Mommy Greenest

Without a blackboard, my Girl Scouts Global Warming presentation on Monday consisted of me jumping around making big Earth-sized circles in the air and pointing to the Sun. Not the most effective talk I’ve ever given. But they were full of questions: How do we make greenhouse gases? (These gases occur naturally, but now we make too much through burning fossil fuels like gas to drive our cars and coal to make electricity.) Where does plastic come from? (Again with the fossil fuels.) What’s organic? (In a nutshell: Grown and produced without chemicals.)

Their questions made me realize that kids need less on the “how” and more on the “why.”

I remember as a child hating it when my dad yelled at me to turn off the lights. My kids and I now yell, “Save a polar bear!” which means the same thing. We may not always remember turn off the lights, but at least we’re making the connection between electricity, carbon emissions and the melting ice caps when we forget.

Maybe I should show them this tongue-in-cheek proposal of lifejackets for polar bears to help them remember.

Or maybe I should start giving them more real reasons for doing the things that we do. Like turning off the lights to save polar bears. Or walking when we can, instead of taking the car, because cars are the leading cause of global warming. Putting on a sweater instead of turning on the heat because we can save an estimated one-third of one ton of CO2 emissions.

Using reusable and recyclable lunch containers because most kids throw their weight’s worth of lunchtime trash (67 pounds!) into the landfill each year. And reusable bottles because plastic can leach the chemical BPA into their water, and because only eight out of 10 plastic water bottles get recycled, and because it’s made from fossil fuels, and because it never truly degrades, just breaks down into little pieces that float around in the ocean and choke the ecosystem. (Plastic water bottles are just plain evil.)

I remember during one big drought when I was a kid having to take baths in the water my cousin left in the tub, in order to conserve it. I thought my aunt was the Gestapo. Today I leave a watering can in the shower to fill up when the water’s warming, and scoop up the water after my kids’ bath to water the plants. (Don’t worry, we use biodegradeable soap.)

Do my kids think I’m an eco-Nazi? I don’t think so. Originally, I explained that the world’s clean water supply is shrinking because of pollution, and that Mommy and Daddy have to pay for every drop that fills their bath. By now, it’s just routine.

As Americans, we have a history of this conservation stuff–it’s only in the last 50 years or so that we got off track. Out of necessity, the Depression taught our grandparents about conservation. My grandmother reused aluminum foil. My grandfather recycled newspaper. I’m trying to teach my kids the lessons they taught me.

So we don’t have to break out the life jackets.

I’m leading the girl scout troop today and have a nifty craft planned to demonstrate the concepts of reduce, reuse and recycle involving newspaper and scissors. (Okay, it’s window snowflakes. I’m not the most creative mom in town.)

But in previewing it with my seven-year-old daughter, I realized that despite the fact that I’ve been talking about shorter showers and blue bins and shutting off lights for as long as she probably can remember, she really has no idea why we’re doing these things.

She doesn’t understand what global warming is.

Now, that’s not surprising. She has a loose idea of what time is, and if you ask her what country we live in chances are she’ll say California.

But I thought that if I could figure out a way to talk to her and her fellow Brownies about global warming, it might at least make my nagging a bit more understandable. I’d use the whiteboard, and a few colored pens. I could be the Al Gore of Girl Scouts. So here’s what I came up with:

• Energy from the sun, as light and heat, heats the Earth.
• Heat rises, and some goes back into space.
• Some is trapped by the gases in our atmosphere—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide.
• These “greenhouse gases” are naturally occurring, but we are making more through burning things, like gas for machines and coal to make electricity. (These are called “fossil fuels” because they come from deep inside the Earth and are millions of years old.)
• The more gases we put into the atmosphere, the more heat it traps.
• As the Earth heats up, the ice at the top (Greenland) and bottom (Antarctica) melts and the oceans rise. On land, because it’s drier, water is harder to find, and it becomes harder to grow enough food to eat.
• If we do nothing, at the current rate the earth will heat up one degree by 2020. This doesn’t seem like much, but the Little Ice Age in the middle of the last millennium started with a shift of only two to four degrees.
• And because we are not doing nothing, but continue to burn more fossil fuels and forests, especially in developing countries like India and China, scientists say the temperature will increase four degrees by 2050, at the latest.

Simple enough, right? Especially with a big picture of a globe and a lot of yellow, blue and green arrows. But the main thing I’d like these girls to take away with them is the sense that they’re not powerless. That the three Rs really matter. That we can slow down global warming and clean up the Earth by paying attention to how we live our lives, and keeping track of how the things that we use are made. (More examples of that soon–I’m still working on the graphics.)

And that kids like them aren’t just waiting for adults to start doing these things, they’re starting organizations like the Green Youth Movement, founded by high school junior Ally Maize (pictured above) and Teens Turning Green.

Kind of makes you want to go back to school, doesn’t it?