2023-10-13 16:00:07
MARÍA MEDEM
That Sunday evening, we gave up pancakes. However, it is a ritual for us. From autumn until spring, they constitute the last menu of the weekend. It’s practical, we always have the ingredients on hand, and it’s a bit of a party before going back to school the next day. But this year, at the opening of the pancake season, it was hot, far too hot for a first Sunday in autumn and therefore to sweat over a frying pan. So, we opted for a rice salad.
This is when, instead of asking: “Who wants olives? »I threw : “We’re making rice salad because it’s too hot because of climate change. It is caused by the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activities. And that’s why we’re going to take the train during the All Saints’ Day holidays, to emit less carbon. » Everyone will have an idea of the contrite silence which greeted this pithy summary. My 9 year old daughter released a summary: “We already know. » I saw in my 5-year-old son’s eyes that he was wondering what language I was speaking. My partner gave me a look that was as surprised as it was heartbroken. It was both funny and a little pathetic.
Why did I launch into this acrobatic tirade which consisted, in my mind, of giving, in the same breath, an honest explanation of global warming and the meaning of the eco-gestures that we try, year after year, to accomplish as a family to participate in the national decarbonization effort? Did I really need to get into this mess? My old friend Héloïse, who has three boys, from middle school to high school, settled the question. “At home, we sort, we turn off the lights, we take care of the water, it’s an education thing, that’s what it’s all about. I don’t know what they think about climate change.”she explains to me one evening when I question her.
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My friend Adrien, who lives in Drôme with his family, writes to me, for his part, that he has never had this kind of discussion with his 5 year old boy, between four eyes, around a table. “Because, as with death, sex or whatever else, I have always counted on life, experience, an everyday word, so that it infuses in my child without it becoming a subject of discussion, all at once, all at once », he specifies. Her boy, however, seems well aware of the climatic-practical dilemmas in which his parents sometimes find themselves. “He distinguishes the intense summer heat from the heatwave and asks me whether we should choose the train which is too expensive or the plane which pollutes”continues Adrien.
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