The Guardian, Saturday February 23, 2008

There was a time when I thought I wouldn't have children. I worried about the terrible things the world would do to them. I also worried about what they would do to the world.

Then a fellow environmentalist assured me it was fine to have one or two children if you lived carefully. "It's all about limiting your emissions," he said. He had just come across a man who was single-handedly burning 100 tonnes of carbon a year - that's roughly 10 times the national average - through a pathological love of flying.

This put things in perspective. I hated flying. So, like most people, I threw my fears to the wind. I was going to have a low-carbon, politically engaged child, and I wasn't going to think too far into the future. My husband, George Monbiot, an environmental campaigner, caved in.

Our daughter, Hanna, is now almost two. So far, she is pretty impressed with the world. Her favourite expression is "Oh wow!", and she often throws her hands up triumphantly, especially if she has had the good fortune to spot a fire engine. More than anything, she loves to look out of her bedroom window at the A489. There are the timber lorries to admire, the tractors, the boy racers' overpowered hatchbacks. Military aircraft, ripping through the skies on their training e xercises, are a delight. Hanna adores anything that burns fossil fuels. When do we tell her the nasty truth about climate change?

Growing up in North Wales in the 80s, I was part of a privileged generation. I did have a few ecological concerns: I worried about acid rain, the logging of tropical rainforests and the hole in the ozone layer, which, like everything, was the size of Wales (though luckily for us was situated elsewhere).

Yet there was a fundamental difference between our environmental consciousness then and now. Then, we believed the planet was essentially stable. The seasons were fixed and the sea was contained. Buying food was a happy, uncomplicated affair, and every summer we welcomed the heat of the sun - the hotter, the better - working diligently on our tans. We flew on holiday without a moment's thought, and carbon was something you came across only when you burnt your toast. The economy was kind to a middle-class family. We had faith in the idea of progress.

What we thought of as progress turned out to be the opposite. Twenty years later, there is a strong and disturbing sense that things are going to get a lot worse. While we are still confronted with a series of single environmental issues, we also have a cumulative, systemic problem on our hands.

Parents have always worried about their children, and our imagination struggles to identify with the suffering of our ancestors. My grandfather, a doctor and author, wrote about diseases in Wales in the 18th century. He published a photograph of the gravestone of a family whose seven members all died of smallpox. George's great-great-grandmother lost nine of her children to a single outbreak of scarlet fever. Then there were the wartime parents, who make us all seem like wimps, and the parents (including my own) who feared the world would be obliterated at the touch of a button.

But though every generation has had its own fears of annihilation, for about 150 years there was an expectation that life for future generations was going to get better. It is much harder to be optimistic now. How, knowing that the biosphere is in a state of collapse, can we be cheerful about the prospect of our children growing up?

When Hanna was nine months old, she learned to crawl. Unfortunately, she could only go backwards. The expression on her face broke my heart as she moved farther and farther away from the toy she was trying to reach. It was like a metaphor for our fight to stabilise global temperatures. However hard we try to reach our targets, they only seem to get further away. We are faced not just with climate change, but potentially with runaway climate change.

In the pages of the Guardian, we learn about peak oil and the disastrous carbon emissions caused by biofuels and other alternatives to oil. We find out about the thawing of the Arctic and the 500bn tonnes of carbon that could one day escape from the ground. We read about the global food and water deficit that is predicted for this century, the anticipated displacement of hundreds of millions of people and the vicious wars that are likely to follow. (Arguably, this is not just a future problem: the conflict in Darfur has been described by some people as the first climate-change war.)

And in the meantime, here we are, holding our babies in our arms, wanting them to be safe and happy.

If we live to be old, when George and I die we could be leaving Hanna behind in a society in which people kill each other over basic resources, and in which the rules of civilisation start to break down. This idea is not something we can easily confront. I still haven't read Cormac McCarthy's The Road - an account of life after a complete collapse of the biosphere. George, grey in the face, urged me to do so. Before giving birth, I would have gritted my teeth and followed his advice. Now, as a mother, I fear that it would be like looking down from the tightrope, and that I would fall. Maybe, in some respects, we have to be climate-change deniers.

A part of us needs to believe that our political representatives are in control. They'll do the maths, invent the technologies, sign the papers, and hey presto! We'll be saved! In our fantasies, they are like airline pilots: rigorously vetted for signs of mental, physical or moral weakness; clever, capable people with soothing voices and a talent for staying calm in a crisis. They will also, crucially, do anything to keep us alive. Ladies and gentlemen, they say, we're now cruising at 30,000ft. Our palms are sweating but we put all our trust in them. We sit back and watch a film.

I can no longer do this. In 2003, I went to Milan to film the negotiations over the Kyoto treaty. Through a stroke of luck, my researcher secured an interview with Harlan Watson, the US government's climate negotiator. His role was not to sign the treaty, but to sabotage it. It was a tense interview.

At the end, I asked him what steps he was taking to curb his own carbon emissions. He hesitated. "Well," he said, "when I leave the room, I try to switch the lights off, which my wife doesn't always appreciate." He laughed a little nervously. "And I don't use my car a lot," he added, "because I'm always travelling."

"By plane?" I asked, and he said, "Er, yes, by plane," at which point he got up very quickly and shook my hand.

I was not a mother then, but if I had been, maybe I would have asked him if he had children and grandchildren, and whether he worried about what the US government was doing to them by undermining the treaty. It might have been harder for me to keep my cool.

This was a low point: in some respects, these people are bringing up my child.

So what psychological tools can we use as parents when we feel so frightened and so helpless? A disproportionate number of my friends are climate-change journalists and campaigners, and most of them have children. I phoned one couple to talk about an issue that, for some reason, we had never previously discussed.

"Even among people you're close to," said Annie Levy, "there's a code of not talking about how you cope with climate change as parents." She told me about the dream she'd had a few nights ago, involving her two young children being washed out by the tide. But in her waking life she generally remains optimistic, because "when your beliefs and your actions are in line with each other, you get a sense of clarity and purpose, and so you don't necessarily feel pessimistic."

Her husband, George Marshall, is founder of the climate-change charity Coin and the blog Climatedenial.org, and author of Carbon Detox. This family is more exposed than most to concerns about the future, and their six-year-old is already starting to ask questions.

"Elsa asks what's going to happen to the planet," said Levy, "and I tell her we're working really hard to keep the heat down and make sure these things don't happen. I say, 'this is why we walk to school, this is why we don't fly, this is what your daddy works on every day.'"

Marshall told me about an Ipsos/Mori study carried out in 2004. The research revealed that people with children under 16 are less likely to express fear about climate change than people without children.

"One way of explaining this," he said, "is to say that parents are put in a difficult ethical situation. Here we are, through our own actions, creating a worse world for our children. When people have a dissonance between what they believe and what they do, they either change what they believe, or change what they do. And the tendency for most people is to reconfigure what they think about climate change, and to think 'maybe it's not that bad'.

I then spoke to Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet and father of a toddler and baby. Despite the harrowing scenarios he portrays in his book, he is sanguine. "When you've got loved ones facing an unknown future," he said, "it's always going to be difficult. In a sense we're returning to the uncertainties of our evolutionary past. But many of the situations I've written about are avoidable. I genuinely think we can do something about climate change."

As parents, we cannot indulge in pessimism. While we want our children to know about the world, we must not deprive them of hope.

When my brother was five, my mother saw him crying in bed. When she asked him what was wrong, he said "I think I've got Aids." Why on earth did he think that, asked my mother. "Because I haven't been using a condom," he said. He'd probably heard the government advice on television.

I have a visceral urge to protect Hanna's innocence. I don't want her to be brought up on tofu and fear. Otherwise we might as well throw ourselves on the compost heap right now.

But for now, life is good. There is plenty of food on the table and water running from the tap, and the climate here in Wales is benign. For millions of people across the world, this is not the case. Children in the developing world are already dying of the diseases, the famine, the wars, that we fear will come to us. Our future is their present.

As I write, Hanna is putting a few belongings in her miniature pram. She packs a cuddly toy, her wellington boots, a cardigan and a book. "Bye, Mam!" she says as she walks towards the door. She's been doing this a lot recently, so maybe she's thinking about leaving home. I hope we can delay her by around 16 years. This is a magical time, and we must enjoy every moment of it.

Original article: http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2258678,00.html