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Good morning. Our daughter’s three year old has a new habit: turning off all the lights, in every room, day and night. “What’s he saying?” I asked eventually, “It sounds like, he’s ‘Saving the polar bears’…” How do we best shape behaviour? Has the ten o’clock curfew, designed to be safer, actually put us more at risk? Every parent knows we need a varied toolbox, to change conduct in the way we want. Writing my book on childrearing, I found the Genesis story, of the first couple in the garden, sets out the perfect parenting plan. You can eat everything, God explains carefully, except from that one tree. First, we need information. Our planet is in crisis: Greenland melted beyond return; a third of all species, flora and fauna, heading for extinction within fifty years. And with Covid-19 on the rise again, we need the precise level of danger of death and disease. We must know the worst, to take the warnings seriously. If you eat from that tree, you will surely die. But information is seldom enough. We also need disincentives: the ten thousand pound fines; environmental taxes; the Naughty Stair. The stick as well as carrot. But parental discipline, like a vinaigrette, should be three parts reward to one of sanction. Praise is far more powerful than punishment. How much easier for a small child to embrace the positive – preserving polar bears – than shun the negative – a nightmare apocalypse of nothingness. We crave stories to inspire. China has announced carbon neutrality by 2060; not soon enough, but something. And thanks to Covid, we now know we can actually do it. Even more than education and encouragement, we need explicitness. The first thing the serpent in the story does, is confuse: did God really say that? You won’t die! In my Gap Year I was privileged to smuggle Bibles through the Iron Curtain. I learnt that that nothing the other side was clear; no law black-and-white; no conduct consistently either forbidden or allowed. I found this far more frightening than clarity, however draconian. Our new Law of Six was supposed to be easier to understand. It’s not necessarily criticism of the current code that many of us are more confused than ever. Above all, we need to believe we can make a difference: staying at home will make my neighbours safer; taking my bicycle will reduce carbon emissions by one journey. Saving the polar bears, one light switch at a time. An adaptation of Loren Eiseley’s The Star Thrower tells of a beach thick with washed-up starfish, a boy painstakingly throwing the drying creatures back in the sea. “With so many hundreds of thousands dying,” the narrator asks, “how can you make a difference?” The lad picks up one more, and hurls it far into the spume. “Well, I made a difference to that one, didn’t I?”