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: Interdependencies and interconnections

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

With two children born into my extended family these past two weeks I am reminded that we are vulnerable, interdependent creatures liable to all types of mishaps most especially in our early and late years. If born with a disability or a medical condition we may live a life of acute vulnerability and dependency even during what otherwise would be our years of greatest strength, resilience, confidence and ability.

Evidence suggests that babies are aware of their vulnerability from the moment they are born and communicate their needs and anxieties to their parents and carers through crying and gurgling, the use of their limbs along with a range of facial expressions. As they grow and become more capable they rely less on physical support. The self-reliance of adulthood belies the fact that we are vulnerable our entire life through our immersion in a complex web of interdependencies.

A lack of awareness of our interdependencies is a disability on par with having a dormant antennae as we are unable to read the signs of impending ecological, economic and political upheaval if not utter disaster.

In hunter-gatherer, low intensity agricultural societies the extended family and community teach each new generation all the knowledge, skills, aptitudes and values they need to survive, thrive and live fulfilled, meaningful lives.

In industrialised digitally reliant societies like our own we supplement and reinforce the education received from family and community with a rigorous and minutely planned formal education system which inculcates children and young adults with the knowledge, skills, values and aptitudes it is thought they need to earn their livelihood and contribute to society. There are exceptions, in Northern Ireland a disproportionate number of inner-city working-class boys in Unionist communities leave school without the qualifications employers and higher educational institutions require.

In the 2024 – 2025 N.I. Executive budget £2.76 billion is reserved for education, which places it second in the expenditure league to that of health. Likewise in the Republic of Ireland. Its 2024 budget allocated 11.9 billion Euro to education placing it second in expenditure to that of health. This pattern of expenditure is the norm in high and middle-income countries. Yet, in spite of the importance countries regard formal education they fail to adequately prepare pupils to live in our interdependent and interconnected world.

An important reason for this is because governments and many parents view formal education through the lens of economic returns. Understandably parents are inclined to see formal education as the means that will enable their children to earn a decent salary throughout their working life. While governments regard formal education as essential to economic growth which Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor, never ceases to tell us is the UK government’s number one priority, its raison d’etre, the metric by which it thinks its tenure will be judged. This is something it shares with most governments regardless of what their political credo is on the left – right spectrum.

The goal of economic growth means nothing less than endless consumption which has catastrophic ecological consequences and is thus short-sighted and self-defeating. One of these consequences, as the World Bank informs us, is that 2.1 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste is generated every year of which, it is conservatively estimated, 33% is not treated in an ecologically safe way. In Fermanagh people throw away so much waste that the county’s only landfill site will have reached capacity much earlier than once expected.

The fixation on economic growth means that the entire Earth is considered a sacrifice zone to the end of enabling the transnational corporations and the exceedingly wealthy to accumulate money without end. President Trump’s “drill baby drill” rallying call encapsulates the widespread dearth of appreciation for the intricacy of the natural world.

The UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who regards economic growth as the be-all and end-all of government policy, is of the same mind as Donald Trump as is evident by his intention to weaken planning controls which were enacted to protect the nature that makes life possible for us all. The governments in both parts of our island are similarly minded.

Robert Kennedy in his presidential campaign speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968 clearly understood the life-impoverishing consequences of the religious-like veneration of economic growth as measured by Gross National Product saying that “it measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile.”

One of the failures of formal education is that it does not equip pupils to understand the full measure of ecological and economic interdependencies. Grasping this helps us decipher the messages we are assailed with through the multiple media outlets about the nature of the world and the values and intentions of the key characters in the drama such as politicians and financiers.

In other words, knowing about our interdependencies and interconnectedness helps us discern fact from fiction, understand complexities, appreciate nuance and context which enhance our ability to make decisions that serve our interests, our local community and people in faraway places.

A case that aptly illustrates this, and effects the amount of money in our pocket, is that one of Donald Trump’s main election campaign promises was that he was going to introduce tariffs, which he said on innumerable occasions is the most beautiful word in the English dictionary. According to the research the majority of those who voted for him did so in the belief that tariffs would mean lower prices in the shops. The opposite is the case.

Pivotal decisions made on the basis of misunderstanding and ignorance are common and can largely be avoided through awareness of our interdependencies and interconnections. Schools are well placed to inculcate in the younger generation the practice of searching these out and most adults can integrate the practice into their own life. This is a critical aspect of education and as Mary Colwell, naturalist and author, recently said, as quoted in the Guardian: “Education is the most important thing we can do for the planet at this moment.”

Eco-Awareness: We are nature and it is us

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The anguish and pain that humans and nonhumans are enduring because of climate breakdown, the loss of bio-diversity, the pollution of rives, lakes and sea along with other human created harms could at root be attributed to believing that humans exist outside the orbit of what is conventionally thought of as the natural world.

This belief, which is an illusion as it is simply not true, can in part be attributed to religious doctrines which hold that of all the billions of species that have ever existed and might exist in the future, humankind is the only one that has a destiny outside of nature. This belief holds within it the idea that the Earth, with its neural-like connected life forms, is on a moral par with the merchandise we habitually discard.

The designation of the Earth as a thing rather than a being and the hubris of thinking that our species is exceptional, has in no small way led us at to treat the Earth as we see fit. We behave like the overseers of a factory deciding what resources to utilize and when. That these resources before they were extracted from their home place might have had qualities, relationships and self-interest does not concern us.

This misconception of our place in the natural order explains our individual and collective response to the collapse of the natural world. The response of governments and corporations to the ecological breakdowns is to employ what are thought to be technological remedies such as the replacement of petrol and diesel vehicles with electric ones, replacing the generation of electricity with solar, wind and nuclear and the use of so-called artificial intelligence to improve efficiencies.

The wellspring of these proffered solutions to our self-made ecological catastrophe is not to conserve what is left of the living Earth and enable the millions living in dire poverty to live better lives but to enable consumerism and the exploitative enterprises and structures it supports to continue unabated. Kate Crawford points this out in her very readable book Altas of Al (2021).

What is not open to discussion by those whose hands are on the steer of the global economy is the option of making a swift but orderly transition to a way of life that is not based on treating our biosphere as a thing and sustaining an economic political system that has been designed to enable the transnational corporations and finance companies to make extraordinarily large amounts of money. An alternative that is within our cultural frame of reference is communitarianism.

The nub of what communitarianism is can be found in the ancient texts. In the New Testament for instance, Acts 4. 32-36, reads: “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. … There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as had need.”

This practice of caring for each other is a lived experience in every Irish townland as witnessed in the aftermath of Storm Éowyn when neighbour helped neighbour to clear local roads of fallen trees, provided flasks of hot water to those who had no electricity and called on the vulnerable. The mobilisation of community resources to address needs was an integral part of rural life in Ireland until recent years. I recall in the mid-1990’s seeing farmers in County Fermanagh help each other bring in the harvest. This practice involved families working together officially began on Lughnasa, 1 August, and ended on Gleaning Sunday or Domhnach Deascan, the 15 August.

Implicit in the willingness to help each other is the predilection to see ourselves in the other, which is empathy. In this epoch of willfully destroying the Earth’s life support systems there is a need not only to help and cooperate but to see ourselves in nonhuman life-forms. We need to treat the biosphere, which means the waterways, flora, fauna, fungi and air in our neighbourhood, the places we walk through and where children play, as we want to be treated ourselves. In other words, we need to apply the Golden Rule of ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ to all life forms. That our society’s default mode is to behave otherwise does not nullify the ethical validity and survival value of the golden rule.

As the practice of working together as a community has a long pedigree so is the idea that Homo Sapiens are an integral part of nature. The evidence for the latter is recorded in Irish name places many of which refer to natural features and myths that suggest a reverence for the land. To give an example, one translation to English of the Irish name for the 33-mile long Sillees River, which originates in Lough Achork and flows through south-west Fermanagh,  is ‘Stream of the Fairies’. In times gone by the idea of fairies articulated the view of nonhuman nature as a sentient being which although at times difficult to understand deserved to be treated with respect.

The idea of ecosystems, geological features and nonhuman life-forms having the status of persons is not only a part of Irish mythology but one increasingly embraced by governments. An example is in late January the New Zealand government conferred legal personhood on Taranaki Maunga, a prominent mountain, granting it all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. In 2017 India granted the river Ganga and its largest tributary the Yamura the status of a person. Can we expect the Northern Ireland Assembly and the government in Dublin to grant personhood to rivers, hills, woods and even whole bioregions sometime in the near future?

We don’t need to wait for our institutions to become more enlightened in order to treat nonhuman nature with respect which I am sure our descendants will be glad we did.

Eco-Awareness: Trumpism and the burning of Los Angeles

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The burning of Los Angeles this January has more than any other extreme weather event impressed upon many people across our island that climate breakdown is a serious threat to their everyday life. These weather events include the floods that engulfed Valencia in Spain in 2024 killing 216 people, the drought in faraway Amazon which has devastated the biodiversity of the region and caused hardship to millions of people and the powerful typhoons which wreaked havoc in many regions of the world.

It is too early to know the extent to which Storm Éowyn, which left 250,000 premises in Northern Ireland and 725,00 in the Republic of Ireland without electricity can be attributed to global warming. However, as all things are connected it is likely that climatologists will attribute some of its ferocity to human behaviour.

The reason for the Los Angeles fires’ seismic impact on people’s sense of impunity is the percolation of the thought through layers of emotional resistance that if the homes, schools, health centres, places of worship and leisure facilities of the richest people in the world, living in the richest country in the world, can be erased as if hit by a nuclear bomb then a catastrophic weather event can happen to any community including one’s own.

Another reason the burning of Los Angeles awakened many to the seriousness of climate breakdown is the mythological status of the city. Los Angeles is not only the sprawling home of 4 million people but the affluent neighbourhoods embody the attributes of one of the United States’ most persuasive moral narratives, the American dream. The term, coined in 1931 by James Adam in his book The Epic of America, refers to a composite of affluence, wellbeing, technological convenience, personal fulfilment and community cohesion contained within a setting of designed elegance brought about through individual initiative and hard work.

In the popular imagination the rich neighbourhoods that turned to ash is where the immortals lived and to see flames consume their wealth reminded us of our earthiness, that we are mortal. This is a positive thing, most especially if the realization widens our circumference of compassion and makes us steadfast in our effort to create a local economy and international economic order based on the fact that we are an integral part of nature.

The costs to nonhuman life caused by the Los Angles fires can only be estimated but we know that 27 people were killed, 100,000 people had to be evacuated, 14,000 structures were destroyed, more than 16,000 hectares burnt and the estimated financial cost is $275 billion. To put these figurers in a local context the number of people evacuated is the size of the population of Limerick or three times the combined population of Enniskillen and Omagh and its cost exceeds the annual block grant Stormont receives from Westminster by a multiple of 20.

While the fires raged data from the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the average global temperature for 2024 was more than 1.5 C above the pre-industrial baseline breaching the target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. New Scientist, 18 January 2025, reports that many experts in the field think that keeping the average global temperature below the 1.5 C target is unachievable in spite of the increasing use of solar and wind energy.

There is little doubt that the temperature of the planet will continue to rise if President Trump is able to implement the environmental policies outlined in his inauguration speech which includes ending the Green New Deal, exporting “American energy all over the world” and building “automobiles in America … at a rate that nobody could have dreamt possible just a few years ago.”

In the manner President Trump was able to persuade constituencies he had gravely offended to vote for him he could persuade a significant number of governments and business leaders worldwide to fall in line with his war against the biosphere in the hope of reaping short-term financial gains.

A psychological strategy Trump used was to persuade people to align their sense of identity with regressive nationalistic myths. Thus, if a person is repeatedly told that they can play a part in making their country great they may deduce that they can become great, as in significant, through supporting Trump.

In the international political arena Trump is using coercive control in the form of threats to get governments to align their stance on issues with his.

Another factor that comes into play in the mechanics of denial and self-delusion is that of simultaneously knowing and not knowing the unmentionable. Fintan O’Toole explores this in relation to the Catholic Church and the Irish State’s joint oppression of women and children from the formation of the Irish State up until the passage of enlightened legislation in the 1970s.

In his book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2021) He writes:

Ours was a society that had developed a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time.

Referring to a priest he says:

He knew that awareness is not acceptance, that seeing is not believing, that the obvious can remain obscure. (p.168)

Wilful blindness in the face of the obvious is not unique to Ireland but common across the globe as demonstrated by our anaemic response to the warming of the planet, our relentless extinction of nonhuman life, and the cruelty of factory farming in which animals, such as poultry, are denied the exercise of their natural inclinations and killed without every seeing the light of day.

The Labour government in the UK exemplifies this wilful blindness. Whilst they lament climate breakdown and the extinction of species they pursue the very policies that cause both. Like the priest referred to by O’Toole they act on the presumption that seeing is not believing.

The best way to detect the flaws in competing narratives and meet the ecological challenges of our time is to exercise our critical faculties and consider the legacy we ought to leave future generations whilst preparing for all manner of extreme weather events.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Trump and not joining the dots

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The economic power and cultural influence of the United States gives it global reach which means that the outcome of the country’s presidential elections affect people across the world including everyone on this small island. While the polls suggested there would be a close outcome in this year’s election the scale of Donald Trump’s win astounded many. He secured more votes than his contender Kamala Harris in almost every demographic and received a sizeable number of votes in constituencies he offended. One such was the Puerto Rican community whose country a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square rally described as a “floating island of garbage”.

What accounts for Trump’s clear win? The polls indicate that the majority of people who voted for him did so because they thought that the economy was not serving them well in terms of the price of groceries and other day-to-day items. The intriguing thing is why did his supporters not realize that to put up tariffs on imported goods, as Trump has pledged he will, can only but lead to a steep rise in the cost of living. (*1)

Why did so many people from Central and South America vote for Trump when he was adamant that he was going to summarily deport undocumented immigrants who he said are not people but “animals” who were “poisoning the blood” of the country. (*2) Most of the undocumented he was referring to come from south of the US border which means that people originating from there will be continually asked by government officials and law enforcement officers to verify their status. This can only mean a life of anxiety and harassment and grief when family and friends are deported.

Voters troubled about the cost of living should not only have been concerned about Trump’s pledge to raise tariffs but his intention to deport undocumented immigrants as it is these people, thought to number between 11 and 20 million, who make up more than half the workforce in agriculture and food processing. (*3) Their removal will lead to deprivations and higher prices.

In other words, whatever the demographic, including millionaires, to vote for Trump was to vote against one’s interests which is a form of self-harm. This is counter to one of the cardinal views held about humans since the Age of the Enlightenment and is central to the capitalist construct which is that we are primarily creatures of self-interest. The reason why the wealthy won’t, in the long term, benefit from the triumph of Trumpism is because they, like every living entity on the planet, are dependent on the climatic conditions we have enjoyed since the end of the last ice age.

A reliable indicator of what Donald Trump’s second presidential term will be like can be gauged from his first term when he annulled over 100 rules and regulations that had been enacted to protect the country’s web of ecosystems from coast to coast, desert to forest. The rules and regulations included ones governing clear air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals all critical to the health and wellbeing not only of people in the United States but the entire planet as global warming emissions affect us all. A special report by the New York School of Law, March 2019, found that annulling these rules and regulations caused thousands of premature deaths in the United States and a significant increase in chronic illnesses, the majority occurring among those on low incomes.

Akin to the double-think of the ruling elite in George Orwell’s novel 1984 this roll back of rules designed to protect nonhuman life, the integrity of ecosystems and the health of the nation was carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The evidence suggests that during his second presidential term Trump will wage war against nonhuman nature with a vengeance as the person he has nominated as Administrator of the EPA is former New York Republican congressman Lee Zeldin. It is expected that top of Zeldin’s to do list will be to rescind the EPA’s most effective measures to reduce global warming emissions from vehicle exhaust pipes, power stations, oil and gas wells. Further, he will likely make many of the agency’s scientific advisors and researchers redundant.

As to be expected other Trump nominations share his worldview. Notable among these is Chris Wright who has been nominated as Energy Secretary. Wright is a fossil fuel executive who is an evangelist for the oil and gas industry and a vocal critic of efforts to reduce global warming emissions.

Given that Trump regards the United States as an extension of himself and made it clear that he would align the country with his imperialist paradigm if elected why did he receive the broad mandate he did? The answer, to quote William Shakespeare in his play Julius Caesar, is that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves ..”

Simply put Trump is not the problem as his second term as president is the will of the electorate. The fault, as in many countries including this archipelago, is that those who voted for him passively ingested what they were told by someone who presented themselves as their Saviour who could create Heaven on Earth, or in secular terms, Make America Great Again. As Trump told his audience and the world in his victory speech:

“Many people have told me that God saved my life for a reason. The reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.” (*4)

Leaving aside the question of when the United States could be said to have been great the fact that neither the electorate or media questioned the meaning of the term underscores the body politics’ unwillingness or inability to analyse competing paradigms. A plausible reason is that many peoples’ beliefs are enmeshed in their sense of identity and intuitively know that if the former is undermined or invalidated so is the latter. I suspect that for many of Trump’s fervent supporters invalidation would result in them feeling existentially lost and/or socially ostracised and that their dread of both is on a par with their dread of their or a loved one’s death. Sadly, this means that for this cohort of supporters arguments about the folly of voting for Trump are likely to result in reinforcing their support for him in an attempt to prevent themselves being lost in an existential wilderness.

This defensive if not passive disposition likely originates in educational, media and ecclesiastic cultures that discourage people from critically examining ideas, scrutinising orthodoxy and questioning taboos. Clearly those who voted for Trump never joined the dots and were not cognisant that we live in an interconnected, interdependent, consequential world in which it is healthy and astute to continually review one’s ideas towards the end of being a thoughtful neighbour and a good ancestor.

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References:

(*1) Trumponomics tees off, The Economist, 16th-22nd November 2024

(*2) Maggie Astor, New York Times, 17 March 2024.

(*3) Trumponomics tees off, The Economist, 16th-22nd November 2024.

(*4) Harvest Prude, Donald Trump Takes the White House Again, Christianity Today, 6 November 2024.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Not acting on what we know

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

One of the strands of modernity, perhaps its backbone, is the belief that we are rational beings. We tell ourselves that our decisions, especially critically important ones, are based on careful consideration of all the available information, a balancing of the pros and cons, align with our values and will help us achieve our goals. This thesis, like the fallacy of common sense, is based on the idea that we act on the basis of self-interest. A flaw in this idea is that many of us often don’t know what is in our self-interest and on many of the occasions that we can with confidence say that we know we don’t follow through.

A wisdom we can draw from this is that knowing on its own won’t save us from our follies both as individuals and a species. It is important to apply this when thinking about how we can best reconfigure our relationship with nonhuman nature.

What is clear from the evidence is that how we live today, and have being living since the advent of the industrial revolution, is not ecologically sustainable nor does it serve the interests of the majority of human beings and other sentient creatures including future generations.

The facts speak for themselves as made available through a number of peer reviewed studies published this October. One of these, the 2024 State of the Climate Report, published in Bio Science, informs us that out of 35 vital ecological signs that were assessed in 2023, 25 were the worst ever recorded. These include greenhouse gas emissions, the increasing size of the human population, which is growing by two million every ten days, the increase in the number of cattle and sheep, which are growing by 1.7 million every ten days, the rate at which glaciers are melting and the rate of deforestation.

The State of Global Water Resources, by the World Meteorological Office, informs us that in 2023 rivers across the globe dried up at the highest rate in three decades and that more than 50% of river catchment areas were in deficit.

A report with equally worrying findings is that by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London which found that wildlife populations worldwide have decreased by 73% in 50 years. Locally, the Northern Ireland Office for the Protection of the Environment found in its October 2024 report that the province has lost 50% of its biodiversity since 1970.

Sit for a moment and imagine how impoverishing and debilitating this loss of wildlife is.

If the trend continues in fifty years’ time we will have turned the world into a mosaic of dead zones where the only nonhuman life will be straight lines of monocultural crops regularly fed and protected by a range of toxic chemicals, which we in turn will ingest. With regard to oceans and lakes scientists tell us that they will contain more plastic than fish. This is but a segment of the nightmare world each one of is playing a part in creating

The report on water tells us that this autumn 3.6 billion people have inadequate access to water for at least one month a year. What we might ask will the number be when major rivers which are used for transport, irrigation, fishing, manufacturing, domestic consumption as well as generating electricity dry up? This has already begun to occur through a change in rainfall patterns brought about by global warming, mass deforestation, and the disappearance of the glaciers that feed the rivers that billions of people depend upon.

If in 2024 high-income countries think that unregulated immigration is a problem then how will they view today’s situation in a few decades time when billions of people find that were they live is fast becoming uninhabitable?

Summarizing the dire state the planet Professor William Ripple at Oregon State University and a co-author of the Climate Report said that:

“A large portion of the very fabric of life on our planet is imperiled. We are already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardizes the life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen.”

The all-important question is why when we know the dire state the Earth is in and how to rectify this don’t we act on what we know? By way of comparison if we discover we have a serious illness we do all we can to get better even undergo unpleasant procedures such as chemotherapy in the case of cancer. Why don’t we behave likewise in regard to our critically ill biosphere when the consequences of ignoring the issues will likely be the painful end of human civilization?

A plausible reason is the narrative many have internalised about our species’ place in the world which is that we exist outside the laws that pertain in the rest of the biosphere and that our lives and fate are separate from it. The belief means, bar a few exceptions, that we don’t apply the moral codes that regulate how we treat each other to nonhuman nature. A poignant example is the horrendous suffering endured by the billions of animals reared in what, if humans were kept in similar conditions, would be called concentration camps.

Not regarding nonhuman nature as a moral agent has become so embedded in the modern psyche by organised religion among other agencies and in spite of secularisation is held to be as incontestable as the force of gravity. The idea that we exist outside of nonhuman nature is encapsulated in texts which billions believe is the literal word of God. One such, which is attributed to Jesus, is: “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36). Believing in this credo, which engenders indifference to the wellbeing of the Earth, not only helps account for our destruction of it but for warfare and might be the determining and final thought of the person, if it ever happens, who presses the nuclear button.

Eco-Awareness: Valuing our waterways

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

When I was a boy of about five or six I would sometimes tilt my head back and open my mouth to catch the rain believing that it was as drinkable as the water that came out of the kitchen tap. This I later learnt was not true as the rain contained contaminates from factories, vehicle exhaust pipes and home fires.

All of these, and a host of other contaminates, have to be removed from the water piped into our homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, offices and factories. This means that although water is free at the point of use, collecting, storing, processing, transporting and then cleaning the water after use costs a great deal of money.

Given that clean water is vital to life and to the smooth functioning of society one might think that we place an exceedingly high value on it but we don’t.

If we did then the waterways on this island, which are oblivious to political borders, would be in excellent health from which hill walkers could draw water to make a hot brew and swimmers stretch their limbs. This, as scientific reports and personal experience tell us, is not the case. Everyone who pays attention to the local and national media would know that not only are the bodies of fresh water across these islands a danger to human and other life but the lack of water infrastructure prevents the building of new homes and other amenities.

The Fermanagh based Impartial Reporter highlighted this in a recent special report on the pollution of Lough Erne and the negative social and economic consequences. Lough Neagh suffers from similar but much worse pollution. In regards to Lough Neagh members of the public in mid-Ulster informed the BBC’s The Nolan Show, 13 September, that the water coming out of their taps tasted so foul they could not drink it. NI Water assured the public that it was safe to drink.

Fergal Sharkey, a clean water activist and one-time lead singer of the Northern Ireland punk-rock group the Undertones, is quoted in The Belfast Telegraph as saying of the N.I. Water Authority that: “It does not need plans. It does not need strategies. It simply needs the current law enforced.” This deduction means that the responsibility for the deplorable condition of water in Northern Ireland, and other jurisdictions, lies with the government minister in charge. In Northern Ireland this is Andrew Muir. As the pollution of Northern Ireland’s waterways is a result of neglect over a long number of years previous ministers in charge of water are also responsible for its deplorable state.

Why do ministers, and bodies with statutory responsibility for our water, turn a blind eye to the scientific evidence and the experiences of those who have suffered illness or loss of income because of the pollution? I would venture that the reason is that they see their job as primarily to facilitate profit making regardless of the cost to ecosystems and human health. This is the case not only on our island but in countries around the world whose bodies of water are also polluted,

This was vividly illustrated by the N.I. Executive’s 2013 Going for Growth strategy which prioritised the expansion and profit-making of the agri-food industry at the expense of the protection of waterways, biodiversity and human health. Evidence that supports this contention is that slurry, which is a mixture of livestock manure and water, and is spread on grassland, is mentioned only once in the 85-page Going for Growth document.

Slurry, which is heavy in nitrogen and phosphorus and is likely to contain the residue of antibiotics, finds its way into our streams, rivers and lake, and is a major contributor, along with untreated sewage, to the growth of blue-green algae which afflicts Lough Erne and Lough Neagh as well as other bodies of water. In 2023 blue-green algae found its way by means of the River Bann onto the north coast. This year it was confirmed in Portrush harbour.

The Going for Growth strategy is a classic example of compartmentalised thinking and reflects the prevailing view, which is contrary to the evidence, that our species exists a part from nonhuman nature, or what is often called the natural world. This sense of disconnection is in large part the result of us living in an increasingly complex technological world.

In regards to our acquisition of water we in high-income countries pull a cord, push a button, turn a tap or push down on a handle without having a clue about where the water comes from, where it goes, its real financial cost or its ecological value. This is the case in regards to almost everything we consume underscoring the case that most of us, including those with doctorates or are highly skilled in a particular field, live in a knowledge vacuum.

The sphere of our ignorance about the things that underpin our way of life is cosmic. It is a vast black hole of not knowing about the materials that common appliances such as smart phones, laptops, motor vehicles, medications and foot ware are made of. Most of us don’t know where the raw materials were mined, processed and manufactured into finished products. We know nothing about the nature of the working conditions and wages paid to all the people along this chain including the inventors, financiers, advertisers, accountants, lawyers, the people who place shop orders, track their delivery across multiple countries and process the relevant forms.

In regards to our polluted waterways we have the expectation of having drinkable water at the turn of a tap no matter what building we are in, the time of day and regardless of whether there is a prolonged drought or a deep flood. We want water whatever the circumstance, or restriction on the quantity, without being prepared, in the broadest sense, to pay for its actual cost which is a disposition predicated on us not appreciating its real value.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Anti-Immigrant violence and our destruction of the biosphere

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If you think the recent anti-immigrant violence across these islands and the declining health of the biosphere have nothing in common you would be wrong. They are both underpinned by dysfunctional ideas that have become as familiar as the wallpaper in our living room that we have ceased to notice them. That is until a calamity occurs such as the August riots, the blue-green algae on Lough Erne and Lough Neagh as well as last year’s climate-related flooding of Downpatrick and Newry. When such disturbing and preventable events occur we are initially taken by surprise and then realise that metaphorically we had fallen asleep at the wheel and were not paying attention to the social and environmental signals.

The anti-immigrant violence appears to have arisen out of mis- and disinformation spread by individuals with ill-intent and taken to be true by people who feel that it confirms their biases and who are disposed to express their affronted feelings through violence. The narrative they appear to have ingested is that they, the economically disadvantaged, are being further economically discriminated against in favour of recent arrivals who are identifiable by their skin colour, religion, name, accent or form of dress.

In regard to the declining health of the biosphere mis- and disinformation is propagated by the fossil fuel industries, transnational corporations and public influencers about the reasons for this as well as proffering insubstantial solutions. The cause is overwhelmingly attributed to individual choices rather that corporate strategies, and the solutions offered are mostly cosmetic, calibrated to resonate with the basic human bias against change, most especially our reluctance to undertake the life-style changes needed in order to avoid the expiration of civilisation along with many other species.

Another commonality between the anti-immigrant violence and our abuse of the Earth is a sense of disconnection and consequent lack of empathy. Judging from the dehumanising language used it seems the anti-immigrant violence is based on the view that the new arrivals are a category of human fundamentally different from them. This is not only categorically incorrect but wilful self-deception, which supported by incorrect information about the allocation of public resources, underpinned by simmering resentments, provided the basis for people, mostly males, to vent their aggression on those they labelled as different / alien / foreign.

As with the failure of some to connect and feel empathy for the new arrivals much of society is bereft of the ability to feel connected with the biosphere and feel compassion for the sorry plight of many of its persecuted species who, like us, have needs and interests. Feeling connected with the natural world is not a matter of taste but an imperative for without its diversity and renewing abilities we will cease to exist.

The case that our collective sense of disconnection from the natural world reduces our chances of survival in the both the immediate and long term is verified by the annual premature death of millions through living lives of extreme hardship due to loss of land, livelihood and home brought about by extreme weather conditions arising from our warming of the planet. A study published in the August edition of Nature Medicine illustrates this, calculating that 47,690 people in Europe died prematurely in 2023 due to hot weather, while the World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030, 250,000 people worldwide will die due to climate breakdown.

The inhospitable living conditions caused by climate breakdown are further exasperated by air pollution, the decrease in supplies of fresh water, fertile soil and people having to work in health destroying environments for the equivalent of a few pounds a day.

Arresting those who intimidate immigrants and putting them on trial, as should happen, is dealing with the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem which in large part can be attributed to the widespread lack of critical thinking involving the ability to disassemble and test the information we are exposed to whatever its source. The practice includes fact checking, contextualising, identifying bias, analysing cognitive dissonance and platitudes and asking what information and discourse is not in the public domain that should be. Changing our minds is one of the positive outcomes of critical thinking and contrary to what many believe it does not suggest feebleness but rather the opposite.

Critical thinking should be regarded as essential to wellbeing and active citizenship as knowing the Green Cross Code and putting litter in the bin. It is imperative that it is an integral part of the school curriculum beginning in Primary One and continuing into third level education.

There should be no sacred cows, as unfortunately there are in schools as well as the print and broadcasting media. Making an exception for even one body of belief or cultural tradition gives licence to all who adhere to ascribed beliefs to plead exemption on any number of grounds. These can be economic efficiency as embodied in the orthodoxy that there is no alternative to economic growth. Or beliefs thought to be sacred as contained in the Bible, the Quran and the Vedas, or a cultural myth of which there are many.

As we live in an interdependent world the teaching of critical thinking should be universal based perhaps on a UNESCO charter – one that references a nonviolent approach to resolving conflict and the necessity of living in a way that allows our nonhuman neighbours to live according to their nature free from persecution.

The anti-immigrant violence and the degradation of our living planet can at root be attributed to our failure to recognize that every living thing is of ourselves and that we are all immersed in the organic and human instigated churnings of life.

We are passengers on the same ship and we have to hone our critical faculties in order to avoid becoming ensnared in a web of false assumptions and deliberate untruths that undermine our ability to live fulfilling lives in a way that does not prevent others, including future generations, from doing likewise.

Eco-Awareness: Fish don’t vote

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

In the UK general election, along with the other 92 general, presidential and mayoral elections that will be conducted worldwide this year, the call made by the competing parties and independent candidates is that to vote for them is to vote for change.

This is the mantra across the UK political spectrum inclusive of the SDLP and the UUP, the UK Labour Party and the Reform Party led by Nigel Farage. Even the Conservative Party that has been in power in Westminster for the last 14-years is trying to persuade the electorate that it is the party of change. Perhaps this is why the polls suggest that it will not form the next government as to claim that to vote for them on the basis of wanting change is to repudiate its time in office.

When one reviews the political policies of the candidates the outstanding thing about them is that tinkering rather than radical change is on the agenda. Bar a few exceptions this means that electioneering is smoke and mirrors which accounts for why many who see through the sham don’t vote.

What the UK political parties with a chance of forming the next government have in common is their religious-like faith that unfettered economic growth is the remedy to all of the country’s woes. It is hoped that the revenue raised will finance public services including the NHS, home care, education, nurseries, the police and judicial system, social housing and the armed forces whose appetite for money is insatiable.

The delusion of the political parties, and it might actually be deliberate deception, is that the irreconcilable can be reconciled. This is that economic growth has a miraculous ability to over-ride the physics of how nature works, which is akin to the magical thinking that often occurs in our dreams. As Marco Magrini in Geographical, May 2024, says: “The laws of chemistry and physics that govern our atmosphere are inescapable.”

The tragic thing is that presenting faith as fact to the public is to unteach what children throughout their 12-years or so of schooling are taught, which is that life on Earth, and probably the entire unquantifiable expanse of the cosmos, operates within the confines of measurable constraints.

Breaking these constraints means that ecological systems collapse with wide-ranging long-term negative consequences for the greater ecology including ourselves. We see this in stark terms with the pollution of Lough Neagh and Lough Erne as a result of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s ‘Going for Growth Action Plan’ launched at the 2013 Balmoral Show. The poisoning of our aquatic gems is also due to the failure of the N.I. Assembly to ensure that raw sewage does not enter our rivers and lakes which are our biome’s bloodstream.

As far as I am aware none of the N.I. election contenders, other than the Green Party and the Alliance Party, has mentioned restoring our intricate system of water ways to a state that allows the rich array of biodiversity they are capable of supporting to thrive. Doing so would mean eliminating the flow of nitrogen-based fertilizers and synthetic pesticides from agricultural land into our waterways which is something only a moderate number of farmers would vote for. Tackling water pollution would also mean raising money to pay for an effective water treatment and distribution system. As in Northern Ireland so on the whole island.

Further, little mention has been made by the N.I. candidates of the need to establish a fully independent and adequately funded environmental protection agency. That this is the case is not surprising given that “Fish Don’t Vote”. This is how Ian Knox in a recent cartoon in The Irish News succinctly explains why those contesting the election rarely, if ever, concern themselves with the harm we inflict upon the biome and by extension ourselves.

The naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham expressed the deep dismay of many voters at the lack of attention the main political parties and mainstream media are giving to the critical issue of how we conduct our relationship with nonhuman nature when he said.

I’m devastated by the lack of foresight, intelligence, commitment, understanding and determination to do anything about the single biggest issue in our species’ history. At a time when we need bold and brave leadership, we’re not seeing any sign from any of the manifestos that this might materialize.

In Northern Ireland elections are not about how we can transition to live a rewarding life in an ecologically sustainable way but about people reaffirming their sense of Irish or British identity. Thankfully this obsession has started to erode with the addition to the electoral register of people who did not grow up with a sense of either identity as well as the increasing number who were born here for whom national identity is not an issue.

Northern Ireland is not the only place where sense of national identity plays a major part in the political discourse. In the Republic we saw this in the local and EU elections and in the sometimes-violent street protests against the arrival of people seeking asylum. In Britain the Reform Party wants to immediately deport undocumented people seeking asylum. Fear of losing votes has pushed the Conservative Party to promise more restrictive but probably unenforceable measures to prevent asylum seekers staying in the UK.

Amidst the noise and heat of the debate about undocumented immigrants the reason why many seek a new home on these islands is because of the severe weather events across the globe caused by the very thing the large political parties are obsessed about, namely continual economic growth. The obsession is in denial of the equation that 1 + 1 = 2, which is to say, there can be no economy without ecology.

Even if infinite economic growth were possible in a finite world there is no reason to think that this would mean economic wellbeing for all. The evidence for this is in plain sight in the form of widespread poverty, the high level of mental ill-health, sense of alienation and purposelessness that is prevalent in the most economically prosperous countries.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: We are the words we use

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

When I was growing up in Belfast I was oblivious of the ideological and ethical meanings imbedded in the words people used. Rather, what my mind alighted on were accents. When I worked in community education I became so attuned to accents I could tell what part of the city the person I was listening to likely grew up in. Although this was interesting to know, a person’s accent did not tell me anything about their values, worldview or emotional disposition. Words, I came to appreciate, are more important than accents as they reveal a person’s unconscious biases, fears, aspirations, moral code and political ideology.

While I am still interested in accents and what they tell about a person’s background I am by far more interested in the words people use, especially when talking about public affairs. The following selection of phrases used to describe the ecological consequences of our behaviour are, as part of the dominant lexicon, fairly good indicators of what the likely outcome of our unfolding story on Earth will be.

A term used by a wide range of people to describe our warming planet and the accompanying consequences is ‘climate emergency’. The word emergency is commonly used to describe a serious situation that is temporary in nature. For instance, in the aftermath of a serious motor vehicle collision the emergency services are called who will respond with speed and use their skills and specialist equipment to mitigate the harm to all involved. There is no sense of permanency associated with the emergency. Likewise, with the word crisis. A crisis interrupts normalcy and all relevant resources are deployed to deal with it until such times as stability is achieved and a potential catastrophe averted.

To describe the warming of the planet and the consequent extreme weather events which uproot hundreds of millions of people on an annual basis. causing the premature death of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, a temporary situation, as implied by the use of the word emergency, is not only inaccurate but harmful. It is harmful because believing that the rapidly warming planet is a temporary phenomenon does not incentivise us to structure the economy in a way that does least harm to it and its inhabitants.

The words emergency and crisis downplay the serious and in many cases irreversible consequences of global warming. Fiona O’Connor of the UK Met Office tells us that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere means that the planet will continue to warm for another hundred thousand years. This is approximately twenty times the amount of time that has passed since the advent of civilization, which is when our ancestors began to live in a network of urban settlements and developed economic and social hierarchies. Within this time scale the warming of the planet is not temporary but forever.

Other misleading terms which go unexamined are ‘normal society’ and ‘common-sense’. Unlike weights and measurements as determined and overseen by the International Committee for Weights and Measures set up in France in May 1875 there is no authority that specifies what constitutes a normal society and defines what is common-sense.

Yet people in Northern Ireland are commonly heard to say that they want to live in a normal society. I am inclined to think that what they consider a normal society is a Disneyworld / advertisement version of society in which racial discrimination, the unfair treatment of women, economic injustice, widespread poverty, under-funded public services and wanton ecological destruction are rarely depicted. Through repetition, and lack of critical critique, the public mind comes to consider the construct as a depiction of normal society.

When the term ’common-sense’ is used the question to ask is whose common-sense?

When Donald Trump was president of the United States he, his advisors, financiers and supporters, thought that it was common-sense to nullify over 100 pieces of legislation governing air and water quality, wildlife and toxic chemicals which resulted in endangering the life of the entire population. In the Trumpian paradigm the common-sense role of government is to enable the wealthy and the corporations to make and retain as much money as possible without regard to nonhuman nature, economic equality and people’s health.

Being a good ancestor, as in taking care of our biosphere and cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations, is not common-sense for those who think that we are not charged with the welfare of future generations.

The term common-sense is held by its users to mean that which coheres with their preferences and view of the world as if these were supported by empirical evidence. As the term can mean almost anything it is a nonsense term. It is also a derogatory one as it implies that those who do not share your view of the world are not sensible and might in fact be deranged.

Deranged is tagged with another nonsense term that is widely used to demonise and undermine those who are fundamentally opposed to one’s worldview, this is ‘radical ideology’. The implication is that those thought to subscribe to a radical ideology should be on the police watchlist. Radical of course means to get to the root of something. Thus, scholars and investigators of all kinds are radical and whether people are aware of it or not they have an ideology. If, for instance, you think there should be no potholes then this view is part of your ideology and if you want to get to the root cause of why there are potholes then you are radical in this regard.

What we can take from this brief survey is that words and phrases can be used to enlighten, liberate, comfort or confuse, coerce, denigrate and shame. As participants of the ultimate democracy, which is the use of language, we should be mindful of the embedded meaning in the words we and others use. Such mindfulness is critical to nurturing good personal relationships and creating a better society.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The parable of the Good Samaritan

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

Most readers are probably familiar with the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. In the parable a man asks Jesus “Who is my neighbour?” Jesus by way of illustration tells the story of a man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho who is set upon by robbers who leave him by the roadside cut, bloodied and half dead. Two people who see him, one of whom is a priest, pass him by without stopping. A Samaritan who was passing tends to the injured man, transports him on his animal to an inn and pays for his keep until he is restored to health.

At this time most Jews hated Samaritans so the last person Jesus’s audience would have thought would help the injured man, who was a Jew, was a Samaritan. The point that Jesus made was that everyone is our neighbour even those we might think of as the other and are hostile to the community one identifies with.

The concept of the Good Samaritan has a cosmic dimension. As the Good Samaritan helped heal a stranger, who is dubbed by Jesus as a neighbour, we should be a good Samaritan to the Earth inclusive of its bodies of water, the soil in fields and gardens, habitat and all forms of life bar the viruses, bacteria and parasites that are known to harm us.

One of the traits of the Good Samaritan is that he was selfless, he acted out of compassion without any thought of personal gain. This is what we need to keep in mind when corporations and financial institutions announce that they are committed to reducing their level of global warming emissions and be carbon neutral by 2050. Are corporations Good Samaritans, working selflessly to restore the ailing Earth to good health, or are they interested in financial gain?

The evidence in the financial sections of the press and audio media suggest that the mission of large corporations to become ‘green’ is based not on a love of the natural world but on a desire to make money. Governments are duplicitous in that they vocalise what they think the electorate want to hear, which is that they are taking action to reduce the emission of global warming gasses and the loss of biodiversity whilst whole-heartily supporting the extraction of the very fuels whose use increases global warming and the loss of biodiversity..

The conundrum that society finds itself in is that obtaining and processing the enormous amount of minerals necessary to produce, distribute and store renewable energy will make much of the Earth uninhabitable as well as cause great harm to the Indigenous communities in which large quantities of these minerals are located.

Institutions that advocate renewable energy without at the same time working to change some of the fundamentals of how we live such as our high level of consumption of meat and dairy, reliance on private rather than public transport, fast fashion in clothes and many other things besides, are doing what a U.S. Major told the journalist Peter Arnette after the 1968 Battle of Ben Tre, Vietnam, that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

In other words, the approach the powerful institutions take, who incidentally construct the parameters in which we make our personal commercial choices, is so counter to serving the common good that it might be considered insane in the sense of destroying something in the belief that in doing so it will be saved. Unlike the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral after in went up in flames in April 2019 some eco-systems once destroyed cannot be restored and species driven to extinction are gone forever.

What is rarely mentioned by the organisations who blow the trumpet for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels is the enormous amount of minerals that go into their manufacture and the infrastructure that sustain them. Once mined, at the cost of immense ecological devastation, and in many cases the abuse of human rights as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the minerals have to be refined, which involves the use of large quantities of toxic chemicals, eye-watering amounts of water and fossil fuel generated energy.

The report Minerals for Climate Action, 2019, by the World Bank Group, informs us that the zero emissions economy, if realised, will increase electricity demand from 28,000 Twh in 2022 to over 100,000 Twh by 2050. A Twh is a unit of energy representing one trillion-watt hours. This means that an estimated 3 billion tons of minerals will be needed up until 2050 which is more than has been extracted from the Earth in the entire span of human existence.

A zero-emissions economy that leaves the structures that underpin gross economic inequality in place, an agricultural system that is responsible for one-third of global warming emissions, and leaving indulgent consumerism unaltered, will not, as a Good Samaritan would want, restore the Earth to good health. This in spite of the case that a global economy based on renewable energy would, once established, emit less global warming gases than one based on fossil fuels.

A question we should ask is would we want to live in a world with even scarcer flora, fauna, fungi and bodies of fresh water than presently exist? Aside from the joy and wonder they provide, a severely contracted biodiversity could lead to the collapse of the global ecosystem resulting in our extinction.

What might bring about the outcome a Good Samaritan would want for the injured Earth and its suffering people is a new, or perhaps rediscovered, mega-narrative in which the right to a life of well-being includes all beings, not simply human beings. This is in contrast to the story we tell ourselves about our place in the world which in general is that the Earth is a warehouse full of insentient resources which we are entitled to consume without regard for the needs of subsequent generations and the welfare and survival of our nonhuman neighbours.

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