Keep it in the ground, dude

I am pleased to be joining in with the Keep It In The Ground campaign.

Some of the ways our family live these days seem like ancient ways…. we use herbs and plants to clean our hair and clothes and home, we try to make our food from scratch using veggies we’ve dug out the garden, we use the power of the sun so on a stormy day we tend to wind down, turning everything off and lighting our rooms with candles.

Sometimes its like the Flintstones meets Little House on the Prairie. Our lives are pretty simple, we harness nature’s resources, and we brush our hair alot. (Although Juno is definitely more Bamm Bamm than Pebbles.)

And then, in other ways, we are living the days I drew in my exercise book age 7 when the class was told to imagine the year 2000. We drive a hybrid car (it’s a massive honker of a thing that we needed for farm work that runs on electricity 50% of the time) and on a sunny day we can charge our laptops and devices AND run a washing machine using the sun alone! The SUN!

Like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure meets Avatar, a little bit. We are trying to live futuristically – as if the utopian world we want to live in is within grasp. Where technological advances make magic and as if all humankind, past and present, is excellent to each other…

We’ve both campaigned, and acted on climate change issues for yonks – but it was really having children in our life that made us REALLY consider what sort of a world we would be leaving them. It is a bit difficult to have that thought, and then look at your children’s beautiful, wild selves and go right ahead and continue in bad, earth hating behaviours.

Now, the thing is, hybrid cars and solar energy are expensive things to invest in, initially. But we have always believed that if you can afford to make a more ethical consumer decision, you should.

We believe this so firmly that when the Guardian got in touch to ask me to be an ambassador for their Keep It In the Ground campaign I was like HECK TO THE YES.

You see, some of the world’s richest, and most altruistic, peeps are still investing in dirty, old skool energy, entirely unnecessarily.

Earlier this year the Guardian and 350.org launched the Keep It In the Ground campaign to ask the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to divest its £28bn from fossil fuel assets.

We are way, WAY, beyond the safe parameters for burning fossil fuels – we should have stopped years ago. Yet not only do we continue to burn them, but companies continue to invest in the whole industry. When there are burgeoning new clean energy industries BEGGING for investment.

Climate change looms over us yet we all continue to behave as if it’s just the feeble joke of a laughable loon. We stand at the til buying more crap made from dirty, unrenewable materials, running our hands through our children’s hair, ignoring the niggling sense that our great-great-grandchildren will probably dig this very crap out of a barren ground and sink to their knees, thinking “For this?! They let our earth crumble around them for THIS?!”

We all need to do our bit, every one of us, but there is a far greater onus on those who hold the strings of the world’s biggest purses.

The Gates Foundation and The Wellcome Trust have done some marv stuff for the planet’s children through their health work, now its time to start investing in the planet’s future children. Divesting of dirty fuels and investing in wind, solar and hydro energy makes the vision of a clean, beautiful tomorrow tangible. It will be a massive high five for all the generations yet to be born.

We’ve got to grab fossil fuel investors by the lapels and give ’em a shake. *furious voice* We’ll do our bit to love this earth – but YOU’VE got to step up too. Find their lapels… or sign the Keep It In the Ground petition, for starters!

Bill Gates, divest of dirty fuel and embrace clean energy, it’s the future!