Tag Archives: Ecology

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: We are burning the world

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When earlier this year I was living in Juba, the capital city of South Sudan, I did not need to read any scientific reports to realise that we are burning the world.

Juba sits in a bowl of polluted air because of constant fires and might well provide a glimpse of what a future ecological catastrophe will look like as well as what can happen when there is not enough money in the local and central government coffers to provide basic public services.

While the footpath verges in towns across our domain are kept free of litter the roadside verges in Juba are covered with household rubbish which are regularly set alight. Further, every cooked meal eaten by every one of the estimated 480,000 population is done with the use of charcoal. Added to this mix is the dust raised by traffic travelling on unpaved roads by vehicles emitting streams of black smoke. The stifling heat compounds the health dangers and unpleasantness of what must be one of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.

The reader’s response on learning this might be that Juba is on a different continent, and although you sympathize with the people living there, their plight does not really concern us here in Ireland. A different continent and climate does not mean that given the same circumstances our plight would not be the same as that of Juba.

What for instance would you do if your Local Council no longer collected your household rubbish because the refuse staff were on a long-term strike? Would you in the course of time toss your rubbish onto the verge of the street and when the unsightliness and stench of it became too much set it alight? What would the outcome be if the MOT/NCT service ceased to function as it is designed to and there were too few police officers to prosecute drivers emitting over the limit amounts of exhaust fumes from their vehicles? And in time would our roads not crumble away because of the lack of funds to maintain them?

These things already happen to a certain extent. We know that the newly formed Northern Ireland Assembly has insufficient funds to meet all of its public obligations and that an unforeseen event, or series of them, could send the international economic order into a tailspin leaving national and local governments without the financial means to fulfill their basic responsibilities. The governments north and south of Ireland are already experiencing financial constrains as illustrated by their under-funding of care packages for the elderly.

The dysfunction of public services on our island and in affluent countries across the world on the scale of what it is in South Sudan might seem to be a never-never land we are unlikely to experience. Without doubt this is what the people thought in the extinct civilizations when they were at their apex. There is no evidence that the peoples of such highly sophisticated societies as the Ancient Egyptians, the Maya, Aztecs, and the people who built Newgrange some 5,200 years ago thought that their worlds would cease to exist. Likewise, with us today.

As we tend not to like change that might be disruptive we are prone to ignore the seismic shifts taking place in the background of our lives. This is most certainly the case in regards to the degradation of the biosphere.

The recent report in Nature that the Amazon rainforest, which has been climate resilient for an astonishing 65 million years, will become savannah by 2050 due to a combination of forest fires, deforestation and climate breakdown, highlights the case that we are blithely undermining the ability of the Earth to sustain life. The expected ecological change in the Amazon will have regional as well as global climatic and economic consequences.

If we view the world in a fragmentary rather an integrated way we might think that as the Amazon rainforest is on the other side of the world we have nothing to worry about. If so we would be mistaken. For although we live on a small island we are a part of the biome and effected by ecological changes of even a moderate magnitude. Further, we are, as every farmer knows, part of the international economic order.

To take one example, Up to 90 per cent of feed that is fed to our cattle, pigs and poultry is in the form of soyabeans and maize grown in Argentina, Brazil and the USA. A major degradation of the Amazon rainforest, as the paper in Nature predicts, will affect rainfall patterns across the Americas leading to a calamitous fall in the amount of crops farmers in Ireland and much of the world use to feed their animals.

Another, not widely recognized way we are turning the world into ash and smoke is through the emission of methane gas from landfill sites, most of the organic matter from which it arises was produced by burning fossil fuels. A 2018 report by the World Bank states that methane from landfill sites makes up 11% of global warming gasses, a figure that is expected to rise substantially by 2050 due to an increase in the human population and the subsequent rise in the amount of food waste.

Our dependency on fossil fuels means that we are doing nothing less than making the world uninhabitable. Because our economy is out of sync with the regenerating capacities of the biosphere and its long-established meteorological patterns we could, within the span of a generation, find ourselves at the stage of ecological and social meltdown that Juba and many other places find themselves in today.

We our long-passed wake-up time in regard to aligning how we live with what the biosphere can cope with. However, as with our personal health, it is never too late to make positive eco changes as well as ensure that our local and central governments spend our money wisely which means on public services that benefit us all.

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 fires in North America

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The Seventh Generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eco-Awareness: Holistic decision making

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

“Outside of the two World Wars it is difficult to think of a time when so many in this country have been facing such a direct threat to the way they live.”

– Presenter of World at One, BBC Radio 4, 25th August 2022

The presenter quoted above is referring to the steady rise in the rate of inflation in the UK and in particular the unprecedented rise in the price of oil, gas and food as a consequence of the war in Ukraine.

A rise in energy prices leads to a rise in the cost of goods and services across the economy and the scale of the present and predicted rises will make it next to impossible for millions of people to keep themselves warm this winter without forgoing meals and accumulating unmanageable debt. The public media has not failed to communicate the seriousness of the situation with the regular use of such words and terms as awful, catastrophic, devastating, exceptional, extremely serious, grave, terrible, misery, fearful, out of control, eye-watering prices and lives will be lost.

If these forecasts turn out to be true for people living in high-income countries what will the impact of the steep rise in the cost of energy and food be for the billions of people whose everyday experience has long been one one of toil, stress and fret in their effort to provide for themselves and their family?

The global community is not only experiencing hyper-inflation but an out-of-kilter climate which this year, as in previous ones, has caused devastating forest fires in Europe, the United States, Asia, Africa and South America as well as drought and floods across many parts of the world. Most recently floods in Pakistani left 60% of the country under water, affected 33 million people, made one million homeless and since June caused the death of over a 1,000 people. China is in the midst of a record-breaking drought which has caused some of its major rivers, including the Yangtze to dry up. In Europe the Loire, the Rhine and the Po dried up, which, as in China, affected farming, hydropower and shipping. The impact of the climate on these countries alone will add to the economic woes caused by President Putin’s war including an increase in the shortage of food leading in turn to a rise in its price.

The effects of climate breakdown and Putin’s war serve to remind us just how interconnected our world is. We are not, as the growing number of libertarians like to think, neutral agents with an almost absolute right to behave however we like. As with individuals, national sovereignty has its limits. Britain is an island nation but its regular outpouring of sewage into the seas around its coast concerns people in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland who fear the sewage will affect their fishing and coastlines.

Hyper-inflation, climate breakdown as well as the catastrophic loss of biodiversity can in large part be attributed to the ultra-nationalism of world leaders who fail to work from the premise that the world is ecologically and economically interconnected and ignore the counsel of Indigenous People not to borrow the future from our children.

More than the need for ecologically sustainable technologies, which are widely seen as a miracle cure to climate breakdown allowing us to continue to live our materially extravagant lifestyle, is the need for a collectivist’s mindset. In the same way as it is necessary for the various departments of a business to work towards a single goal, the success of the business, it is likewise necessary for world leaders to work in unison towards resolving our global ecological and economic problems.

Besides this we voters need to waken up and closely question candidates running for public office about the impact their policies will have on the biosphere, the poor in their own constituency as well as in the wider world. What will the legacy of their policies be for future generations?

Although the following suggestion might well come from Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) it is worth putting it forward. In the manner that new employees are given an induction by their employer into the culture, policies and practices of the body they are newly working for, as well as put on probation, it should by mandated that public officials and representatives of every rank should undertake likewise. In this case the body is the biosphere inclusive of humankind. The culture is comprised of a sense of compassion, connectedness and fairness and the policies and practices based on the Hippocratic oath of the medical profession which is “do no harm”.

A course for new public decision makers on the wisdom of basing decisions on a holistic, eco-centric, non-tribal and non-nationalist basis would not be suffice to ensure long-term compliance. The courses would need to be supported by regular forums, such as Citizen’s Assemblies, in which experts in the field and concerned members of the public, share their knowledge and experience in regard to the pros and cons of various options which are considered from the perspective of the local and the global, the short and the long term. During the assemblies, face to face interaction would take place between the parties most directly affected by decisions enabling humanism to dilute stone-faced tribal, class and national interests, and compassion for the welfare of nonhuman species to melt the idea of economic gain for the few.

Such an on-going educational program for our elected and appointed decision makers should result in a significant reduction in decisions made on the basis of Donald Trump’s sentiment “America First” or the pre-Brexit wish “to take back control”. In the long term there are no firsts in our interconnected world, and as the present cost of living crisis shows, when it comes to the price of fuel and food national sovereignty can do little to change things.