From mending clothes and household appliances to stewing apples and using a hot water bottle... what our grandparents can teach us about making our lifestyle more sustainable
Most people over the age of 50 have been fixing, recycling and making do for years — so it’s no surprise, discovers Rose Stokes, that as we all become more environmentally aware, the life hacks that served our older relatives well are back in fashion
When I was young, my grandpa used to fill the kettle in the morning, boil it and decant the contents into a flask. This meant that he boiled the kettle just once a day, thereby saving electricity and, crucially, money. In my childhood many of these habits and behaviours that governed how my grandparents and, by extension, my parents lived seemed odd.
Having been born in the late Eighties without any lived experience of wartime — or even post-war — Britain, I struggled to understand these idiosyncrasies, considering them to be markers of their personalities, rather than indelible imprints of a time gone by. My grandma would collect all of the fruit that fell from the trees in the garden and — without fail — would make a stock of jam to last the winter. If something in the house broke, my grandpa, an engineer by trade, would find a way to fix it; whether that meant by himself, or by asking someone down the pub who might have the requisite skills.
I often remember wistfully that no matter the season of our visit, my grandma — and later, my grandpa, following her death — would stew apples every Sunday for his breakfast throughout the week. Still now, I have a Proustian fondness for stewed apples.
My parents straddled the period between the “waste-not-wantnot” post-war mentality and the boom in mass consumerism and neoliberalism of the late Eighties and Nineties in the west. That is to say that while their incomes and resources increased, anything classed as “wasteful” was to be avoided. My mum knitted (and still does), they always had a healthy vegetable patch nourished by a compost heap in the garden and all options to try to repair a broken item would have to be exhausted before we’d consider buying a new one.
However, like most families, our behaviour adapted with the times. Amazon made it easy to replace broken items at a low cost. Fast-fashion brands precluded the need for repairing damaged items of clothing. Flights became cheaper, and so we took more of them.
It became costlier to fix a car than to buy a new one (even for a family of engineers). Taxis became more affordable than group trips on the bus. And we got so used to these luxuries, our expectations shifted too.
Over the past few years, global conversations about the climate emergency and the role of humans in mitigating it have made progress. Individuals are starting to wake up to their responsibilities as consumers, and brands are popping up all over the place to try to meet the demand of a new market of “sustainable products”. Seldom a week passes without a new “listicle” or think-piece containing novel “life hacks” or ideas for how to live more sustainably. These pieces of advice usually hinge on a principle of encouraging reuse and moving away from a culture of disposal. Buy less, fix things, travel more mindfully, produce less waste, eat less meat, grow your own food, repair clothes, holiday closer to home — these are behavioural changes that are often cited by experts when asked how individuals can reduce their impact on the environment.
But is any of this really that “novel”? Tell anyone above the age of 50 that you’re learning the new “environmentally friendly concept” of reducing waste and consumption, and the ensuing eyeroll will be palpable at long range. It is perhaps a marker of our obsession with “newness” that we would sooner assume that these ideas are signs of innovation, rather than recycled habits from the past.
Language has shifted over the past few years: we talk now of a “climate crisis” rather than “climate change” — conveying consensus over the scale of the issue facing humanity. In fact, in May, MPs in Westminster approved a motion to declare a state of climate emergency.
This was an important development for environmental campaigners, Extinction Rebellion, which had included it in its list of demands to the government, following a series of disruptive protests, although in practice it means very little. It was also followed in September by news that hundreds of climate sceptics are mounting a campaign for environmental deregulation after Brexit, many of whom have links to the cabinet of Boris Johnson, the prime minister.
The stakes could hardly be higher. Recent calculations by Monica de Bolle, a prominent economist focusing on Latin America, show that we are much closer to an environmental tipping point (when the scale of climate damage is deemed irreversible) in the Amazon rainforest than previously estimated; in fact, she predicts that we could reach this landmark event as early as 2021.
Dr Tim Taylor, an environmental economist at the University of Exeter and the institution’s colead for the Inter-sectoral Health and Environment Research for Innovation (Inherit) project, says “we’re facing a world where it looks like we’re going to break the 1.5°C threshold of temperature increase”. He continues: “As we add more and more to that pressure, we increase the challenges that future generations will have to respond to.”
So where does this leave us? As Dr Taylor says, this “emergency” presents us with a “great potential to change our habits in a variety of ways”, which “really do offer potential benefits for businesses and broader society”.
He points out that initiatives directed at bringing progress on climate goals can often produce “triple wins”, with a knock-on impact on both public health, and health equity, which is an area on which he focuses his attention.
And yet, the scale of the task is so colossal, that it often leads individuals to feel overwhelmed. “People can feel a lack of agency,” Taylor says.
“We can feel that what we do amounts to such a small drop in the ocean,” he continues, “but when it comes down to it, change comes from a number of directions: from the top down and from the bottom up. We need governments to change policies, and individuals and big business to change their behaviours.”
We could learn a lot from our grandparents, he says, about living sustainably. “Lowering energy usage, reducing our meat consumption, and eating and growing more fresh produce are all habits of yesteryear that could have a positive impact on both the environment and our health.”
I put this question to my mum, Stephanie, and was soon looped into a Whatsapp group conversation with her friends about the habits and routines of their parents to save money that would now be considered “life hacks” for those wanting to reduce their imprint on the environment. “Your grandmother made our clothes and so did I,” Mum tells me. “When I grew out of a knitted jumper, she’d unravel it, add some wool and make a bigger one.”
My dad, Roger, says my grandparents would always darn
❝ Habits of yesteryear could have a positive impact on our health and the environment