Guest Article by June Birch, author of “Everyone Can be a herO.”
If someone had told me, as I clung tightly to the stair rail and made my way down to the basement of the London Science Museum, which in those days was the children’s domain, that one day a book of mine would be in the bookshop, upstairs, would I have believed them?
If someone had told me that it would be endorsed by a campaigner, who was described as “one of the most influential woman of the twentieth century,” by no less than the Smithsonian Institution,… and whom I deeply respect, I don’t think so.
Much later, going round to the local stationers and begging for samples of their used cardboard boxes to make recycled covers for books, or watching a hand held drill being used to make the holes to put the string through, it didn’t seem very likely either!
But it did happen.
This is a school library book from the future…. people expect to be inventive in how they reuse things. Anyway, its fun and it doesn’t usually cost anything.
There has already been a nuclear accident and resources are low. The surprising thing is that, people are pretty much the same. Teenagers still want to hang out together and parents are still trying to look after them. The difference is that no one wants to think too hard about the future. It hurts too much.
Meanwhile, they grow food on every spare piece of uncontaminated land they can find, and it’s organic. Streets overflow with earth bags and balconies brim with blueberries and strawberries. The kids go to school three days a week. Windows can be made of transparent solar voltaic panels which open to the optimal angle to absorb the light from the sun. All wavelengths are used to maximum advantage. It’s a highly productive system.
There’s a lot of stuff around from today.. solar, wind and water. What is still around is the nuclear waste…and people still don’t know what to do with it. They have been left a legacy they didn’t want and now four teenagers need to find out where the nuclear waste trains are going and why.
It is their future, and they want to protect it…even though it isn’t as good as it could have been… Who will get sick first? These things don’t usually happen overnight. Just far too soon.
Will they be able to have children themselves? Will they have mutations? Will they be ill?
Their today is our tomorrow and perhaps we have to protect it for them too. Certainly their parents are sure that there was renewable energy to spare, if there had only been the will to use it. The programme was just getting under way when the accident happened..…Accidents don’t usually happen because someone wants them to! They just do.
Meantime, the kids want to have fun:-
‘He took her hand and they raced towards the gap.
“Now!” he shouted.
They both leapt across the broken concrete and landed clumsily but safely on the other side.
They skated on for a while…’ (ãJ.R.Birch 2007)
If life was just that simple….but…they know otherwise:-
‘A red admiral flew overhead and Kirk looked around him. It could all be so beautiful, he thought. You had to battle on. The world seemed to be divided into two sorts of people: the ones who cared and the ones who just wanted to have everything, but were prepared to destroy everything to get it.’ (ã J.R.Birch 2007)
June Birch wrote “Everyone Can be a herO” and Dr.Helen Caldicott very kindly endorsed the book. You can read a chapter at www.insideoutsider.co.uk, the home of Inside Outsider Publications, a primitive, but solar powered website.
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A timely book – should be compulsory reading in every school..
I’ve done energy workshops with schools in Cumbria – children believe that Sellafield is still producing electricity – The truth is it stopped in 2003 – spends £30m every year on gas – pumping out nearly 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide yearly – while still routinely releasing radioactive discharges.
…top polluter …
June Birch is a top herO !