Tag Archives: Eco-Awareness

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The recent wildfires

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by Larry Speight –

March and early April were the driest and warmest on this island in 60 years. This means that if you are under sixty they were the driest and warmest spring months you will have experienced during your entire life. Many people appreciated having sunny June weather in early April, taking the opportunity to spend more time outdoors than they usually do and if this involved physical activities such as gardening, walking, running or cycling this would likely have improved their physical health and emotional wellbeing.

The warm weather also benefited a whole range of life forms with a host of insects on the wing and in the undergrowth providing nourishment for bats and birds including the cuckoos who travelled all the way from the Democratic Republic of Congo to County Fermanagh and other parts of Ireland to feast on them. While we and our nonhuman neighbours took advantage of the summer-like weather in life affirming ways a few but significant number of people set fire to delicate, bio-rich, CO2 absorbing peatlands and gorse covered hillsides.

The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service reported that over this dry sunny period they attended 300 wildfires most of which they thought were set deliberately. Some of the most destructive were in the Mourne Mountains in County Down including one on Slieve Binnian and another near Hilltown. In the latter 100 firefighters fought to extinguish the fire over a period of two days. People in Newcastle complained that they were suffering from smoke inhalation.

In County Fermanagh there were wildfires in Belleek, Brookebrough, Cuilcagh and Lisnaskea. During the same period there were a large number of wildfires in the Republic of Ireland one of which was in Nephin National Park in County Mayo which turned a bio-rich habitat into a dead zone and destroyed a specially designed boardwalk eliminating peoples’ access to the peatland park.

Many people were upset and bereaved on learning about these catastrophes while at the same time baffled as to why people would deliberately destroy ecosystems which are not only home to multiple forms of life but provide humans with a life enriching amenity including services such as absorbing climate altering CO2 emissions, purifying water and providing a haven for pollinators.

Although the destruction seems to defy comprehension it was not as many have said mindless. The perpetrators have minds which means they have reason, impulse and motive. The wildfires were imagined, planned, rationalised and then acted upon. In the absence of an in-depth study of the mindset of these destroyers of nature, human health and material resources we can only hypothesise, drawing on what we know about human behaviour.

A viable hypothesis is that the arsonists feel that they lack agency in the overall schema of their lives and setting fire to a defenceless community of lifeforms, with a minimum chance of apprehension, is a potent way of demonstrating to themselves that they can make their mark on the world. The sense of being able to act beyond the sphere of their personal concerns might well be sharpened by the association of fear with fire. Causing fear is likely to have heightening their sense of power.

Although destroying habitat and disrupting lives simply because one can is monstrous the desire to feel that one has agency and is significant is part of what it means to be human. In the case of the arsonists the tragedy is that their existential drive for a sense of significance is void of empathy for the wildlife they intentionally destroyed and the people whose lives were endangered including the dedicated, highly trained and courageous fire fighters and the people in agencies who provided support.

The arsonists are a tiny fraction of the number of people here and across the globe who have a distinct lack of empathy for life-forms and people who they perceive as categorically different from them.

In terms of the latter there has been no groundswell of demand from across the human community, and in particular from governments, for an immediate halt to the genocide of the people in Gaza. The UN’s Human Rights Office puts the figure of women and children killed in Gaza by Israel with the active support of the United States at 70% of the total. The war waged by Israel involves the systemic destruction of all civic infrastructure including, hospitals, sewage treatment plants, water provision, electricity, homes, roads and the deprivation of food, fuel, medicines, sanitation products and the means by which people can earn a livelihood.

A case that vividly illustrates the extent of our alienation from nonhuman nature, our lack of empathy for the nonhuman lives we destroy, is that of Brazil building an eight-mile long (13km), four-lane highway through pristine rainforest ahead of the COP30 climate change summit it is hosting in Belem this November. The road, and the inevitable negative consequences it will spawn, will destroy a Garden of Eden treasure trove of biodiversity and disrupt the lives of the Indigenous people.

This act of vandalism leaves one wondering about the mental game-play involved in wilfully destroying what one claims to love. The seemingly unfathomable equation is resolved by the realisation that we, humanity, does not love nonhuman nature at all. Like the genocide in Palestine and Sudan the measure of universal empathy does not suffice to prevent our destruction of that which we perceive as categorically different from us but is in fact that which we are.

The tragedy of the arsonists who this spring turned large areas of this island’s precious biodiversity into a blackened wasteland, the living soils and imbedded seeds washed away by the rain, is their lack of empathy. Sadly, we can expect further hostility directed at our natural heritage during the long sunny spells forecast this summer.

That we are what we call ourselves, which is the wise ape, Homo Sapiens, is to be questioned given that other species have thrived for millions of years while we, a relatively evolved species, are on the verge of extinguishing ourselves.

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 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: 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: The myth that all will be well in the end

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

There is a part of the human psyche that wants to dwell forever in childhood, a place of happy endings, comforted by the thought that as the Big Bad Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood met a sorry end we can expect our own tribulations to end well. When we had fearful and worrying moments as children we would, if we had attentive parents or carers, be comforted by their explanation that our anxiety had magnified our worries and all would be well.

The message that all will be well is one we have ingested all our lives. This is the primary message of most religions, which is that if we adhere to a particular set of beliefs and code of living the prospect of spending eternity suffering in Hell won’t materialize. That all will be well in the end is the bread-and-butter message of political parties of all hues. If you vote for us, they tell the electorate, your aspirations to live a better life in a better society will be met. They assure us that unlike the other political parties they have the magic formula to put everything right.

The transnational corporations also appeal to our Peter Pan yearning to live in a fantasy land of perpetual play where the vile pirates, the threats to our wellbeing, are always defeated. At this point in history when our frivolousness, ignorance and hubris have brought the Earth’s life support systems to the point of collapse the infantile part of ourselves is more than willing to accept the message of the corporations that we will hasten the transition to the paradise of a green economy through buying their supposed energy saving, carbon neutral, ecologically sustainable, ethically produced products.

In appealing to our primeval desire to be comforted, protected, and our wish for all our trials to have a happy outcome, society’s pivotal institutions ask one simple thing of us, which is to place our faith in them. That so many people do in no small measure accounts for wars that cause unimaginable suffering and trauma, deaths by the tens of thousands and in some cases millions, as has happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as the destruction of the natural and human constructed world.

Our blind faith in the pivotal institutions helps account for climate breakdown which in 2022 is thought to have caused the premature death of 60,000 people in Europe alone and led to the rise of heat-related deaths in the United States by 95% in the years 2010 to 2022. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands die and millions are displaced by climate breakdown every year.

Blind faith in our institutions allows for gross economic inequalities, which among other indignities means that billions live out their lives trapped in extreme poverty. UN-Habitat inform us that in 2020, 1.1 billion people lived in slums, a figure that is expected to rise to 2 billion by 2030. Rural areas also suffer from poverty, which the UN says is 17.2% higher than in urban areas. As we in Ireland know poverty in the high-income countries is unacceptably high.

As a society we need to awaken from our induced infantilism in regard to societal problems and no longer passively accept the mantra of our pivotal institutions that all will be well if we have sufficient faith, vote for them and buy their products. Highlighting the pitfalls of not questioning those in authority Frank Herbert, author of the bestselling 1965 novel Dune, said in an interview with Mother Earth News in 1981 that he thought President John F. Kennedy was among the most dangerous leaders his country ever had. This is not because he thought Kennedy was malevolent but because people didn’t question him.

It is ironic that in spite of the emphasis society places on each new generation receiving a good education, and the widespread understanding that education is a life-long process, we don’t sufficiently question the soundness of the dominant political – economic paradigm or the lived theology of our religious institutions.

In regards to the former, while the major political parties are emphatic in saying that they want fundamental change, each, without apparently being aware of their cognitive dissonance, advocate they very thing that is the cause of the rapid degradation of the biosphere and so much human suffering. This is continual economic growth. Consuming more means more mining, poisoning of rivers, lakes and sea, an increase in the loss of biodiversity, air and noise pollution, traffic congestion, more Indigenous communities expelled from their ancestral lands, and rising temperatures. As Joyetta Gupta writes in Scientific America, March 2024, “There are limits to our natural resources. At some point they run out, or we ruin them.”

Many religious people, perhaps the majority, accept without question the idea that the primary purpose in life is to ensure that they and their loved ones go to Heaven rather than Hell. The belief that of all the species that have existed in the 3.7 billion years of life on Earth, Homo sapiens is the only one that is immortal is the ultimate in exceptionalism and gives license for humans to treat nonhuman beings as objects. Within the framework of religious belief it is reasonable to think that God did not create multiple forms of life for humans to mistreat – as in factory farming, destroy – through agricultural run-off, and exterminate.

The idea that all will be made well by technological innovation in the form of electric vehicles, solar, wind and nuclear-generated energy, is one of the most dangerous myths of our time as it is so readily accepted by the Peter Pan part of our psychology. This is our inclination to believe in implausible things such as that we can reduce our negative impact on the biosphere without changing our life-style, that there are no moral constraints on how we treat nonhuman nature and regardless of our eco-callousness all will be well in the end.

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Eco-Awareness: Locked-in poverty syndrome

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

I normally write my column in the cool wet climate of County Fermanagh assured that at this time of the year the day time temperature won’t rise about 8 or 9 Celsius. On this occasion I write from Juba in South Sudan where I can be assured that it won’t rain and the day time temperature won’t fall below 38 Celsius.

Living here one cannot avoid noticing the negative impact that the economic imperative to survive, underpinned by cultural practices, has resulted in the near complete negative transformation of a biome.

Outside the sprawl of Juba, the country’s capital with a population of 460,000, are the lands of the Bari Tribe. Over the last few decades, the land has morphed from being a verdant rainforest into a bio-impoverished expanse of savannah. This has been due to the felling of the forest to make charcoal for use in the villages, in Juba and for export to Saudi Arabia. The cultural practice of regularly setting fire to the grass and small bushes prevents the forest regenerating.

The transformation of rainforest to dry savannah is a classic case of what happens when a society lives beyond its eco-regenerative capacities through opting for short-term financial gain at the expense of persistent if not permanent economic hardship.

The loss of the rainforest has led to the loss of the produce and services it provided the Bari people and neighbouring tribes. These include a cooler climate, shade from the sun, a reliable supply of fresh water, medicines, fiber, food, wood, as well as materials for a range of useful implements and decorative accessories. It also meant the loss of agroforestry, which is the practice of growing crops and keeping a small number of economically useful animals among the trees. In addition, the loss of the forest has meant the loss of an important sequester of carbon and has had an impact on the local weather system. When the rainy season arrives, it will inevitably lead to severe flooding as it has done in the past.

There is nothing to replace these losses as given the lack of paved roads, electricity, piped water and the ever-present threat of tribal animosities resulting in widespread violence, economic development, whether indigenous or from an international company, would be difficult or unlikely. Thus, we have a locked-in syndrome of poverty.”

The removal of the threat of widespread violence could see a major company wanting to buy or rent Bari land and use it to produce plantation crops for both domestic consumption and export. Plantations, however, do not aid biodiversity, rely on expensive imported hazardous chemicals, employ relatively few people who are usually underpaid with the economic profits going abroad rather than circulating in the local economy.

This tragic scenario of ecological degradation leading to the locked-in syndrome of poverty is not particular to this part of South Sudan. It is the case in many parts of the world including Ireland as illustrated by the ecological degradation of Lough Neagh, other bodies of water, and the steep loss of biodiversity due to the Forestry Department’s over-reliance on coniferous trees and the farming community’s over-reliance on diary, beef and poultry. Northern Ireland in fact ranks 12th in the world for biodiversity loss.

Many of the businesses that relied on Lough Neagh are in decline as a result of the blue-green algae that has blighted the lough in recent years. Among them are eel fishing and leisure boating. Other bodies of water that were once replete with fish no longer provide suitable habitat for them due to agricultural run-off and the disposal of untreated sewage.

This takes us to the nub of the issue, which is how do we meet our needs, essential and relative, whilst not at the same time undermining and eventually eradicating the bounty of the Earth without which our needs cannot be met.? Is it wise, and do we think it is ethical, to meet the needs of the present at the expense of experiencing chronic need in a few years or decades time? Do we take our ecological legacy into account in the decisions we make?

As a society it seems we have opted, perhaps contrary to our avowed moral code, to live by the credo “I’m all right Jack”.

As a result of the imperative to meet pressing needs, as well as prepare for a rainy day, we by default largely rely on patterns of thought, dispositions and beliefs that are not fit for purpose. We behave in a way that a family business would not which is to use up all of our capitol in the form of the intact ecosystems left to us by passed generations.

Although it is said that we learn from our mistakes we often don’t. In regard to the harms we cause to nonhuman nature, which includes the over-heating of the planet and loss of biodiversity, we have not acted with the urgency, imagination and doggedness necessary to address them.

Like the Bari Tribe, who were unable to modify their long-established land-management practices in regards to felling trees for charcoal, communities the world over are finding that as a result of being unable to live within the regenerative capacities of their ecosystem that they are marooned in a locked-in poverty syndrome. Ecological destruction increases poverty which exasperates ecological destruction which in turn deepens the level of poverty.

It does not have to be this way. The move in the Republic of Ireland to recognize the rights of nonhuman nature in their constitution offers some hope. Many countries already recognize that nonhuman nature has rights comparable to those of people. Imagine the positive transformative impact across society if the rights of nonhuman nature were respected.

Like human rights in many a political jurisdiction, enshrining the rights of nonhuman nature in a country’s constitution does not mean they will be protected but it sets an important moral standard and wrongdoers can be held to account.

Eco-Awareness: The Paradox

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The Paradox

If any of us went to see our doctor for a health check and the results revealed that all was not well we would immediately address the problem which might include eating less processed food, committing to a regime of daily exercise, getting sufficient sleep and if we drink alcohol reducing the amount we consume. For, unless we are in a state of despondency, we want to be as healthy as we can for as long as we can. Not only because we want to live an enjoyable life and there are things we want to accomplish but also because we don’t want to leave our loved ones bereft through our premature death. Yet, when it comes to the ill-health of our extended selves, the biosphere, without which we would not exist, we respond to the evidence of its critical condition with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders.

There are studies galore that describe the poor health of the planet. A recent report published by the non-profit organization Climate Central, based in Princeton, New Jersey, found that the past 12 months were the hottest since records began with one quarter of humanity experiencing dangerous levels of extreme temperature. In September, Science Advances, informed us that 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries have been breached. These boundaries they say “are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of the Earth’s system as a whole.” Studies published in advance of COP28 show that rather than reducing our consumption of fossil fuels, as we should be doing, consumption is rising in spite of the investment in renewable forms of energy.

Scientific research tells us that we are living in a new human created geophysical epoch called the Anthropocene which is significantly less benign than the Holocene epoch of the past 11,700 years. It was the Holocene period that provided the conditions that allowed civilizations to flourish. Life in the Anthropocene epoch will be exceedingly difficult for human and nonhuman beings alike rendering the Enlightenment idea of progress redundant and much of our sophisticated technology unusable.

A paradox of this tableau is that while we our concerned with our own wellbeing and that of family, friends and acquaintances we are not concerned enough about our extended selves to do something meaningful about it. I am inclined to think that Hannah Arendt, author of the best-selling book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’ (1963), shines light on this paradox.

Arendt is of the view that horrendous deeds, such as the industrial-scale mass murder of Jews and other peoples by the Nazis during the Second World War can, aside from hate and furry, stem from automated instruction-obeying behaviour rooted in a lack of critical thinking. In other words, people will do terrible things because they are told to by someone in authority or because they regard what they are doing as normative and therefore don’t think about its meaning and consequences.

This lack of critical reflection, or one might say complacency, can largely be attributed to the strong desire humans have to belong to a group, a tribe and in recent centuries a nation. The wish to adhere to prevailing norms is a part of our social-navigation software with our antenna alerting us to align with the prevailing views and behaviour of the group / tribe we feel we belong to or risk being scorned as deviant or out-of-touch. The commercial world is well aware of this and uses the persuasive power of advertising to reinforce or change what is considered normative and desirable. This November and December £9.5 billion will be spent in the UK doing precisely this.

The answer to the riddle of why we don’t extend our strong desire to care about our personal wellbeing to the biosphere is because our society does not value it. The biosphere is perceived as external to us rather than part of us. It is the ‘other’.

Viewing living entities as ‘other’ enables both ecocide and genocide.

The Hutu militias who massacred an estimated 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 called the Tutsi “inyenzi” – cockroach, and “inzoka” – snake. In Hitler’s Germany, Jews were called “Untermensch”, subhuman. Many Turkish people referred to Armenians as “dangerous microbes”. When Europeans colonised the Americas, Australia and other parts of the world they called the Indigenous people brutes and savages on the basis that they were thought not to have a soul as they supposed themselves to have.

Committing ecocide without the enormity of what we are doing dawning on us is what makes it banal. We have wiped whole habitats from the face of the earth along with thousands of species. We are in fact living through the sixth mass extinction and are on course to extinguish a million species in the next few decades.

The worldwide annual consumption of 8,127,632,113 chickens and 3,331,950,000 cattle together with a plethora of other farm raised animals can justifiably be called ecocide especially when the horrendous ecological consequences of rearing and transporting the animals to the point of sale is taken into account. The banality of the infliction of so much suffering is underscored by the fact that it draws so little comment.

Is ecocide a sin?

Do religious people hold that poisoning soils and rivers, felling primary forest, polluting the atmosphere with emissions, noise and light amount to turning one’s back on God? Is striving for infinite economic growth, with the annihilation of life this causes, to disown God? Further, is the method of keeping billions of sentient, intelligent, imaginative, problem-solving, familial-bonding creatures in sensually deprived conditions an affront to God? These are pertinent questions as religious beliefs are an integral part of the dominant paradigm which, if we wish to be considered good ancestors, we should examine with the thoroughness of a forensic scientist.

Whatever the outcome of COP28, and other ongoing negotiations to regulate our relationship with the biosphere, we are unlikely to follow through on any positive agreements without embracing the idea that our extended self, the biosphere, has moral value and an intrinsic right to exist. As the Brazilian Indigenous academic and activist Ailton Krenak says in his book ‘Life is not Useful’ (2020): “Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on Earth.” Waging war against life on Earth is what we are doing and unless we cease our defeat is assured as is the elimination of most life-forms we share with this small spherical rock.

Eco-Awareness: Maltreatment of our loughs is emblematic of how we treat the biosphere

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News, , , , , ,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

It is a rare occasion that a Northern Ireland non-party political issue is aired on RTÉ 1’s evening news and even rarer on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One as well as their early morning programme Farming Today.

This happened recently and readers won’t be surprised to learn that the item brought to the attention of listeners and viewers is the deplorable biological state of Lough Neagh. As has been well documented it is polluted with blue-green algae as are Lough Ross in County Armagh and parts of Lough Erne.

The algae is a bacteria called cyanobacteria, is the result of human behaviour which includes the rise of the water temperature due to global warming, the dumping of sewage into the loughs, leaking septic tanks, the run-off of nitrogen and phosphorus from fields in the form of slurry and fertilizer and the presence of invasive zebra mussels which filter the water enabling sunlight to reach into their depths hastening the growth of the algae.

Unfortunately, it is not a case of problem understood, problem solved as is often the case with a mechanical breakdown; once a malfunction is understood it can be put right by a skilled technician.

One reason for the absence of effective eco-management of Lough Neagh is that it lies within the jurisdiction of five local councils, is overseen by five government departments and is managed by the Lough Neagh Partnership. It receives its funding from the five local councils. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs is conflicted: it is simultaneously responsible for promoting the interests of a sector of the economy that helped cause the problem i.e., intensive agriculture, while at the same time it is responsible for tackling the problem by virtue of its environmental mandate.

Another complication is the legacy of colonialism. The bed, the eels and banks of the lough are not owned by the people of Northern Ireland but by the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury who inherited this ecosystem of approximately 153 sq miles at the age of 26. His family came into possession of it in 1857 when the 8th Earl married into the Chichester family who inherited it from Sir Arthur Chichester who was gifted it by King James1st in the mid-1660s.

On the basis of the precept that possession is not the same as justified ownership the question some will ask is what right did King James 1st have to dispose of the lough, a collective asset availed of by families bordering it for untold millennia and a moral entity in its own right? The question is relevant to restoring the health of Lough Neagh as Nichols Ashley-Cooper, the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, could return his inheritance to the people of Northern Ireland placing it in the trust of a single authority.

In doing this the Earl would be following a precedent set by museums who recognize that they have a moral obligation to return to Indigenous communities artefacts stolen from their ancestors. The Horniman Museum in London did this in November 2022 when it returned to Nigeria 72 bronze artefacts looted by British soldiers in 1897 from Benin City, now southwest Nigeria.

More recently Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled in favour of returning 9,300 sq miles of land to the Xokleng people who were evicted from it in the late 19th and early 20th century by colonialists who hailed mainly from Germany. In the view of the court the passage of time did not erase the rights of the Xokleng people to their ancestral lands. This is something the Earl of Shaftesbury should ponder in regard to his presumed entitlement to the bed, eels and banks of Lough Neagh.

Aside from the administrative complexities, the algae problem that afflicts the three loughs is emblematic of how we treat the entire biosphere. We act as if we are sitting at a table laden with food and water for innumerable shifts of people. Instead of leaving nourishment for these diners we gobble everything up leaving the table empty and in a disgusting mess.

I hypothesis that the reason why we behave like this is because we are shackled by the straps of our enculturation. A cardinal edict of this is that we are only responsible for ourselves and family, and to a lesser extent our neighbours and community, and that the people beyond the circumference of our vision in place and time, and the nonhuman beings and natural systems that sustain us are simply of no account.

We think of the natural world beyond our skin as things rather than living entities many of whom are thinking, feeling beings with preferences and foresight and part of a complex network of relationships. The Abrahamic religions have played no small part in people viewing nonhuman life in this way, after all, they are not held to be immortal like us and have no special status in the eyes of God.

Thus, while our moral code tells us that it is wrong to willfully harm someone in close proximity to us, we think that poisoning our ecosystem by pouring sewage into rivers and loughs, unnecessarily emitting global warming gases and buying merchandise composed of materials that have been mined by indentured labour as morally neutral. The ecological catastrophe taking place in our loughs, and the elimination of much of the biodiversity of our island, are a direct consequence of how we see our place in the living world and our sense of entitlement in regard to others including future generations.

Fortunately, we can extricate ourselves from our enculturation. One way is through what is called transformational learning as conceptualized by Jack Mezirow in the late 1970s. This involves critically reflecting on our received wisdoms, cultural imperatives, worldviews and assumptions; testing them to see if they accord with scientific evidence. It involves comparing, contrasting and exploring alternatives. It is a collaborative on-going process which takes place in a trusting, noncoercive setting. This can happen over a cup of tea, a pint, during a meal, a long walk or in a classroom.

An outcome of transformational learning that is focused on living in an ecologically sustainable way is recognizing that we live in an interconnected, interdependent, multi-generational, multi-species, sentient world. Our place within this cosmology is to do what we can, with justice issues in mind, to restore the bio-world to health. This life-long work is done for the sake of nonhuman nature and ourselves including those who will sit at the table after we are gone.

In summary, we need to change the prevailing view of our place in nonhuman nature if we are to find a sustainable resolution to our ecological problems including restoring our loughs and rivers to good health.

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Photos by Larry Speight of the wake for Lough Neagh held on its shores on 17/9/23 can be found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/53218375754/in/dateposted/ and accompanying pictures.

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.