I’ve been busy these last few weeks preparing a climate and biodiversity camp for my 3 children and a few others. I’ll blog next week about what I did and what worked. But first, I need to prepare something for the children and parents to go home with. As a climate and biodiversity camp, there really can’t be any free consumer giveaway stuff 😱

1. A love of nature is a good starting point

We need to speak to our children about nature so that they can see why it is worth saving. Polar bears are great, but we don’t have any in Inchicore. We do have plenty of other things, and especially some fantastic tree life.

2. Local is understandable: think local to act global

Possibly the same point as above, but if children understand what is around them,they can start thinking of ways to change their own area. They can scale up to save the world later!

3. Listen to the children: they are supposed to be on holiday

The kids need a bit of fun and relaxation. This is not school. Although they need to learn some of these things it will be easier for them to learn in a more relaxed way if it’s not pushed down their throats. I let them go out and play football some of the time, which gave me some time to spice up the next activity. We also played around in the autumn leaves.

4. It’s not about personal responsibility- but we can try ideas that they can share

We need overall system change. Our individual actions are not going to change things if industry and government carries on with the status quo. However, we learn from each other and we can prove that actions can work, and this helps us to scale up. That doesn’t let governments off the hook.

5. There is hope – but we have to be realistic

This is a major challenge. There is a lot of work to be done. We adults have to do our best to hand over the earth we borrow from our children in a fit state for them to thrive. But if we don’t manage that, they have some work to do.

Hope this has been of interest. Happy to hear your comments below!