Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –
Our cultural heat dome
We are inclined through habit, conditioning and inertia to live in the pond circumstances have placed us in and are reluctant to change one iota of the negative aspects of how we live even when advised to by a concerned professional such as a medical doctor, counselor or psychiatrist. Many of us are so habituated to how we live and the prism through which we make sense of the world that we put up with the restrictions, burdens, boredom and for some the nagging sense of a life unfulfilled because change takes effort and involves social, financial and self-esteem risks.
Our inclination to live as we have always done is the real impediment to whole-heartily addressing the ecological catastrophes and social justice issues that exist locally and globally. Ecologically these include the degradation of the life support systems we depend upon namely water, air, and in the case of organisms, their extinction. The latter includes not only birds and mammals but pollinators and the multitude of micro life-forms of which healthy soil is composed.
The most serious and prolific of social justice issues are those that are out of sight. Among these are the millions of underpaid and poorly treated workers shackled by overseers to workstations in China and countries in S.E. Asia who produce much of what people in Ireland regard as indispensable not least of which are clothes and digital devices.
Almost completely absent from our mental audit of the world is the human suffering and destruction to eco-systems caused by mining the raw materials that are used in the manufacture of these consumables as well as the ecological costs involved in the transportation, packaging, storage and eventual disposal of them. Few will be aware, as the thinktank Circle Economy tell us, that a colossal 106 billion tonnes of materials are used by the global economy every year. Much of this, even the things that can be resold, repaired and recycled, end up in landfill sites, and as has been well documented, in the marine environment.
Our complacency is such that instead of taking action to stop the bleeding of our living Earth we advocate that government and corporations increase the level of bleeding, deceiving ourselves of the reality of what we are doing. The euphemism for the butchering of our biosphere and the suffering it causes, especially to indigenous societies, is ‘economic growth’.
The idea that continual economic growth is an all-round good thing is so embedded in our psyche that the news presenters and commentators on media outlets that proudly claim to be impartial frame economic growth in celebratory terms and lament indicators of ‘economic stagnation’. This fossilised thinking is prevalent across our cultural firmament.
An illustrative example are the spring and summer weather forecasts. When this spring’s temperatures across our island reached 22 and 23 Celsius on a daily basis the weather presenters used cheery words when announcing the prospect of further dry days some going as far as encouraging their audience to light barbecues.
No mention is made of the fact that without regular rainfall the rivers, lakes, reservoirs and aquifers become depleted with the result that society suffers. This includes industry, agriculture, hospitals, schools, day centers and homes. Prolonged spells of high temperature cannot only cause inconvenience but they affect mortality rates. A study published in Nature reports that between June and September 2023 an estimated 47,690 people across Europe died from heat-related causes.
Climatologists describe extended hot dry periods as heat domes in which a large area of high pressure in the atmosphere traps hot air preventing it from escaping. It could be said that the predominate ideas concerning economics and what it means to live a meaningful life are trapped in a cultural heat dome. The dome is forged by the formal education system, religion, government policy, advertising and social media to the end of sustaining consumerism whose reason d’etre is not wellbeing but capital accumulation.
The expected outcome of the ideas trapped in our cultural heat dome is contained in the global warming statistics which indicate that the warming of the planet is on an upward trajectory and expected to reach between 2.5 and 2.9 Celsius above the pre-industrial level by the end of the century. This breaches the 2015 Paris Agreement’s 1.5 Celsius global warming threshold above which the edifice of global civilisation could well collapse.
A life-support system that shows every sign of functioning below the capacity required to sustain civilization is the collection of life forms known as biodiversity. Given that 75 % of global food crops are dependent on pollinators including bees, butterflies, bats and birds the rapid decline of these combined with the decrease of soil fertility could see the demise of the intensive agricultural system that has developed since the end of the Second World War.
In regard to this the International Trade Association informs us that 80% of the food eaten across the whole of our island is imported. This includes animal feed, fruit, nuts, vegetables as well as a wide range of processed foods. Our vulnerability, not only as an island people but as a global community, is compounded by the digitalisation of almost every sphere of our lives as well as our dependency on the complex, highly sensitised supply networks.
It is sobering to think that civilisation is the proverbial camel waiting for that last straw to be placed upon our back.
We, however, don’t have to accept the self-harming ideas trapped in our cultural heat dome. These include that nonhuman nature has no moral standing and there are no alternatives to continual economic growth and our highly circumscribed political democracy. These are not laws of nature. They are cultural, time specific, and can be changed through education. A good start would be for schools to teach the new generations how to process their emotions, critique ideas, make and repair, grow and preserve food in an ecologically friendly way and apply empathy in the nonviolent resolution of conflict.
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