Tag Archives: Ecology

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.”

Editorials: Antisectarianism, Tiocfaidh ar lá

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Antisectarianism

Antisectarianism in the Northern Ireland context is positive action to overcome sectarianism and sectarian divisions. Nonsectarianism is not ignoring sectarian divisions but deliberately treating everyone the same and avoiding, as far as possible, thinking in sectarian terms. Of course in the North awareness of ‘who is what’, what foot people kick with, is difficult to avoid and most people will have grown up with that awareness imbibed with their mother’s milk – this is almost literally true as surveys have shown even young children may be aware of the otherness of people across the main divide.

Antisectarianism and even nonsectarianism were often brave choices during the Troubles (and before) when expectations could be to stick to and support only your own perceived side or tribe. There are those who suffered physically or through ostracism because they were seen to be friendly to the other side. Although it is different, there was also bravery in the face of violence or the threat of violence, a prominent example is 15 year old Stephen Parker who sacrificed his life in 1972 trying to warn people about the bomb which killed him. Less bravery is required today in most circles in Northern Ireland, not all, but it still requires determination, and the blurring of some old divides does not mean they have disappeared. Other examples include those who painted out sectarian graffiti or who tried to assist at risk neighbours who were of the opposing ‘community’.

There are all sorts of assumptions made about ‘the other’ still, and the corollary is that all sorts of assumptions are made about ‘our kind’, and breaking out of that straitjacket can be a difficult task. Difficulties in deciding what is ‘sectarian’ come mainly from the overlap between religious-community (‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’) identity and cultural and political identity. In terms of voting strengths this is usually thought of these days as 40:40:20, i.e. 40% each identifying as Catholic/Nationalist/Republican or Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist, and 20% as ‘other’. Nationalism and unionism are legitimate political identities and it is unfair that anyone should be castigated for simply supporting either. But scratch at any of the three categories mentioned and you will find considerable diversity, and many of the 20% ‘others’ may still carry not just some beliefs from their background but some prejudices as well.

Norn Iron is certainly a long way from being there. Even people who think of themselves as nonsectarian may be far from that because they have never seriously examined their assumptions and carry prejudices with them.

One of the tasks which INNATE has sought to champion (largely unsuccessfully we might add) is telling the story of those people in civic society who did work for peace and nonsectarianism during the Troubles. A few of those stories have been told including some aspects of work by the churches and something like the, very significant, input of the Women’s Coalition to the Good Friday Agreement. The story of the Peace People is ‘known’, often with mistaken assumptions of one kind or another, but the story of other peace and reconciliation groups is not known. INNATE’s contribution in this area consists of some chronicling on our photo and documentation site https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland and a listing of peace groups https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Irish-peace-groups-listing-2024.08.pdf – though this latter includes groups all over Ireland and ones focused on peace internationally as well, over a longer time frame.

This work is not just for the purpose of giving credit where credit is due but also to show that there were people trying to provide alternatives and that republican, loyalist and state narratives that they had ‘no choice’ to the actions they took are simply untrue. It may be true that they did not see a choice, it may also be true that some did not look too hard. But the fact is there were alternatives which they did not, perhaps even could not, explore because of their belief systems and conviction in the power of violence. Of course those violent responses took Northern Ireland deeper into the mire and engendered violent responses from the other sides (of the three broad entities mentioned above – republicanism, loyalism and state). However INNATE’s stand has been it is pointless to be condemning violence in any situation without showing the possibilities of nonviolent alternatives; the old Troubles slogan coming from some conservatives to ‘root out the men of violence’ was counter-productive.

However occasionally we can stumble across amazing stories which we are unaware about in antisectarian action. The Books “Q&A” with children’s writer Martin Waddell in The Irish Times of 23rd November 2024 had one such story. Well into the interview, the interviewer, Martin Doyle said “The Troubles had a big impact on you” and Martin Waddell replied: “I had been keeping my eye on the small Catholic church in Donaghadee as there had been attempts to burn it. I saw some youths running out and laughing, and I went to check. I saw a thing like a wasp’s nest and that’s the last thing I remember.”

He continued “I was told that if I’d been six inches forward or six inches back, there wouldn’t have been a body. Apparently some sort of vacuum forms when there’s an explosion. The bomb went up and the church came down on top of me. Luckily somebody had seen me go in, otherwise I’d have just been buried. I had a big slice across my neck, but nothing vital, and was sliced across the right arm, my eardrums were burst, but I was more or less wrecked. Remember, I’d made the breakthrough, I’m now a professional writer but when I got blown up, I was no longer fit to do that. I lost several years.”

Obviously Martin Waddell did not know he was risking his life when he went to check on a church from across the main divide from him in the North. But he did. And the above was his matter of fact account of it with an extremely close shave with death and major personal repercussions. But it was a significant antisectarian action which deserves to be remembered.

There are many, many more stories of people’s bravery in standing up for antisectarianism and peace. But it needs work to uncover them before those involved die. And that work is needed to show that there were people who stood up for peace and antisectarianism throughout the Troubles, often in very difficult circumstances.

Tiocfaidh ar lá

Usually translated as ‘Our day will come’, this Irish Troubles era republican slogan could be adapted for peace purposes. While there are debates as to its linguistic appropriateness in Irish, the meaning is clear; our aims will be achieved. So long as it is removed from its previous context, and not understood in a triumphalist way, there is nothing wrong with it as a slogan. It is difficult to be optimistic in relation to peace in the world today when wars are seen as a method of resolving policy and when demagogic and xenophobic nationalism are so rampant.

We may plough on regardless, trying to build a better, more peaceful and just world when things are going to hell in a handcart, not least on global heating (where the ‘hell in a handcart’ metaphor is indeed appropriate). But how can we sustain activism when all around seems to be going in the Wrong Direction?

There are a number of answers to this and they exist on both micro and macro levels. It may be somewhat simplistic to list them in such a short form here, but needs must.

The first point, at a personal level, is to draw on our philosophical and/or religious beliefs and roots, and our reading of the past and history – which moves us quickly from the micro to the macro. We know from experience that, collectively, ‘peace through military strength’ is a recipe for disaster. Some people might well say, “Military strength was needed to defeat Hitler” but where did Adolf Hitler come from, what was the scenario from which he emerged? The answer, in longer term analysis, is surely from the mayhem caused by clashing imperialisms and war. Nationalism, antisemitism, and xenophobia were undoubtedly factors in Hitler’s immediate path to power but without that background of war, victory and defeat, his emergence would have been unlikely or impossible.

The ‘lifestyle’ precepts of both humanism and virtually all religions are in tune with ‘the Golden Rule’ – treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. People often play lip service to a humanistic or religious belief but avoid the very real implications. Killing people or treating them unjustly is not treating others as you would like to be treated.

There is of course always a danger in feeling we are right and everyone else is wrong; we may well have the right analysis of a situation but if we enter a tunnel of self-reinforcement, e.g. rejection coming to indicate we are on the right track, then there is a danger of self delusion. We always need to be analysing the appropriateness of our own analysis and actions. However it is also quite possible that we are part of a small band who have a clear and correct analysis of a situation; that after all, is how change can happen – a small bunch of people, perhaps seen as fanatics or dissidents start a ball rolling which gathers momentum. The kind of understanding shown in the Bill Moyer ‘Movement Action Plan’ outline of stages a successful social movement goes through is important in this context; the Peace People in Northern Ireland in 1976 is an exception to this rule in that it started large and then got smaller. See e.g. https://commonslibrary.org/resource-bill-moyers-movement-action-plan/

We personally also need to understand the power and possibilities of nonviolence. The ‘peaceful option’ is often quickly dismissed as impractical but there are many struggles, and the research by Sharp and by Chenoweth and Stephan (for example), which show it to be a strong and viable response to injustice and tyranny.

We should also not underestimate the power of individual, or small scale, witness. We have to be true to ourselves and our beliefs. However just as most businesses that are set up do not succeed, so most peace witness may not be particularly successful either, but if we not not try then we cannot be even moderately successful. If we sow seeds we may not be aware of where they grow or when they grow. We can stand up and not be counted. We can face clever and sustained opposition and the ignoring of our claims – the Irish establishment and media denial of changes to international neutrality is such an example where the response is always ‘things haven’t changed, nothing to see here’ when things are changing, slowly but surely, in a more negative and militarist direction.

But we can have small victories, and aiming for intermediate or even immediate goals which are very achievable, even if they are small, is important. In relation to Irish neutrality, the successful civil society challenge to the government’s “Consultative Forum on International Security Policy” and its legitimacy in 2023 was a small but significant spanner in the works for moving at that point to undo the Triple Lock on the deployment of Irish troops overseas. https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/albums/72177720309217408/ Celebrating our successes is something we may not be good at but needs done so that we, and others, can see that change is possible.

The world goes through phases of tension and détente, of conservatism and relative liberalism, and similar patterns can re-assert themselves in different eras, e.g. conflict between Russia and parts of western Europe. We are currently in a phase of tension and conflict with uncritical official responses to this. This will change and indeed has to change if humanity is to survive.

There can also be some success comes from unlikely or unintended sources. An example is the fact that Donald Trump, despite his threats over Panama, Greenland (and Canada!) and despite his MAGS ‘manifest destiny’ bluster may be less likely to engage in or support war than most other US presidents. Obviously with Trump nothing can be taken for granted so this is a possibility rather than a certainty and how the Russia-Ukraine war will proceed, or end, without US support for Ukraine remains to be seen. But despite early Ukrainian successes it should have been obvious to have had an early resolution – which was possible through negotiation in the early months of the war.

The coal Miners’ Strike in Britain in 1984-85 was a bitter industrial dispute where prime minister Margaret Thatcher was trying to break the trade unions, especially the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). She succeeded with lasting negative social and economic effects for those involved and their areas. The issue of carbon emissions was presumably not a concept to which Margaret Thatcher gave a moment’s thought but the closure of almost all coal mining in Britain led to a very considerable decrease in carbon emissions and thus a contribution to cutting global heating. ‘Events’ can have very divergent outcomes or repercussions, both negative and positive.

Pablo Neruda wrote about idealism and realism (in English translation) – “I love you, idealism and realism / like water and stone/ you are / parts of the world / light and root of the tree of life”. https://www.flickr.com/photos/innateireland/46318259912/in/album-72157609617432905 Without our idealism we are sunk; without our realism we are detached and living in fairy land. In grim times such as these we need to hold strong to our idealism and our ideals because we need to be the yeast that makes things rise to a better future, indeed a future at all. We wouldn’t advise you to go around shouting “Tiocfaidh ar lá” but our day will come in the sun – and with solar power.

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

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.