In 2001 I decided to buy a subscription to the Guardian Weekly for my brainy daughter: a good excuse to have it delivered after relying on news stands in Norway since we moved here in 1997. As I live in this oil-producing nation teeming with climate change deniers, the paper seemed like an oasis of well-sourced news and like-minded thinking.
When she was 17, my daughter moved to Moscow, then to Oxford and is now in Edinburgh, where she just finished a PhD on anthropology and climate change, but the paper kept arriving here in Oslo.
My parents were fiercely contemptuous of journalism and politics when I was a child, yet I had found a paper I both trusted and delighted in. They seemed rather surprised as I became politically active, but wonderfully, they began to subscribe themselves.
In my work with teenagers, I’m lucky to take thousands into the Norwegian forest each year. We explore sustainability and our dependence on and love for other species. Does a week go by when I don’t refer to articles, praise the paper, urge others to subscribe? Seldom.
In my home it lies on the kitchen table, where the Afghan, the Czech, the Slovak, the Indian and the Norwegian who live here take a turn to read. The address sheet is hung up so the blank side serves as a shopping list. The best? Nature watch never fails.
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