Category Archives: Eco-Awareness

Only the ‘Eco-Awareness’ columns from 2021 onwards are accessible here. For older Eco-Awareness columns by Larry Speight please click on the “Go to our pre-2021 Archive Website’ tag on the right of this page. Also see ‘Eco Echoes’ – a selection from his columns – in ‘Pamphlets’ under ‘Much more’ in the menu bar.

Eco-Awareness: The fires in North America

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The fires in North America, and the recent one in Hawaii, absorb the attention of most of us. They are the imagined Earth-on-fire apocalypse of the distant future brought rudely into our present.

The roaring red flames, thick smoke blanketing entire landscapes, burnt buildings, scattered skeletons of motor vehicles, the tales of frantic escapes and the tragic deaths chime with some of our deepest fears of what might befall us, our children, grandchildren, friends, neighbours, civilization and the very fabric of the world. Cormac McCarthy in his novel The Road, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, gives us a glimpse of what trying to survive in a burnt-out ecosystem might mean.

Thankfully, as a global community, we are not living in the very scary world described by McCarthy and if we listen to the scientists and heed what our collective experiences are telling us, we probably don’t have to.

There is little doubt, as the World Weather Attribution initiative tells us, that the heatwaves in North America and Europe this summer, as well as the melting of the ice sheets in Antarctic, would have been “virtually impossible” without human induced global warming. If we want to live in a predictable, benign climate we know what to do to address global warming which is to act on two fronts simultaneously.

One of these is to persuade our government to work in unison with other governments to change the economic framework in which the transnational corporations and financial institutions operate. The mechanisms that enable this to happen already exist. We also, metaphorically, have to leap out of our warm beds on a cold night and close the windows that are letting in the storm. In other words, we have, without delay, to live a less fossil fuel intensive life-style which means eating less meat, dairy and travelling when feasible by public transport as well as walking and cycling. All of which, it is satisfying to know, will improve our physical health, emotional wellbeing and enrich our sense of place.

Another thing that we need to do is restore our seriously degraded ecosystems.

One reason why the fire in Hawaii was so intense and spread so fast is because much of the original forests had been clear-felled and turned into sugarcane and pineapple plantations. When these crops could be produced and harvested more cheaply elsewhere the companies abandoned the land which was colonised by highly flammable grasses and shrubs which had been brought to Hawaii to provide livestock foliage and for decorative purposes as early as 1793. Today almost a quarter of the land area of the Hawaii chain of islands is covered with these grasses and shrubs. The Pacific Fire Exchange organization say that this situation can be reversed by planting native trees.

This year, as of the 28 August, the wildfires in Canada have burnt more than 151,615 sq. kilometers or nearly 59,000 sq. miles of forest. A cause, in addition to global warming, is that the timber companies replaced the bio-diverse, multi-aged, damp forests with monocrops. These are single species, single age trees, readily seen in Fermanagh, and were planted in regimented lines across the landscape. These tree plantations are not only more susceptible to fire than the native forests but also enable the rapid spread of diseases.

Another factor is that the Indigenous people in North America managed the forests in such a way that their fuel load was reduced, which meant that forests were less combustible and when they did catch fire were less likely to burn for weeks on end.

The recent wildfires in Hawaii, in southern Europe and the massive ones presently burning in Canada are a wake-up call for us to regard our local ecosystem as something very precious which we need to take care of and restore to good health. Equally, we need to be concerned about the Earth as a whole and educate ourselves about where what we consume comes from, how it is processed, how it gets to us and if the workers along the line are paid a decent wage and treated with dignity.

We live in an age when it is imperative that we recognize that Nature has no borders, that there is no us and them, and all things are connected, including the present and the future.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The Seventh Generation

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The term ‘economic growth’ must rank as one of the expressions most commonly used by politicians, and economic commentators the world over. Certainly, politicians in English-speaking countries use it in almost every speech on public policy. In the same way as the world was once described in a way that referenced males as the primary change markers and doers, the default way human welfare issues are framed is in terms of continual economic growth. As the former view of the world is oppressively askew so is the view that human wellbeing is almost entirely depended on the economy continuing to grow.

The reasoning that underpins continual economic growth is that not only does it provide people with jobs by which they can earn an income to support themselves and their family but it provides government with tax revenue which they can spend on public services. The equation is that economic growth means more money going into government coffers leading to better public services, which in turn means a healthy, educated population who contribute to economic growth. The high level of crushing poverty across the globe and the deep alienation many feel, as in part reflected in the large number of people suffering from poor mental health, shows that the system simply does not work.

The idea that economic growth is indispensable to our wellbeing has been deeply inculcated into the common consciousness by the agencies of socialization. In fact, so ingrained is the belief that institutions that pride themselves on the notion of being impartial, such as the BBC, present figures that suggest that the economy is growing as a good news story, something to feel cheerful about. The ecological destruction and human injustices that underpin the figures are considered irrelevant and so are not mentioned.

On examination, the idea that continual economic growth is the solution to societal woes, can be seen for what it is, a fairytale. This is because it is mathematically impossible for the finite to contain the infinite. Although the Earth is dynamic as in seasonal changes, evolution and extinction, earthquakes and the eruption of volcanos, its measure of resources such as water and minerals are fixed. The visual fact of this is depicted in the dramatic Earthrise photograph taken on the 24 December 1968 by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 orbit of the moon. In the picture the Earth is seen for what it is, a small self-contained blue and white spherical island of rock in the incomprehensible expanse of dark space.

A tragic outcome of the fable of unlimited economic growth is that we have designed a linear rather than a circular economy. One is which we mine, process, manufacture, use and discard. In doing so we emit global warming gases, extinguish other species and pollute the soil, air and water making life increasingly hazardous, and in many cases, impossible for ourselves and other life forms.

The ubiquity of the belief in continual economic growth, embodied in the idea of Gross National Product (GNP), is not only due to the potency of our socializing agencies but our inclination to believe in impossible and hardly plausible things. A discerning politician who saw the reality of the fairytale was Robert F. Kennedy, brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

In his March 1968 campaign speech for U.S. presidency made at the University of Kansas, Kennedy critiqued GNP saying that it encompassed air pollution, the destruction of the redwood forests, the loss of habitat to urban sprawl, napalm and nuclear warheads. It measures, he said, “everything … except that which makes life worthwhile.” That, which makes life worthwhile, should be the essence of any economic system. Not worthwhile only for the richest 1% who consume more than their fair share of the Earth’s resources but for the entire human family including the unborn generations.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which compromised six nations who prior to the arrival of Europeans lived in what is today the northern part of New York state, made decisions on the basis of the impact they would have on the seventh generation. Of particular concern was the long-term impact decisions would have on the biome. The credo extends empathy and compassion to people who will be living 150 years after we are dead. By way of contrast when Michael Gove was the Environmental Secretary in 2017 he warned that due to the eradication of soil fertility through intensive agriculture the UK had 30 to 40 years of harvests left.

If the seventh-generation philosophy guided our decisions, rather than the four to five-year election cycle, we would steer the world away from the pursuit of economic growth towards an ecologically sustainable economy in which the emotional as well as material needs of everyone are met.

If nothing else the prevalence of mental health problems, climate breakdown, the loss of biodiversity and rising poverty tell us that the orthodox economic construct has failed and a rethink is long overdue. We revaluate and change our paradigms in regards other areas of life. This will happen in the aftermath of the tragic implosion of the submersible en route to view the remains of the Titanic lying on the seabed of the north Atlantic. Why not apply the same rigorous assessment to the long-term feasibility of continual economic growth and consider other economic models?

This is something Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados encouraged world leaders to do at the recent two-day climate summit in Paris arguing for a radical reform of the global financial architecture put in place after World War 11. She told the delegates:

“What is required of us now is absolute transformation and not reform of our institutions.”

Commensurate with this required change is a need to change our view of nonhuman nature from one that sees it as a collection of things that have economic value to one that regards it as an integrated body of life forms that have intrinsic value.

Meanwhile the global temperature is rising, the world’s soil is becoming less fertile and the clock is ticking.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Keeping our dogs on a lead

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

On a recent early morning run through one of Fermanagh’s Global Geoparks I was reminded of the extent to which we are immersed in a human-centric view of the world when I met a middle-aged woman taking a walk with her two dogs which were not on a lead.

My first encounter with the woman and the dogs was when I rounded a bend and saw a four-legged creature dash into the undergrowth and was wondering what I had seen when I realized with dismay that it was a dog. On seeing a woman on the path ahead I called out to her to bring her dog to heal, at this stage, it was dancing frantically around me. She did not hear me for some moments as she was wearing headphones.

When she was close and had removed the headphones I told her that her dogs should be on a lead, which I feel is as obvious as not driving through red lights. Her immediate response was to talk about her dogs in relation to people. When I remarked out that I was concerned about the threat her dogs posed to the red squirrels, hares, pine martens and birds she replied “we love nature”. I silently pondered if the ‘we’ referred to her dogs. Before I could say anything more she issued an insult, put on her headphones and walked away with her dogs still free to harass the wildlife.

With miles to run before I reached home I had time to reflect on the values and perspective that might underlie the woman’s behaviour and consider if they were unique to her or common to society. Her words “we love nature” stuck me as peculiar as if this was the case she would not have let her dogs terrify the wildlife, poo wherever they wanted with the potential of spreading pathogens, and would not have blocked out the dawn chorus with her headphone, including the captivating call of the cuckoos who live in the locality at this time of the year.

By the time I reached the end of my run I had concluded that how this woman interacts with the natural world aligns with the predominating attitude towards it, which can be summed up in a single word, narcissistic. This is to say that society values nonhuman nature in terms of the benefits it provides us rather in terms of it having intrinsic value and self-interests.

In this context what the woman meant when she said “we love nature” is that she values having a place where her dogs can run free without the danger of getting run-over by a motor vehicle or people complaining about the danger her dogs posed to them and others. Also, when her dogs inevitably pooed she was free from the social pressure that in a busy place would compel her to clean the poo up and dispose of it properly. The same narcissistic love of nature is held by many of those who fish in rivers and lakes and picnic on the beach on sunny days. If asked, they would likely say that they loved nature, that the sea and sand are wonderful, and there are pleasant views to be enjoyed by a lakeside. Yet, as any local council and concerned citizen will verify many of these self-proclaimed nature lovers leave an enormous amount of litter when they depart from the places they say they love.

This narcissistic relationship with nonhuman nature is imbedded in our economic system and is in fact supported by many a religious text. In the Christian tradition people will refer to Genesis 1:28 in which God tells humankind to subdue the Earth, “and have domination over the fish of the seas and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The woman’s insult may well have arisen out of her perception that I was challenging her God-given right, as she saw it, to dominate the Earth through letting her dogs scare the living-daylights out of “every living thing that moves” within the confines of the Global Geopark.

On a different scale on the narcissistic spectrum Global Witness report that between 2012 and 2021, 1,733 land and environmental defenders were murdered worldwide. Most of these people were murdered by miners, poachers and farmers who were destroying forests, polluting rivers and extinguishing species in exercise, as the killers would likely have seen it, of their right to subdue the Earth. A recent well publicized case was the murder of British journalist Dom Philips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in the Brazilian Amazon in June 2022 who were investigating illegal fishing in the area.

The challenge for humankind is to see ourselves as an integral part of nature rather than outside of it and to live in partnership with it rather than dominating it. The evidence is clear on this point, our narcissistic relationship with nonhuman nature has resulted in climate breakdown and the sixth mass extinction, from which a cascade of ecological disasters have occurred and are unfolding.

As we need to keep dogs on a lead when in the public domain we also need to keep our appetite for things and experiences on a lead otherwise much of the biosphere will expire and most of humanity with it. This likely outcome is supported by a study in Nature Sustainability, 22 May 2023, which found that the planet is on course to warm to a degree that will drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has flourished for millennia. The climate niche is a mean annual temperature of between 13C and 25C. If the warming trajectory continues the average annual temperature outside the niche will reach 29C by 2030 making life barely livable for two billion people. Of this number up to one billion are expected to migrate to a cooler climate, which, among other places, means northern Europe including the Irish – UK archipelago.

The authors of the study say that human suffering and migration on a scale never seen before caused by climate breakdown does not have to be. It depends on whether we continue to subdue nonhuman nature or live in partnership with it. Our responsibility for ourselves, family, friends and neighbours extend to caring about other life-forms and the generations yet to be born. As Tad Friend writes in The New Yorker, 22 May 2023:

“wildlife has a right to exist regardless of its economic value, regardless of its usefulness to us in any way. … Animals are our family..”

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: President Biden’s visit and the power of myths

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Humans need to plot their place on the existential map of the world in order to know where they stand in relation to others, especially to those who belong to a different community. We also need to have a sense of how we should relate to the life forms we share the planet with and the topography around us. The entirety of our sense of place in the web of life is called a worldview and surprisingly for something so important it is largely based on myth. Myths exist in the face of evidence to the contrary and all too often are used to bolster our sense of identity, importance and entitlement to things we have no right to on the basis of equity and ecological sustainability.

The power of myth, as a self-justifying narrative, was illustrated by President Joe Biden during his recent 4-day visit to Ireland. There is no doubting the pride he takes in his sense of Irish identity but as he could have made a visit to his ancestral home towns a private matter he almost certainly did it to bolster his standing with the electorate in the United States. His focus on family, religious faith and ancestral roots is something most of his fellow citizens can easily identify with and through extension have some empathy for Biden the man and presidential candidate.

What makes basing one’s identity and view of the world on myth dangerous is that it plays to our emotions and biases while completely sidestepping the facts of the subject in question. The primary myth President Biden used was his portrayal of the role the Irish played in the formation and economic prosperity of the United States as heroic and that many Irish immigrants and their descendants improved their economic and social circumstances beyond what their ancestors could ever have imagined as praise worthy. He used his own family story to give credence to this.

The collective history of the Irish in the United States is that they imposed a variant of the poverty and persecution they experienced in Ireland on the Indigenous people to further their own interests. The Irish immigrants, along with the immigrants from other European countries, stole the land of the Indigenous people, exterminated them by warfare, starvation and disease, forced them to move with little provision to parts of the country they had no connection with and was the home of other Indigenous people. The tragic forced removal of the Cherokee in the Appalachian region, where many Ulster-Scotts settled, is a case in point.

The European colonists also confined the Indigenous people to reservations, and from the 19th through to the late 20th century, Indigenous children were kidnapped by the public authorities and placed in residential schools in an attempt to eradicate their culture. Pope Francis, on completing his 2022 visit to Canada, named what happened to the kidnapped children as genocide.

The myth that lay behind the Irish and other European nationalities colonising what the Indigenous people called Turtle Island is that the Indigenous people were not human in the sense the colonisers felt themselves to be. The same view was held about the people kept as slaves whose ancestral home was west Africa.

In his remarks in Leinster House, President Biden said about the Irish in the United States that:

“the values that sustained these people throughout their hardship in their lives – Freedom, Equality, Dignity, Family, Courage.”

Except for courage these values are what many Irish immigrants denied the Indigenous people. It was only in 1978, on the passage of The American Indian Religious Act, that the Indigenous people were free to practice their traditional religion. This was denied them by the 1883 Code of Indian Offences under which Indigenous people were liable to be imprisoned or denied food rations for 30 days for taking part in traditional ceremonies. It was only in 1994, five years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, that the American Indian Religious Act Amendments was passed giving the Indigenous people legal protections that were not contained in the 1978 Act.

Among the things this tells us is that most of the 23 U.S. presidents of Irish descent did little to advance the rights and dignity of Native Americans. President Ulysses S Grant, (1869-1873 and 1873-1877) is one such president but with reservations as his aim was assimilation, which is to say, eradicating their culture. It might surprise some readers that President Nixon, who was of Irish descent, empathised with the dire situation of Native Americans and signed the Indian Self-Determination and Self-Organization Act of 1975, which greatly enhanced their autonomy.

All of the following ecological catastrophes are due to the myths we have about our relationships with others and the Earth. This includes climate breakdown, the rapid loss of biodiversity which many biologists call the Sixth Mass Extinction, and the ever-increasing expanse of dead zones in the oceans caused by plastic pollution and the run-off of agricultural, industrial and urban waste. Myth has played its part in the creation of air pollution, which the World Health Organization says kills an estimated 7-million people a year, with 9 out of 10 of us breathing air containing high levels of pollution. And, as we in Ireland well know, myth plays an important role in communal conflict.

Much, if not all, of our ecologically destructive behaviour is based on the myth that we are separate from the rest of nature. The extent to which we consider this to be the case is the widespread and long held belief that out of all the species of life that have ever existed on Earth in the course of 4.5 billion years we are the only one that is immortal. The prevalence of this myth plays no small part in our viewing the incredibly beautiful bio-world we live in as expendable. That we regard it as such is something that Pope Francis touched upon in Laudato Si’ (2015) when he said that: “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” This, our observations readily tell us, is fact rather than myth.

Eco-Awareness: Are we guilty of Lucifer’s sin?

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

According to the Bible, Lucifer was God’s archangel who was cast out of Heaven at the beginning of time, which is before the creation of the material world, because he thought that he was equal to God if not better that Him. (Him as in the non-gender sense of the word.) Lucifer figures in the Bible in the form of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Satan who tempts Jesus during his 40 days and nights of fasting in the Judaeo Desert and the dragon in the Book of Revelation. According to the Bible, Lucifer’s aim is to harm humankind by any means he can, including destroying the biosphere, the sustainer of every living thing which the Bible, the Quran and other religious texts say was created by God.

Given this the question we should reflect upon is whether in destroying the biosphere, in laying ruin to the handiwork of God, we are in fact doing exactly what Lucifer did which is think that we know better than God. One way it could be said we are doing this is through extinguishing species by the multitude and altering the very physicality of the Earth which the Bible on at least five occasions says God was pleased, if not delighted, with. Genesis: 12, for example, says:

“The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind, and the trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God said that it was good.”

We are systematically and intentionally extinguishing other species through trophy hunting; an example is the widespread practice in S.E. Asia of taking song birds from their natural habitat and confining them for life in cages for people’s gratification. Another way we exterminate species is through turning habitat into farm land or using it to extend the radius of towns and cities. In countries such as Brazil and Indonesia this is done through the burning and felling of forest. In Ireland it is done through planting acre after acre of Sitka Spruce on bio-rich peatlands, extracting the peat to burn in the form of turf, and until recently to be sold as compost for gardens.

Human induced extinction is also caused by over fishing, the pollution of rivers, lakes and the seas by industrial waste, release of untreated sewage and the run-off of toxic chemicals used on farms including insecticides, pesticides and herbicides. Plastic pollution, the causes and impact of which is well documented, leads to the death of a whole range of terrestrial and marine animals. And as is regularly reported in the news and expounded upon in documentaries, the demise of wildlife is caused by the warming of the planet through the burning of fossil fuels and the release of methane from various sources including landfill sites, paddy fields, farm animals and the extraction of oil and gas.

Human induced extinction is also caused by invasive species, an example is the extinction of 28 species of sea birds on Marion Island in the Indian Ocean brought about by mice devouring chicks of ground and burrow nesting birds. As reported in The Irish Times, Weekend Review, 25 March 2023, the mice were unintentionally brought to the island by seal hunters in the 19th century. Such in the extent and rapidity with which we our terminating nonhuman life we are now living through what is called the sixth mass extinction.

Scientists tell us that there were at least five mass extinctions during the last 540 million years. The last one occurred 66 million years ago and led to the demise of 76% of life forms. This was caused by the impact of an asteroid on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, which as most school children know led to the extinctions of the dinosaurs.

It should be borne in mind that extinctions are an integral part of evolution, with the demise of some species leading to the emergence of others. Scientists, such as those who work in the Natural History Museum in London, estimate that between 0.1% and 1% of species become extinct every ten thousand years. This is called the background rate, A mass extinction occurs when species go extinct faster than they are replaced, with at least 75% going extinct in a relatively short period of time, which in geological terms, is two million years.

Although we have extinguished species since the end of the last ice age we have over the past 500 years being doing so at an ever-increasing rate, turning whole areas of the planet, including parts of the Irish – UK archipelago, into dead zones. We were reminded of this in March when the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland published Plant Atlas 2020, available online, which is based on 20 years of data collected by 2,500 botanists, scientists and trained volunteers, and shows that there has been a 56% decline of native plant species in Ireland since 1987 and that in both Ireland and Britain non-native species of plants now outnumber native ones.

Given the role we knowingly play in extinguishing life on Earth, which diminishes the chances of our survival, it is understandable that one might conclude that we are guilty of committing Lucifer’s sin. Are we, to borrow a common phrase, playing God, when we decide which species we want to continue to exist and which not, which mountains to level, which rivers to allow to flow freely and which habitat to remain intact or turn to ash?

The Biblical Lucifer must be very pleased with us as unless we change our attitude towards nonhuman nature there will soon be nothing left of God’s handiwork to destroy and the last human might well hear Lucifer declare checkmate with God.

Eco-Awareness: Caring for the countryside

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

Caring for the countryside

When I was a boy growing up in Belfast the countryside was considered an exotic place. While the city was concrete, tarmac, factories, warehouses, office blocks, shops, expansive residential areas, litter on the streets, motor traffic congestion and foul air, particularly during the winter when burning coal to keep homes warm and heat water for the family weekly bath was the norm, the countryside, by comparison, was regarded as a place of purity and wildness

When on cycling tours through the countryside I particularly enjoyed the hedgerow lined roads aware that they were a source of autumn nutrition for people and wildlife in the form of various berries, seeds and nuts. Springtime was a celebration of colours when wildflowers and grasses appeared. In comparison to the city the countryside was replete with a rich variety of birds, mammals and insects. Rabbits were a common sight, part of a food web and the rivers and streams ran clear, many lined with trees and filled with aquatic life. There was heather, hills, lakes and woods with a mystic attached to them. The smells, sounds and the quiet were of a quality not found on the noisy city streets.

Another thing which at that time made the countryside alluring is that the stories country people told, their common phrases, the rhyme and cadence of their voices were markedly different from those heard in the city. These differences have long been diluted by the broadcasting media and a commuter lifestyle. Nevertheless, many city folk still visit the countryside as a tonic, somewhere to go to ‘get away from it all’, replenish themselves, touch base and in general have an enjoyable time.

Although in days gone by the countryside was considered by urbanities as a place apart we knew that there was an interdependency in that much of what we ate came from the local farms as their smell, flavors and the soil that clung to the root vegetables confirmed. Lettuce and tomatoes, gooseberries and strawberries meant that it was summer time and their taste was, as anyone who has a kitchen garden will know, incomparable to those grown in the mega polytunnels so prevalent across Europe today.

Much of what defined the countryside up until about the late 1970s has largely gone and few mourn this as few realise it. I was recently reminded when journeying through west Fermanagh of the increasing homogeneity and consequent bio-poverty of the countryside when I saw a large segment of a hedgerow that had been bulldozed and set alight. In the aftermath of persistent rain there were no flames amongst the carcass of recent habitat but rather the dismal sight of grey smoke rising and spreading which road users, birds and mammals, could only pass through with mouth and nostrils tightly shut. The word ‘harm’ came to mind to describe what I saw.

The hedgerows in County Fermanagh, and in fact across the whole of the island, are uprooted and burnt at a tremendous rate and replaced by desolate barbed wire fencing. There are no recent figures for the annual loss of hedgerows in Northern Ireland but in the Irish Republic, as reported by RTE News, 6,000 kilometers are destroyed every year. It is not only bio-rich hedgerows that are lost but broadleaf trees are regularly felled and are variously left to decay, set on fire or sawn-up for firewood. For those who care about the wondrous flora and fauna that is disappearing before our eyes, not to mention the fish kills caused by slurry, fertiliser, herbicide and pesticide run-off, this is desecration. In regard to the state of rivers in Northern Ireland the Belfast Telegraph, 11 December 2021, reports that “in 2021, zero river bodies achieved good or high overall status” and that the lakes were rated no better. The rivers, lakes and coastal waters in the Irish Republic have a similar rating.

Replacing hedgerows with a fence might be done to eliminate the need for regular hedge trimming and thus save time and money, it might also be done to prevent cattle and horses escaping onto the roads which can result in serious accidents, and bulldozing a stand of mature broadleaf trees might be a way to increase grazing land or grow more grass for silage. The agricultural economy has changed during my life-time and many will say that the efficiency achieved is for the better as prior to Putin’s war on Ukraine the price of food was the cheapest in living memory. If, however, I were a kingfisher, a curlew, a corncrake, a barn owl, a snipe, a sparrow hawk, an otter, a salmon, a trout, a hare, an orchid, a bee, a bluebell, an oak tree or a stream, I would think that the change has been disastrous.

One thing that our economic system is blind to is that there can be no economy without ecology. Unless we put the welfare of nonhuman nature at the heart of our economic decisions then it and us, especially our descendants, really do have a bleak future. The point we need to keep in mind is that the future is not prescribed as we are the authors of the type of society and countryside we want to live in.

To leave our descendants a countryside that is a repository of biodiversity and a place where farmers earn a good living producing tasty nutritious food we need to exercise our agency and refuse to be cogs in the giant nature-eating machine which is the international economic order. There are a number of ways we can do about this. We can take the baby step of planting and nurturing a variety of vegetable seeds this spring, and a toddler step would be to petition our Local Council to provide community allotments as well as regularly monitor the quality of the water in rivers and lakes and ensure the hedgerows are not trimmed out of season. The contact details of your local councilors are available on the internet.

As there are Local Council elections this May in Northern Ireland and next year in the Irish Republic voters have leverage through asking candidates in their ward what they have done, and will do if elected, to protect and enhance the ecological health of our countryside as well as provide their constituents with a resilient, bio-enhancing agricultural system. This is a urgent matter given that a 2020 survey by the UK Natural History Museum and the RSPB ranked Northern Ireland as the 12th worst country in the world for biodiversity, the Republic of Ireland was ranked 13th. Will the candidates, if elected, work to ensure that the Council increases biodiversity within the electoral boundary by 30 % by 2030, which is the target set by the COP15 biodiversity conference held last December in Montreal?

We can hardly expect our descendants to think well of us if our legacy to them is a countryside in which poisoned rivers flow, the soil is kept on life-support through expensive artificial chemicals and there is not a butterfly, bee or bird to be seen across the bland lines of fencing where bio-rich, sheltering, shadow casting, food providing, story inspiring hedgerows used to grow.

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Eco-Awareness: Are electric cars really eco-friendly?

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

One of the most common things one hears political candidates say at election time is that they will bring about real change if elected. One usually does not have to listen very long to learn that what they mean by real change is an intensification of the effort to increase economic growth, which is widely considered to be the solution to most if not all of society’s problems.

The belief is the ideological bedrock of the main political parties in Ireland, the UK and across the world. Where the political parties strive to distinguish themselves from each other is the means by which economic growth will be achieved. Even when it comes to dealing with ecological catastrophes such as climate breakdown, loss of biodiversity and pollution the parties frame their solutions in terms of growth, albeit, with the prefix ‘green’ added.

When the mainstream politicians, CEOs and most commentators use the term ‘green’ they do not mean a change from viewing nonhuman nature in humancentric terms as in it is a collection of resources to be used for our benefit, be it material or a means of enhancing mental health. Nor does it mean respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples from whose lands most of the minerals used in the manufacture of the goods we purchase are sourced, or that the people employed in the chain of events which brings a product to the shops or our doorstep are paid a living wage.

‘Green growth’ is somewhat akin to putting new wine into old wine skins (Mt: 9:17) and is almost always used in regard to energy generated by wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, hydro and thermal power as well as conserving energy through insulation of the building stock. What is an anathema to governments and corporations is the idea of only buying what one actually needs.

Thus, the purchase of electric cars is encouraged rather than the replacement of petrol and diesel ones by comfortable, reliable and affordable forms of public transport and safe and attractive walk and cycle-ways.

The electrical car, which is widely trumpeted, is a good example of why so many ‘green’ inventions are the antithesis of real change. Will electric cars solve traffic congestion? Not if the aspiration of replacing every petrol and diesel car with an electric one is met as this will mean that there will be no decrease in the number of fatalities and serious injuries caused by vehicle collisions. They will also not lead to a reduction in road building and the amount of farm land and habitat paved-over to create park and ride enclosures. Nor will electric vehicles lead to the elimination of air pollution as according to the UK government’s Air Quality Expert Group (2019) more than half of the particle pollution from road transport comes from breaking and tyre wear.

The big sell of electric cars, one that is rarely critically evaluated in the media, is that they will make a significant contribution to the reduction of global warming gasses. This will not be the case if the batteries are recharged with energy generated by fossil fuels which is how most of the electricity used by the global economy in 2023 is produced.

In the highly unlikely event that all electricity worldwide is generated by ecologically benign sources of energy by 2030, after which no new petrol and diesel cars will be sold in Ireland and the UK, electric vehicles will still be a major source of global warming gases, a cause of ecocide and horrendous human rights abuses.

An electric car, excluding steel and aluminum, requires six times more minerals than a comparable petrol or diesel one. As 99 % of minerals come from mining, which produces 100 billion tonnes of waste a year, electric vehicles cause at least six times more ecological damage than conventional vehicles including the loss of biodiversity, the use and pollution of water and degradation of landscape. In fact, 56 % more fresh water is used to produce an electric car than a conventional one, which is a major draw on water at a time when large swaths of the world increasingly suffer from prolonged droughts.

The pre-showroom story of electric vehicles is one of high CO2 emissions as illustrated by the sourcing of just one mineral, cobalt. 70% of this is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where in the large Chinese owned mines heavy machinery using fossil fuels are used. The cobalt is then transported by diesel lorries on a two-week journey to either Dar es Salaam, Tanzania or Durban, South Africa where it is transported to China on ships using heavy diesel. In China, which has 73% of the market share of vehicle batteries, the energy to manufacture them comes from coal-fired power stations. The batteries are then sent by CO2 emitting ships to car factories around the world from where they are transported to the car showroom by – you guessed correctly, diesel powered ships and large vehicle transporter lorries.

As one would expect in our linear economy it is not the end of the story. As a BBC Costing the Earth programme reported in 2020, 93% of electric batteries are disposed of in landfill sites where, in time, they can contaminate soil and underground bodies of water. This will certainly happen if your battery ends up in an illegal dump such as the one close to the Faughan River on the outskirts of Derry City which was recently highlighted by the Radio 4 series, Buried.

Unlike in this part of the world the miners in DRC have no recourse to protect their human rights. Michele Fabiola Lawson in Human Trafficking Search, 1 September 2021, reports that of the estimated 250,000 cobalt miners in the DRC, 40,000 are children who, using their own tools, mainly their hands, earn less than $2 a day. Pete Pattisson reports in the Guardian, 8 Nov 2021, that a miner working in a large industrial mine earns 30 pence an hour. Both UNICEF and Amnesty International have published research documenting the exploitation of cobalt miners in the DRC. Not only are the miners grossly exploited but they are under constant threat of being killed as the cobalt mines are fought over by various militia.

What is the thinking that allows prosperous health and safety conscious societies like ours to base their life style on the exploitation of people in a faraway country, and through a chain of connections, utterly destroy their ecosystem? Might it not be the very same colonial mindset which made European countries, and later Anglo-countries like Australia and the United States, immensely wealthy in the first place? Might it be because prosperous societies regard the ecosystems in which the mines are sited as a thing rather than a complex web of life-forms and processes that have intrinsic value?

As consumers we could be more discerning and follow the example of Belfast born social activist and campaigner Mary Ann McCracken (1770-1866) who boycotted sugar grown on the slave plantations in the Americas. We should certainly educate ourselves about the cradle to grave life-stories of the things we buy and examine the notion of continual economic growth.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: COP needs to be reformed

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The COP climate talks, held every year since 1995, is the only international event where a concerted effort is made by almost every government in the world to reach consensus on reducing the emission of gases, namely carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, that are the cause of global warming. Given the mistrust, animosity, competition and real sense of historical grievance felt by many of these countries towards each other the fact that COP exists, and is well attended year after year, is a tangible success.

That said, it is apparent from COP27, recently held in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt, needs to be radically reformed. At COP27 there were 636 participants with links to the fossil fuel industries. A size that outnumbered the combined representation from Indigenous communities and the ten countries most affected by climate breakdown including low-lying island states whose whole way of life will likely be erased by the ravages of climate breakdown.

The intention of the representatives from the fossil fuel industries and most of the major oil and gas producing countries was transparent, which was to lobby hard against any meaningful agreement to reduce the world’s consumption of fossil fuels. They succeeded.

An item of contention was the commitment of the host country to the aims of COP. Egypt is not only a dictatorship that prohibits dissent as its 6,000 political prisoners bear witness but it is also a close ally of Saudi Arabia. At the conference Saudi Arabia along with Russia fought hard to have the 1.5C ceiling abolished, which thankfully they failed to do. They did, however, manage to get the aim of phasing out the use of fossil fuels left out of the final text while the proposal to accelerate the development of “low-emission” energy systems, a euphemism for upscaling the use of natural gas, was added.

It was perceived by many in attendance that Egypt managed the proceedings in a way that hampered the realization of the positive outcomes that many countries hoped for. The disappointment of these delegates was perhaps best expressed by Alok Sharma, UK president of COP26, who said in his closing remarks.

“Emissions peaking before 2025, as the science tells us is necessary. Not in this text. Clear follow-through to phrase out all fossil fuels. Not in this text. And the energy text, weakened, in the final minutes. Unfortunately, it remains on life support.”

COP28 will be held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a major oil and gas producing country. Given that 30 per cent of its GNP comes directly from oil and gas and its tourist industry is oil and gas dependent through reliance on aviation, air-conditioning and desalination plants can the world expect it to fervently work towards phasing out fossil fuels? This is as implausible as a tobacco company hosting a conference to persuade the participating tobacco companies to agree to cease to do business. Likewise with COP29 which is likely to be held in Australia, a major exporter of coal.

There is widespread agreement that one of the few positives that came out of COP27 is the setting up of a loss and damage fund that will help those countries most adversely affected by climate breakdown. A committee composed of representatives from 24 countries will in the coming year work on deciding exactly what form the fund should take, which countries should contribute and how the money should be spent. It is envisaged that aviation, shipping and the fossil fuel companies will be asked to make significant contributions. This is not unreasonable as they on average have earned a $1 trillion a year, ever year for the past 50 years.*

A number of European countries have collectively pledged $300 million to the fund. This might seem a sizable amount but it is insignificant in comparison to the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of damage per year that the most vulnerable countries suffer as a result of climate breakdown. In late August 2022, for example, flooding in Pakistan displaced 33 million people, killed 1,500 and caused at least $30 billion worth of damage. Like many poor countries its large international debts prevent it doing very much to make good its losses.

Sceptics will point out that it is easier to agree to contribute to the fund than actually contribute. Here one is reminded of Greta Thunberg’s comments about COP26 in Glasgow:

“Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah.”

The point is that in 2009 the wealthy countries, including the EU and the United States, agreed to make $100 billion a year available by 2020 to help poor, vulnerable countries prepare for the effects of extreme weather events as well as put renewable energy projects in place. Little of the money materialized. In the case of the United States, it is highly unlikely that Congress, which will be in the control of the Republican party, will approve donating money to the loss and damage fund. Without the lead of the largest economy in the world pledging money, many other countries are unlikely to.

In a nutshell the outlook for the health of the planet is not good. This is something we can’t divorce ourselves from as the life of each one of us eight billion humans, rich and poor, is directly dependent on having a healthy biosphere. A major ecological meltdown could erupt in multiple wars, from which even the wealthiest would not escape harm. This is demonstrated by Putin’s war in Ukraine where nuclear power stations are viewed as military assets, and therefore can be bombed. This is perhaps no different from the UK and the USA carpet-bombing Dresden in Germany during the Second World War. The factories, railway network and communication facilities were considered legitimate targets as were the people who worked in them.

With regard to future COPs, Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, will scrutinize the COP process to ensure transparency, their smooth running and that they are less susceptible to the interests of the fossil fuel industries. On the basis that the fossil fuel industries peddle what the world urgently needs to wean itself off they should be banned from attending future ones.

COPs should also have strict guidelines about who their sponsors are. In the case of COP27 it was Coca-Cola, which produces more than 100 billion plastic bottles a year. Much of this plastic, which is made from oil, ends up discarded causing serious ecological problems. Such sponsors undermine the integrity of COP.

* Kevin O’Sullivan, Burning of fossil fuels relegated to side issue, The Irish Times, 21 November 2022.

Eco-Awareness: The need for new stories

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

As revealed by innumerable, scrupulously researched reports on the climate and biodiversity the consequences for the biosphere and humanity as a result of us living the way we do are dire. This is that people everywhere are likely to experience an increase in the severity and frequency of extreme weather conditions in the coming years as well as live impoverished lives due to the steady collapse of the Earth’s life support systems. Perhaps the reason we pay little heed to the science of impending ecological disaster is that we have internalized the myth that a super hero, heroine, good fairy, athletic figure on a white horse, a bugle-led cavalry or a divine being will save us. We absorbed these stories during our childhood and if we are parents or grandparents probably tell or told them to our young offspring or gave them the story books.

In one sense we know that these stories, whether told, read or seen on film, are the product of the imagination. Yet, and it may be primeval, most people appear to believe them, not so much the details but the embedded message that somehow, we will be saved. We are inclined to deduce this on the basis that our culture has long taught that humankind is an exceptional species. The religious texts of the Abrahamic religions, which most of us are familiar with, are absolutely clear that we are the chosen species and will be saved. In effect this means most people consider our species to be so exceptional that we are, like the mythical gods, endowed with immortality.

One of the most commonly believed saviour stories is the one the UK Prime Minister Liz Truss never ceased telling the electorate with the conviction of an evangelist, which is that economic growth is the formula to economic salvation. Like a magic wand it would save the country’s public services, provide a living income for all of its citizens and enable them to live long productive lives in a world that has a stable moderate climate and thriving wildlife. Fanciful as this is she was elected by her political party to be their leader and thus the prime minster. Although Liz Truss held the post for the shortest period in British history the problem is that almost all governments believe the story about economic growth, including the whole of the EU. Not only this, the fable of continual economic growth is so widely believed it is rarely questioned by the public media as was evident when Liz Truss was campaigning to be elected leader of her party and during her time as prime minister.

The fact that there cannot be infinite growth in a finite world is something governments, corporation executives, the financial institutions and voters must know in the same way they known that two plus two equals four. So why the cognitive dissonance? In part it is because, as the political history of Northern Ireland shows, fables play a more determining role in our lives than facts. Another reason is the tendency to accept things as we find them.

All of us were born into a political, economic and cultural world we did not create and in the same way we assimilated language, norms of behaviour, tastes and preferences, acquired an accent, we internalized one of the most destructive stories of all, that of unlimited material consumption in a materially limited world. In the same way most people don’t question the ideas that form the scaffolding of our cultural world such as belief in God, that humans have eternal life, are self-determining and are entitled to holiday overseas once a year, most don’t question the plausibility of the foundation story of our global economic system or its ethics.

Aside from the power of fable and the tendency not to question the nature of the society we grew up in, a third reason for the widespread belief in economic growth, in spite of its absurdity and the dire ecological, climatic and human consequences, such as the present famine in the Horn of Africa, is that we, and in particular those who have immense political and economic power, simply don’t care. It is a case of out-of-sight out-of-mind. Although this attitude has survival benefits such as reducing stress, in our intensely interconnected world in which the fate of others, human and nonhuman, affects us all, it is fatal. As the poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote: “No man is an island, Entire of itself.” Our interconnectedness is why the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP27, is meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt this November and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, COP15, is meeting in Montreal in December. It is why Putin’s war in Ukraine has caused a spike in inflation and hunger around the world and why the outcome of the presidential election in Brazil affects us all vis-a-vis the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

Our lives are entwined with each other and the biosphere. What we need are not stories of economic salvation through, to quote Liz Truss, “growth, growth and growth” but stories that tell of our interdependencies and the consequences of not respecting them. This means stories which, when they have seeped into our subconscious, trigger a red alert when influential and powerful people present economic fables as fact.

Eco-Awareness: UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s economic plan

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

Although the overwhelming majority of us share the same language as the UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, it is becoming increasingly evident that many of us do not live in the same existential universe as her. In a recent BBC interview, she was asked if it is fair for her government to create a tax system that enables the wealthy to acquire even more wealth whilst the economic position of the majority would be so little changed as to make no measurable difference. She said it was fair. For clarity’s sake the question was put to her a second time and she gave the same answer. (BBC 1, Sunday with Laura Kuensberg, 4 September 2022)

On hearing this it occurred to me that if such a scenario were presented to children in nursery school in the form of a game, they would straight away call foul. They would see that giving to those who have much at the expense of those who have little is wrong. Donald Trump did this when he gave $2 trillion in tax giveaways to the ultra-rich.

The sense of not living in the same universe as the Prime Minister, and many of those who yield enormous economic and political power, is reinforced by the case that in spite of ecological catastrophes occurring on a regular basis in various parts of the world directly linked to the nature of the global economy, Liz Truss has placed economic growth at the heart of her premiership. This is akin to a doctor prescribing to a sick patient the very thing that made them sick. We would immediately see the absurdity of this if a smoker were told by their doctor that the way to heal their diseased lungs is to smoke more cigarettes, in fact as many as they could per day, rather than give up smoking.

Liz Truss proffers that economic growth creates jobs and thereby puts money in everyone’s pocket. This is not necessarily the case, there is for instance no correlation between economic growth and people on the shopfloor earning more money. Think of the people who work in the Amazon distribution centres. Economic growth can be accelerated by automation in which few workers are needed. As the present high rate of inflation shows more money in your pocket compared to 12-months ago does not mean you can buy more than what you bought last year. Economic growth that increases air pollution, which in Belfast kills 5,000 people a year and incapacitates many more, is not something we should applaud. It is in fact impoverishing, not only in terms of the human suffering caused but on the cost to the NHS.

Given our heavy reliance on fossil fuels economic growth means a warmer planet, the annual cost of which runs into hundreds of billions of dollars; death, injury and sickness, lives uprooted the pollution of water, the loss of crops, agricultural land and the destruction of physical infrastructure and habitat. The floods in Pakistan in September illustrate this. More than 33 million people were made destitute, 1,600 people died and a third of the country flooded. Reconstruction, as in providing health clinics, hospitals, schools, homes, water treatment plants, warehouses, roads, communication systems and community centers, will take years and cost billions in hard currency. More recently storms of various magnitudes, thought to have been intensified by climate breakdown, have caused death and destruction in Cuba, eastern Canada, Dominican Republic, Luzon the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Florida and Vietnam.

The type of economic growth favoured by the Truss government reduces the health of the biosphere to the detriment of all including future generations. Continual economic growth in a finite world is pure fantasy. Young children will tell you that the consumption of a limited amount of something, a packet of crisps for example, leads to a lesser amount in the packet until eventually the crisps are all gone. So with the resources of the earth, most of which are not recycled after use. In our linear economy the plastic crisp packet will either end up in the ocean or in a large hole in the ground along with the estimated 6 billion crisp packets used in the UK every year.

It should not be over-looked that belief in continual economic growth is not only the wrap around goal of the Truss government but also that of most of the political parties on these islands and beyond. I have no doubt that our political leaders and major economic investors would derive some benefit, and save all of us a great deal of misery, from reading E.F. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful (1973). Its critique can be summed up with words to the effect that ‘if we won the battle with nature, we would find ourselves on the losing side’. (p.11) In other words, to treat the economy as separate from the biosphere is to be blind to the fact that we are the Nature we are destroying.

It seems that those who believe in continual economic growth can’t grasp the basics of mathematics or simply don’t care that its pursuit will leave us all destitute in a decade or two, including the very wealthy and those of Liz Truss’s generation. There are alternatives, namely those which mimic the dynamics of what is conventionally thought of as the natural world.

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