Jane Powers on green festivals
It's time to admit that I have officially and somewhat gracelessly swung round the corner into middle age. One of the most surprising symptoms of this condition is that I find myself starting sentences with "Young people today" and ending them with a sigh. I do a fair bit of my young-people-todaying because I'm annoyed by all the excess energy that they have - and that I don't. They're noisier, flashier and more conspicuous than I am. They get in the way, and don't notice (or don't care), because they have more going on at any one time in their lives than I have.
But in a lot of cases they're more idealistic, too, and they direct some of that pesky energy towards the greater good. They're very different from many people my age and older, who channel their energy inwards, to carefully husband what we've got already and to ensure we continue to get more of the same.
No, it's the young people who are spending their holidays helping other people or saving the planet. It's young people who can talk about "climate change" or "global justice" without looking sheepish, doom-and-gloomy or self-congratulatory. It's young people who make up 80 per cent of the participants in the courses and seminars I attend on matters to do with sustainability.
Young people are capable of really believing that 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide is a fair share for each of us to produce, not the 17 tonnes that the average Irish person is emitting, or the 11 tonnes that is the mean for an EU citizen. For instance, at a course I attended recently, it was a young person who, when asked what was his ideal car, replied that it was a bicycle.
It will be young people, mostly, who will be jumping around at the several festivals over the next three weeks, each of which has a lively environmental element: this weekend's first Irish Green Gathering, at Woodbrook House, in Killane, Co Wexford (www.irishgreengathering.com), with its solar- and cycle-powered stages; Dún Laoghaire's Festival of World Cultures, with its Cool Earth eco-fair on August 25th and 26th (www.festivalofworldcultures.com), and the Electric Picnic (www.electricpicnic.ie), from August 31st to September 2nd, which will host Cooler Earth, Global Cool and Friends of the Earth.
Young people know there's no reason they can't have fun while saving the earth, which is why Cool Earth's and Cooler Earth's Carbon Confession Box, with video-recorded confessions, is bound to be a hit ("Bless me, Mother Earth, for I have sinned . . .").
Young people today are the hope of tomorrow. If anyone is going to save the planet, it will have to be them - because the rest of us are not doing a very good job of it.