs to spend Sunday chilling out and “doing nothing tangibly useful”. This “going to church” rule is also about teaching her to believe in something beyond self, to wonder and to question, more so than indoctrinating her with specific religion.
2. Scoring goals on the football pitch teaches her about commitment, hard work and dedication. And a certain amount of physical fearlessness (which translates into confidence). It is also about being outdoors, lots of exercise, learning how to get on with her peers and the thrill of winning.
3. Many friends chide me for being a tiger mum when it comes to teaching my child chemistry. Oh dear friends, please understand that it is not about the marks (I know she will exceed her university requirements) but the process. One must learn how to obey before one can lead. Chemistry seems to push all her buttons….and mine, too, unfortunately. So we circle each other like a couple of warring hellcats, but we will get there in the end, battle-scarred and hopefully wiser as individuals and closer as mother-and-daughter: it has been said that the most challenging thing about parenting is being patient to a smaller version of impatient you. It is weird but in the last two years or so, we learn to find our way to each other hearts and about life though our shared, and sometimes contentious, journey in chemistry.

Note: hell breaks loose if any of these three (only three) rules are breached. But touch wood, I have a high level of compliance because my children know they have a good deal. Only three rules!