100 Years Project Anthology

enlightened attitudes, teleportation, hovercrafts, the works. I don’t
know why. I knew all about Save the Whale, Ban the Bomb, Cancel
the Debt, Preserve the Ozone Layer. I was boycotting products,
signing petitions, attending marches, going veggie, and pushing Fair
Trade at my bewildered family until they were sick of me.
And yet this optimism persisted. Probably because children grow up
expecting adults to sort things out. All I had to do was make them
aware of the problem and they’d fix it, right? And sometimes they
did. When I was 14 no one had heard of Fair Trade and now it’s in
every supermarket. When I was 14 you couldn’t get a vegetarian meal
in a Belfast restaurant to save your life. Now there are vegan options
in your local petrol station. CFCs are gone. Ethical fashion is a thing.
I had every reason to be optimistic about The Future.
But these days, thanks largely to young people on school strikes,
adults are already completely aware of the problems the planet is
facing. They’re just not doing much about it. Worry seems like a
completely valid response to that, so I don’t want to patronise these
young people by saying, don’t worry it’ll all be fine.
But at the same time, I really don’t want them to worry so much.
When I was young all my petition signing and badge wearing and
leaflet distributing seemed so miniscule and change seemed so