“YOU’RE just throwing a rice pudding at a brick wall,” a friend once described my attempts at environmental action.

I sort my recycling into black and blue topped bins; pay £50 so I can put my hedge trimmings and garden waste into a green one; make sporadic trips to the dump with unwanted electrical goods; take (and buy) stuff to and from my favourite charity shop to reduce the amount of discarded ‘stuff’ in the world; buy fewer clothes and make them last longer; have LED light bulbs, shower rather than bath, use waste water to water the garden and take the train whenever South Western Railways interminable disruptions will let me!

My son (for whose generation I tell him I am doing all this for) merely scoffs at my efforts.

This week two things have happened across the other side of the world, that have made me think that perhaps he’s right; my gestures may be largely for my benefit rather than the planet.

First was the news of the fires in the Amazon rainforest. A new populist president in Brazil (modelling himself on Donald Trump) has dismissed the concerns of climate scientists and encouraged the clearance of the rainforest for commercial development. Six per cent of the air that you and I breathe comes from that rainforest. The fires threaten not just wildlife, biodiversity and the forest’s indigenous peoples; they threaten the very air that we breathe. Yet the burning of the Cathedral of Notre Dame has received more media coverage and more offers of public support than the purposeful destruction of ‘the lungs of our planet’.

The second was a trip that my son and I made to New York (thanks to those clever people at Traveller’s World who fixed us up for far cheaper than anything on the internet….).

One of the things that was most shocking was the sheer wastefulness of everyday American society. Everything is either disposable, plastic wrapped or both; the cars are the size of small trucks; aircon is everywhere; lights are always on; everyone uses disposable cups and my return trip generated nearly 1,000 kilos of CO2 – about a 10th of the CO2 I generate each year.

Perhaps my son is right to sneer at my half-hearted and inconsistent efforts and laugh at my fortnightly midnight excursions into the front yard to sort out the recycling; a week in a New York hotel will more than have undone any good I may have done last year.

So in the face of forest fires, continued profligate consumption in America and carbon burning summer holidays, should I continue making gestures? Surely, I tell myself, making some gesture has to be better than making no gesture at all – but it leaves me thinking that maybe it isn’t enough, perhaps I should be doing more rather than less.