How do you teach a child to be ecologically sensitive?

Given that you, yourself have a long way to go before you are halfway there? This is a topic I have been struggling with since a while and what did really help me was the fact that the school had done a month's theme on 'Protect our Planet" last year, which did introduce the brat to the topic in a child friendly and easily understandable manner. Of course, it also helped that had done The Solar System and the planets, so the concept of Planet itself was a little clear in the head. And we had also watched Superman, so we were very clear that if the Planet Earth blows itself up, like Krypton did, we could be sure that Mamma Pappa would pack him off in a capsule to another planet, where the brat will be Superman. Mamma is not fussy about how he gets his concepts into his head, and is content to let him assume a bright future career as potential Superman in 'nudder Eard', as long as he understands that the Earth has its clock ticking.

While saving water, being frugal on electricity and such like is a given, with electricity bills these days being the kind of stuff one has to drag a sturdy chair under one's butt before one dares squint at the amount payable, other stuff like plastic bags, pollution, recycling stuff is what Mamma has been trying to din into the brat's head these days. Not to much success, one must admit honestly. We live next to a creek, which has a rivulet run into it, and this rivulet is black, frothing, and loaded with waste. And mamma always makes it a point to comment about how the black, polluted industrial waste is flowing into the sea and choking up all the fishes, their gills and slow poisoning them. The brat listens nonchalantly. "An dose whu don die, the fisherman catches an we eat dem."

The other thing mamma tries to do is explain to the child why we must not waste paper. Trees, rainforest cover and such like. The mamma lands in the bedroom and sees the brat gluing together his old worksheets which had been carefully filed for reference during assessment times. The end result was something that was a cross between Jim Carrey answering prayers in the form of Post Its in Bruce Almighty and a brat snowed under somewhere.

What are you doing, brat?

I is savin paper. I is sticking all ole paper tuggeder so dey don gerlost.

Mamma rushed in to try and salvage some papers. No, no, brat, she moaned, this will ruin these papers, you need to get them bound together like a book so you could reuse them.

I nod using my real buk. I don need more buks.

And then the issue of plastic bags. Mamma tries to tell the brat that plastic does not degenerate but stays put in landfills for years, where it seeps into ground water, at which point the brat zones out and says, Okay, when we is going to d supermaarrket, we bring eveything in our hands. Id will all fall down and we will keep picking it up....

Mamma shuts up. Knowing that her dependence on plastic bags is far from over yet.

How do you teach your children environmental consciousness?