Tag Archives: Identity

Eco-Awareness: The conundrum of modernity

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

Although we live in an integrated world, as the disruption to the global oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz show, we don’t seem to realise that when we buy food, cosmetics, cleaning products and pet food that we are almost certainly contributing to the demise of the ecological sustainability of the biosphere. What this means is that we are in a direct, measurable and tangible way undermining our children’s and grandchildren’s future.

No doubt some readers will feel affronted by this deduction, thinking ‘I would do absolutely anything for my family and those I care about’. Would you, however, forego buying products with palm oil in them? If you want to be thought of as a good ancestor who lived in compliance with the regenerative capacities of nonhuman nature then your response would be affirmative.

What would not using products with palm oil entail? As 72% of the global food market relies on palm oil it would mean not eating most types of biscuit, cake, crisps, breakfast cereals, breads, spreads and ice cream. If you already abstain from eating these on taste or health grounds would you forego using most brands of tooth paste, soap, shampoo, facial cream, lipstick as well as many cleaning products? In the case of the latter 18% of cosmetics and cleaning products use palm oil. If you drive a petrol or diesel vehicle will you cease to drive it on learning that legislation requires that petrol and diesel is composed of 10% biofuels and that 10% to 15% of this comes from palm oil?

As our dependency on palm oil shows fossil fuels are not the only commodity that enmeshes us in the web of the global economy and thus widespread ecological destruction and structural injustices.

Palm oil originated in the rainforests of the Guinea coast in West Africa and has been used for millennium by local communities for cooking, healing and rituals. It was also traded as traces of it have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back 5,000 years. It was not, however, until the nineteenth century that European colonialists in Africa realised its versatile properties and transplanted it to Indonesia and Malaysia where it is widely grown today.

Although palm oil is beginning to make its ecologically disruptive presence felt in tropical Africa, central and south America, it is Indonesia and Malaysia account for the vast majority of the palm oil used around the world. Malaysia supplies 25% of the market while Indonesia 60%.

There is nothing ecologically wrong with palm oil per se. (Biologically it is not classified as a tree.) The problem is they are planted in vast regimented formations on land that has been cleared of bio-rich forests either by bulldozing them down or turning them into ash by setting them alight. The loss of these forests is immeasurable as it results in the extinction of flora including some not known to science but familiar to the Indigenous communities who use them in an ecologically sustainable way.

In Indonesia palm oil plantations have led to the catastrophic demise of the Sumatra tiger, forest elephant, forest rhino and the three species of orangutan. It has led to soil erosion and water contamination through the indiscriminate use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers. Indigenous people in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua have been particularly affected losing much of the forest that sustained them physically, psychologically and culturally.

Losing a culturally significant site is important as verified by the August 2017 and November 2024 protests in the Sandy Row area of Belfast over the dismantling of the Boyne Bridge as part of the construction of Grand Central Station. Between 2006 and 2008 there were sustained local and international protests against the building of the M3 motorway through the culturally important landscape in the vicinity of the Hill of Tara, County Meath.

To grasp the importance sites of cultural significance are to our sense of identity imagine how you would you feel if a company acquired an iconic site such as Devenish Island in County Fermanagh and without prior and informed consent levelled what is left of the monastic buildings and planted row upon row of gooseberry bushes. Likewise, how would you feel if a graveyard where your loved ones are buried was acquired by a company who bulldozed away the graves in order to use the land to grow a commercial crop.

This is what has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia since the nineteenth century and as Muhamad Isnur informs us in The Jakarta Post, 12 May 2026, it is happening on a large scale today in Papua, one of the 17,024 islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Here Indigenous communities are losing their land to corporations with the active support of the government and military.

Although Indonesia and Malaysia are a long way from Ireland if we use palm oil we are complicit in the suffering caused to the people and nonhuman life forms in both countries even if we are unaware of the devastation caused by the palm oil plantations. Like it or not we are entangled in the web of international commerce simply by spending money.

Is there a way out of the conundrum of enjoying the comforts, conveniences and opportunities offered by modernity which inescapably entails us violating our values and principles? This is something we all need to ask ourselves whilst examining plausible resolutions.

First though we need to see what is wrong with how we live as we won’t attempt to fix what we don’t know is broken. To do this we need to breach the membrane of our enculturalisation and have an idea of what we are looking for in the foliage of the taken for granted.

Education in the sense of training our minds to see the consequences of our behaviour on the disempowered as well as the capacity of nonhuman life forms to live according to their endowments is critical. As all things are connected when we harm others we harm ourselves.

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Duchas by Helen Henderson

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Duchas (Irish Gaelic) Duthchas (Scots Gaelic) : identity, being and belonging in nature or place. A sense of origin, relations, interconnectedness, heritage, tradition and identity.

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I am inviting you to come with me, on a Turas, a journey, from disconnection to connection, from exile to belonging, from extraction to restoration, from decolonising to re-indigenising,

We all come from somewhere, we all have ancestors, we all are sustained by the eco-systems that provide us with air, water, food and ground to stand on.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle on a large table, depicting a detailed picture made up of thousands of small pieces. It is as if this puzzle was thrown up in the air, falling, fragmented all over the floor, like a trauma memory. No sense of chronology or story. In many ways, trying to understand our history here on this island is like trying to put the pieces of this jigsaw back together to make sense of what happened to this place and people. Why do we not have the full story?

Is mise Helen agus is as Doire me. I was born and raised in Doire-Derry-the Oak Grove in what would be perceived as a Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist cultural background. Originally, I viewed history as the problem, the reason that we are still stuck, and I had no appreciation of how history is re-lived every day in the place that I come from. When I started working in youth and community work, we focused on promoting ‘good relations’ to foster trust between the two main communities in Northern Ireland. I had no knowledge of the colonial and imperial project that was Ireland for hundreds of years, and ultimately still is Ireland today. Good relations work was not interested in the root causes of the most recent conflict in the North and seemed to place all the blame for ‘our troubles’ on the working class communities that were most impacted by the violence.

I later moved into ‘Global Education’ where we educated teachers about the structural causes of poverty and inequality across the globe and the damage caused by our capitalist and extractive systems. Here, I learned more about colonisation across the world and the impact of that in ‘developing countries’ but the local conflict and context seemed to be invisible. This illuminated the fact that our capitalist system is built on an invisible foundation of racism, white supremacy and slavery and this is still very much the case today. Slavery has not gone away, it is just well hidden. Trade, Aid, Debt continue to be used to maintain a status quo and ultimately keep poor countries poor and condense the wealth within a few powerful hands and corporations. The issue of decolonisation was pursued in an academic, conceptual, ‘heady’ way but seemed to be hard to put into practice or a real life local context.

As I started digging, a book called ‘The Ghost Limb’ written by Claire Mitchell resonated with me, as she explained her feeling of being detached from her Irish identity as a Protestant from the North. She had a sense that key parts of her identity were severed, but still haunted her as a wound or a longing. She connects with the story of the United Irishmen and the Rebellion in 1798 as a pivotal moment in history where Protestants and Catholics united against the British Imperial Powers and suffered one of the most brutal crackdowns and slaughter. Without going into a full essay on Irish history, the learning for me was about one of the most effective tools of colonisation: Divide and Conquer. I could see the ‘Protestant-Catholic-Sectarian’ story in a systemic light and see that this was not purely a good relations issue between two groups of people who just couldn’t get along. I embarked on a personal reckoning about what this meant for me, my ancestry and my role going forward as an ‘alternative’ protestant.

I embarked on a Triscele place based mentoring programme developed by 3 sports practitioners that sent me on an ever deepening pattern of three spirals: 1. The sacred nature connection 2. Ancestry and power 3. The stories we create through culture. Over the next few years I had the privilege to meet folk from across the world including Maori, Native Hawaiian, Menominee, Lakota and Inupiat. These folk were encouraging and supportive and advised that we have a responsibility to find out more about our own Ancestors, restore our connection to Land and Nature, and to learn the language of the Land. The way back to healing, peace and well-being was through the process of re-indigenising ourselves to our place, traditions and eco-systems. We needed to do our own digging.

There are shared values across many of the Indigenous Nations including: Nature as teacher and expert, Nature connection as sacred, Welcoming and hosting, sharing and collective care, honouring the Ancestors, gratitude practice, reciprocity and the inherent appreciation for the interdependence of all living things. These values are obvious and evident in Indigenous world-view and practices. Whilst there is a lot of work needed to push back against the pervasive individualism and disconnection in our communities, I believe that these indigenous values are evident here on this island. We just need to know where to look and how to practise them.

People can know things in different ways including an embodied way, an ancestral way, a spiritual way and the intellectual way of knowing is overly dominant in heavily colonised western societies. During the lockdown, I was delivering trauma training and was teaching folk about how every single human being has a reptilian, mammalian and human set of wiring and the rational brain is the most recent part of our ‘human’ wiring. We take the world in through our senses as raw data, which is passed through the reptilian brain, then the mammalian, and eventually the human brain gets the information and makes up a story to explain it all. It is a lot more complex than this, but this transformed the way that I worked as an educator, inviting people to build a relationship with their body, their felt sense and trust the knowledge that comes from attunement to the natural world. Our bodies are a wonderful tool for re-indigenising and this is a practice that deepens our sense of connection and empathy for all living beings. To notice is to honour.

Putting the two words of Indigenous and Ireland together in the same breathe creates all sorts of conversations. It is an invitation to dialogue about how we find our way home, back to the land and back to a way of being in the world that is not harmful, divisive and extractive. Some people don’t want the discomfort of the conversation and prefer to make a judgement. Historically, here in the North of the island, folk from very different sides of the conflict and world views sat around the table and talked, shared, cried, laughed and recognised the common humanity in each-other. We were able to move beyond the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and sit down with people who were labelled ‘dissident’ ‘terrorist’ or ‘sectarian’.

Our bodies, minds and communities are so hypercolonised that often we can’t even see it. The social programming that I received, through education, media, church and state were so strong and contained very clear messages about women, religion, the Global South, and was largely euro centric, individualistic and racist. It would be a miracle if I got to adulthood without some very challenging perceptions and ideas. We cannot ignore issues of power, patriarchy and privilege and in Ireland, and across the earth, the playing fields are not level. I believe that the process of decolonising involves as much painful unlearning of the social programming as it does learning. It also involves a collective process and dialogue in that we cannot ‘fix’ these issues in our heads or on our own, or by simply saying ‘Well, I am not racist/sexist/ablist’.

Our current media can offer a lot of posturing and virtue signalling about these issues but not much real life action or digging to the root causes. It is quick to point the finger and demonise and I am not sure if that is the long-term answer to our human race living peacefully and cooperatively together. Core values of equality, cooperation, compassion and collective care are what make us human and connect us through our common humanity. I don’t have any answers or solutions but I long to find a way back to our rightful place, as a flourishing part of this wonderful eco-system that we are blessed to know.

Divide and Conquer is still alive and well today, so let’s sit down and have a chat and a cup of tea.

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Helen Henderson has spent most of her working life in the third sector, and has a background in youth work, community development and peace building. She managed a community centre based in Derry/Londonderry, St Columb’s Park House, developing programmes promoting non-violent activism, participative democracy and compassionate leadership and also worked for an international NGO as a Global Education manager. Recently, Helen secured a Board appointment as a Commissioner for the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and co-founded Indigenous Ireland https://indigenous.ie/ as a voluntary collective group of people and organisations who are committed to decolonising and re-indigenising minds, bodies, education and eco-systems.