I saw an advert in a paper the other day featuring an everywoman customer, writing to her energy provider. "Dear energy provider," it started, "I've just found out I'm expecting a baby, so of course I'm more interested than ever in sustainable energy sources."
It has an undeniable logic: mums have children, ergo, mums have a stake in the future, ergo, mums are eco-warriors. Becoming a parent is meant to revive all the altruism and idealism of one's youth, while tethering it to a new determination to actually do something, rather than sitting around talking about it. This kind of womb-centric politicisation has always been around - in this country, you saw it most strikingly at Greenham Common - but it never seems to have grabbed the mainstream by the throat before now.
The recently launched EcoMom Alliance of America, for the well-heeled soccer mom demographic it attracts, is the noughties equivalent of the Tupperware party. In meetings, things can get heated, as members berate one another for the lushness of their carpets, choice of laundry detergent and suchlike. But on the ecomomalliance.org website, the tone is determinedly conciliatory. "Buy carbon offsets and reduce mom guilt," it says. Other tips include switching your car engine off when you're not moving, switching to energy efficient light bulbs, and using "non-toxic products for cleaning and bathing [to help] protect the environment as well as reduce you and your family's risk of disease". Finally, "play more" - for a load of schmaltzy reasons that crescendo to: "Do things that make you feel healthy, good and thriving. It's all connected. Sustain your Home, Sustain Your Planet and Sustain Your Self. All good. No bad!"
But if it's all good and no bad, then why do I feel so nauseous? Sorry, I'm coming at this from a very English place. I would probably object to any optimism, let alone this raucously positive cheerleading. And I think I'm pretty representative of the nation, because our own equivalents have a much more low-key tone. Check out the Women's Environmental Network (wen.org.uk) for the much more serious-minded UK version of the EcoMom Alliance. If I had one criticism - well, two - it would be that WEN's rhetoric is very tendentious and humourless. It reminds me strikingly of the kind of people who went to Greenham (like my mum and, under sufferance, me). One could applaud their activism inwardly while at the same time wishing they wouldn't glower so self-righteously at the Greenham locals on buses. WEN is like glowering in blog form. It's all, "is Waitrose oblivious to the irony of its own carbon footprint!?!" this, and "women's views ignored in nuclear policy" that.
Perhaps you think I'm being petty. Women across the developed world are uniting, for the sake of their children, with new zeal, against climate change and attendant ills. What's not to like? Well, partly, this idealisation that parenthood has at its core the assumption that only parents really have any investment in the future - that any empathy with the earth and its plight can only proceed from having procreated. While it appears to unite parents, that's not the real effect, since presumably we are all united in our desire for the world not to end. It alienates parents from non-parents.
Plus, from a feminist perspective, it makes me feel a bit queasy. It's all based on the assumption that women do all the laundry, all the childcare and all the cooking for the next generation, not to mention all the indoctrination. And that women are the ones who have the largest investment in the future, because they're mommies. This makes the conversation a little problematic. People without the most rudimentary grasp of sexual equality are hard to take seriously. And because this EcoMom Alliance is so isolated from any recognisable movement, they are making up their own rules - which include, "Sure, hon, you need an SUV! Just make sure you turn the engine off when you're not driving." As for carbon offsets to deal with "mom guilt" about your SUV, they are - in my view - like eating too many brownies one day and jogging extra the next.
Another website of this ilk, eco-chick.com, has the subtitle "because mother earth is a woman". Like the parental chitchat, this sounds sweet but in fact is divisive - the subtext is "only we understand the earth, because we give life. We're all in this together, we and the earth; we can feel her pain." By surrounding it with this nonsense, it undermines the very sound rational grounds that there are for environmental activism.
The cutesier these ventures are, the less stringent their standards seem to be for differentiating between what's demonstrably true, and what isn't. Consider, for example, this piece of advice from EcoMom Alliance: "Use non toxic products [to] reduce you and your family's risk of disease." What is that about? What kind of bathing and cleansing products give you diseases? Shouldn't somebody be finding out? It's irritating because the case for carbon-watching and overall frugality is as watertight, thoroughly researched and uncontested as a case can be; when it gets conflated with half-baked stuff about toxic cleansers giving you diseases, it is undermined.
But having said all of this, and believing it, the important thing is the activism.
A therapist in Santa Barbara, Linda Buzzell, publishes Eco Therapy News on the basis that "activism can help counteract depression". A load of half-hearted activists turning their engines off for the sake of their own mental health is not going to save the world. But activism is the right direction. If it all looks a bit Stepford wives from the outside, even if it is a bit Stepford wives from the inside, it's better than apathy and inaction.
