Eco warriors
They may be right, but bullying the rest of us won’t get them anywhere
‘They’ll put more hashtags after their holier-than thou tweets than a Kardashian on a product promoting e-binge’
It’s easy to picture the scene. There’s Kate, seraphic in her white Alexander Mcqueen peplum dress at a business event in Warsaw earlier this month, and there’s the gaggle of tech geeks who have just handed her a toy designed to soothe newborns. The tech geeks are shifting from one orthopaedic-sandalled foot to the other, patiently awaiting a royal reaction.
“We will just have to have more babies,” indulges the duchess – in much the same way that I might assure my five-year-old that I will “just have to gobble up” the Fisher-price hot dog she’s handed me. Cue frenetic, helium-voiced, emoji-tastic global excitement. Kate and Wills want more kids! Or is it possible they were only making the necessary noises?
Either way, Kate’s been rapped on the knuckles. It seems a non-profit organisation called Having Kids – who actually don’t think people should have children (or not too many) and are unfamiliar with the concept of royal diplomacy – have written the couple an open letter explaining how irresponsible it would be to have a third child and imploring them not to procreate. It’s a lot to ask of someone you’ve never met, but apparently the future of the planet is at stake, and actually I agree with them.
Other people’s children are bad enough, but they invariably go on to become plain old other people – say, 9.8billion of them by 2050 – and that is a chilling prospect. Not quite as chilling, however, as the eco-bullying that Kate, Wills and the rest of us are increasingly being subjected to.
They start small, the eco-bullies, arm-flailing as you double-bag at the supermarket checkout, thrusting that Youtube video of marine biologists removing a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nostril in your face down the pub and defending the stylistic merits of jute. They’ll liken your patronage of a “single-use-cup-using” café to a daily “hit-and-run” on our natural resources, pepper their conversation with opaque terms such as “compostability standards” and “post-consumer content”, and put more hashtags after their holier-than-thou tweets than a Kardashian on a product-promoting e-binge (#thinkreusable #plasticfree #zerowaste #sustainable #trashisfortossers).
Before you know it, they’re limiting the number of resource-sapping, carbon footprint-producing drains on the environment you’re allowed to birth, and perhaps that’s a good thing, what with milk now no longer being allowed either. Yes, according to a controversial animal rights advertising campaign put out by an organisation set up in memory of a dead hen, the white stuff is now considered “inhumane” by the eco-bullies, who have a superior sense of right and wrong and a baffling amount of time on their hands. “Milk women, not cows,” they chant. Stick a hashtag on that.
Of course, the worst thing about eco-bullies is that they’re right about everything, except milk and jute (which should never be hung on an arm, let alone worn). They’re right about the overpopulation, the plastic bags and the sea turtles, the coffee cups, the cotton buds and the microbeads, which beyond being tiny marine terrorists, will completely fail to remove gunk from your pores and possibly irritate sensitive skins.
And maybe because they’re right, it shouldn’t matter that they’re often harriers and poseurs using their ecocredentials for status reasons, and making one feel nostalgic for the breathtaking selfishness of the Chelsea tractor brigade (who, for all their entitlement, were at least honestly awful). But anyone who has ever been bullied will tell you that it’s unlikely to work in the long run. As is finger-wagging, which, in the words of Groucho Marx, is only liable to make you think: “Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?”