{"id":2335,"date":"2019-09-24T11:46:44","date_gmt":"2019-09-24T10:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timarnold.co.uk\/?p=2335"},"modified":"2019-09-24T12:54:10","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T11:54:10","slug":"greta-thunberg-awakens-our-inner-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timarnold.co.uk\/greta-thunberg-awakens-our-inner-child\/","title":{"rendered":"Greta Thunberg Awakens Our Inner Child"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Greta Thunberg. Photo Credit: South West News Service<\/p><\/div>\n

At age thirteen, back in 1988, I asked my mother \u201cDo you think I should join Friends of The Earth mum? I can pay \u00a35 every month that goes towards them saving the environment.\u00a0 Will it work if I join? Because we need to save the environment.\u201d<\/em><\/h3>\n

This came at a time when, living in Spain, I regularly complained to her that we should move back to England because in England, they had unleaded petrol, and Spain were still only providing leaded petrol.\u00a0 This was a big deal to me when I was 13 as well as being a useful strategy in my head that might persuade my mother to move back to England so I could visit book shops to browse the latest graphic novel by Alan Moore and listen to Ultravox on the radio.<\/h3>\n

Never one to answer a question she didn\u2019t have the answer to, my mother said \u201cWhy don\u2019t you write them a letter and ask?\u201d.<\/em>\u00a0 This was a stock reply for a lot of my questions when I lived in Spain, and as a result, I had many pen pals in England including druids, makers of Aeolian harps and the publishers of the only Cornish dictionary in circulation at the time.\u00a0 So, I wrote a letter to Jonathan Porritt.\u00a0 The letter was a defining moment in my life.\u00a0 Or rather the absence of it\u2019s reply was.\u00a0 I asked a simple question, which as I recall went something like this:<\/h3>\n

‘Dear Jonathan, I\u2019d like to join Friends of The Earth, but only if it is actually going to make a difference to saving the environment.\u00a0 Do you think the work you are doing is actually going to make a difference? If it really will make a difference, I would like to join.\u00a0 But if it\u2019s not going to make a difference and you are part of the same system that is destroying the planet, then there is no reason for you to reply to my letter.’<\/h3>\n

I never received a reply.\u00a0 This of course may have been for any number of acceptable reasons.\u00a0 But in my thirteen-year old head, it felt like I\u2019d scratched the fashionable veneer of the green movement and found something I didn\u2019t trust.\u00a0 I felt duped, and from that moment on, I began to draw cynical and satirical pictures inspired by Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman that depicted the futility of the green movement.\u00a0 This was the splinter between the brave innocence and hope of my childhood and the hardened rock n roll angst of adolescence.\u00a0 Ultimately the angst won out and I turned into an agitator and eventually an activist, hell bent on challenging authority and the establishment in most of my work ever since. \u00a0Until this year.<\/h3>\n