Tag Archives: Larry Speight

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Our failure to manage material waste

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

A report issued on the 8 June, which is the UN declared World Ocean Day, states that an estimated 52 million tonnes of plastics enter the ocean every year. I challenge you to imagine the scale of this amount. What does 52 million tons of any substance look like? The truth is the amount is so vast we have no readily available reference points.

This, sad to say, is not the total sum of our waste. It is but the measure of one of the materials we use and discard almost without thought in the course of our day. We have a plastic wrapping in our hands one moment and if in a public space are likely let it fall at our feet or if in a moving vehicle throw it out the window. If you don’t believe this look around you. On seashores, river embankments, in woodlands, on the verge of country roads and on city pavements you will find discarded plastic along with other items such as cigarette butts and vapes. They are found on the top of mountains and at places that were traditionally considered sacred such as holy wells and wishing trees.

Throwing away plastic wrappings, bags, bottles and containers of every kind is for many as unconscious as the stream of unregistered thoughts involved in our physical dexterity such as walking or reaching for something. An exception is when we have suffered an injury and every move has to be consciously planned in order to minimise the pain.

Throwing away things we no longer want is an integral part of many a person’s mindset, something the archaeological evidence shows we having being doing since our species first evolved. For most of this time this was not an ecological or social problem as what we used was organic and decomposed. However, with the advent of the industrial age and the development of synthetic materials how to dispose of things in a way that causes the least harm is a major problem.

Are readers aware that in both Northern and Southern Ireland most landfill sites have reached full capacity and the waste is transported by lorries to mainland Britain and Europe to feed incinerators that generate electricity. This embeds waste management across our island in the global fossil fuel economy and every penny rise in the cost of liquid fuels means that Councils have less money to spend on meeting other public needs. This is a millstone around our necks pulling us ever deeper into the mire of economic and ecological dysfunction.

The challenge of disposing what we don’t want, which are often perfectly usable goods, is an educational and legislative one involving the chicken and egg scenario. Legislation is needed at all levels of government, including at the international level, to ensure that manufactured goods can be repaired rather junked for the reason that the items can’t be repaired and if they can it is more expensive to repair them than buy a new one. This applies to things as transparently simple and inexpensive as a pair of flip-flops as it does to items as sophisticated and expensive as mobile phones. Long passed are the days when you could leave electric devices such as a radio, television and tape recorder into a shop to be repaired.

Legislation is also needed to change the materials in which things are contained and carried. When I travelled in India in the 1990s train passengers were served tea in clay cups which were, as our ancestors would have done, thrown away after the liquid was drank. Today it is plastic cups that are thrown away. Food items were served in paper cones, on palm leaves, in newspaper or pages torn out of an old school text book.

The conglomerates that dominate the global economy should be compelled by internationally enforceable legislation to produce packaging that when disposed of will decompose and can be used as compost on gardens and fields.

Some progress has been made in producing carrier bags that decompose but the research shows that outside of laboratory conditions the decomposition takes more than a human life-span. The majority of the clothes that likely adorn your body at this very moment will exist somewhere on the planet long after your flesh and bones have been digested by the guts of our planet. Your legacy won’t be engraved on a block of polished marble but be all the things you purchased during the course of your life which, as in a horror film, never die.

Your body is wearing your ghost.

Your immortality is your life-long accumulation of all the inorganic things you have ever owned and fossil fuels you have ever used or used for your benefit. It is said that all of our good and harmful deeds are recorded in a ledger overseen by God and that our immortal fate will be determined by what is the ledger, in other words by our own deeds. What will be the magnitude of the harm done to nonhuman beings and our fellow humans, including the generations yet to be born, when the record of your deeds is set before you so that you know you have chosen your own type of eternity?

Perhaps, as in court rooms today, we might plead ignorance as a mitigating circumstance, except that in law ignorance is no excuse. This brings us to the chicken and egg scenario. In order to achieve effective waste management legislation we need to lobby our legislative bodies to pass the legislation. Start with your elected political representatives. We also need to ensure that the conglomerates fulfill their ecological responsibilities and educate ourselves about the ecological niche we occupy and the harm we do as well as the good we can do.

The Earth is being suffocated by the things we dispose of which means we are self-harming and this should stop. The first step towards restoring our collective health can be taken today. No excuses.

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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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The militarist mindset

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The statistics presented to us through the various media outlets about the war in the Middle East fail to convey the full horror of its impact on human and nonhuman life and the commentary tells us little about the negative consequences for the descendants of those who suffer from the violence as well as the harm done to the biosphere which will last for millennia.

Our lack of exposure to the full horror of the war is not entirely the fault of the media as much of what is happening is not seen by them. Although the visuals aired for a few minutes on our screens and the brief accounts that are broadcast of the anguish and inconsolable grief felt by those whose loved ones have been injured and killed resonate with most people, we living far from the suffering have no voice in the war cabinets of the United States, Israel and Iran. Nor do we have a voice in the war cabinets in Ukraine and Russia or the desert camps of the warring parties in Sudan. No one on our rain-soaked island can declare that a war in a faraway land is over.

What we can do is educate ourselves about the horror and the consequences of war which might lead to a mass opting out of the militarist mindset which holds that there is no alternative to organised violence, a view that the 1998 Northern Ireland Peace Agreement firmly rejected.

The militarist mindset is dangerously flawed as it is based on a fractured view of humanity. On the one hand it depicts an entire people, in the case of the United States’ war on Iran, 93 million humans, as undeserving of the essentials of life such as water, food and energy as well as freedom from anxiety and fear. This is underscored by President Donald Trump saying that he will bomb the Iranian people “back to the Stone Ages where they belong.”

The word ‘belong’ is telling as it reveals that in his cosmology there are the deserving and the undeserving, those who have entitlements ascribed by divine providence and those that don’t. This view of the so-called enemy is prevalent amongst all warring groups. It was articulated by Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Secretary of War, who in a religious service at the Pentagon on the 25 March said that the wicked should be eliminated and called on God, with reference to Iran, to “break the teeth” and kill the “wicked” enemies “who deserve no mercy” and should be “delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”

The militarist mindset can simultaneously consider a whole ethnic group or nation unworthy of life while exalting those of their in-group / country / who cause others enormous suffering and commit mass murder if it is perceived to further the interests of their group.

Aside from the inaccuracy of this fractured view of humanity and the indifference to the suffering it causes, which is overwhelmingly borne by women and children, there is an additional ecological and human cost even if not a single person receives a scratch in the war zone. Both arise out of military spending.

The projected global sum that will be spent on the military in 2026 is $2.9 trillion. The United States is expected to spend in excess of $1 trillion while the European Union is expected to increase its spending by 60 billion Euro bringing the total to an estimated 460 billion Euro. This is money that could be spent on meeting social needs such as affordable housing, health care, education, care of the vulnerable and regenerative agriculture both at home and abroad.

A positive outcome of redirecting the enormous amount of money spent on the military towards social need is that it lessens the potential for social conflict thus helping neuter the perceived need for military hardware and trained killers.

As the 30-year long period of political violence in Northern Ireland reveals there is the phenomena of inter-generational trauma which carries a litany of wellbeing issues including chronic ill-health as revealed by the 2025 report ‘The Prevalence and Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences in Northern Ireland’ which was commissioned by the N.I. Executive. In the case of the violence and destruction of civic infrastructure in Palestine, Sudan and other war zones the children not only experience deep trauma but as their schools have been destroyed and many of their teachers killed they will likely grow up without receiving a formal education.

With few exceptions media coverage of wars neglect to examine their impact on the biosphere including the ecosystems in the war zones. When the ghastly plumes of black smoke rise into the sky from bombed buildings, oil storage tanks and ships an easy reference could be made by the commentators that the smoke and dust emitted from the bombed structures contribute to the warming of the planet and that the fallout will poison water, soil and plants and likely be inhaled by the human and nonhuman population causing chronic health problems.

The amount of global warming gasses emitted by war is substantial. The Guardian reports that in the first two weeks of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran the global warming emissions exceeded the amount emitted by Iceland in the course of a year. In February 2025, Earth.org reported that the global warming emissions from Russia’s war on Ukraine was the equivalent of the annual emissions of Austria, Hungry, Czech Republic and Slovakia combined. Globally, the military’s annual emission of global warming gases totals approximately 5.5 percent of the annual global total emissions. If the military were a country they would rank as the fourth-largest national emitter.

The militarist mindset not only wages war against people, in particular women and children who are the main causalities of war, but on the biosphere itself. To undermine the ability of the biosphere to sustain life robs us of the right to call ourselves Homo sapiens – the wise ape.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The wisdom of the Pharaoh

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The idea of preparing for a rainy day, of having savings to pay for an unexpected setback such as repairing a much needed home appliance or buying your child a new pair of shoes is an intrinsic part of our culture. In fact, preparing for possible, if not inevitable, hard times seems to be a cross-cultural disposition. In Genesis chapter 41: 14 – 36, Joseph advises the Pharaoh to store surplus food during an expected seven years of plenty in preparation for seven years of famine that are thought will follow as foreseen in the Pharaoh’s dream.

The Pharaoh wisely took Joseph’s advice.

In a general sense people on this island, across Europe and most of the world have since the end of the second world war increasingly lived in an age of plenty, albeit with a terrible price paid by the biosphere in terms of loss of biodiversity, the rise in global temperature and pollution of soil, air and water. During these years of plenty and technological innovation governments have not acted with the wisdom of the Pharaoh and prepared their societies to cope with the predicted negative consequences of our irresponsible treatment of nonhuman nature.

There are, and have been, many Josephs who dedicated their lives to getting us to awaken to the folly of our consumer life-style. Among them are Rachel Carson (1907-1964) who is best known for her 1962 book Silent Spring, E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977) who crystalised his ideas of living within ecological limits in Small is Beautiful (1973). In our own time there is the Irish author and film maker Manchan Magan (1970 – 2025) who is perhaps best known for his book Thirty-Two Words for Field. A climate and human rights campaigner who is known internationally is Greta Thunberg who was Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year.

In addition to dedicated individuals there are organisations a plenty in Ireland and elsewhere who, on the basis of rigorous research and sound evidence, inform us that the rainy day we should have prepared for has arrived. We have been urged for decades to radically change our approach to organising the business of living whilst simultaneously preparing for the consequences of our historic abuse of the biosphere. The warnings have largely being ignored with tragic consequences in the form of life-inflicting and property destroying floods, droughts, storms, wild fires and the poisoning of waterways.

A major warning was given over 50 – years ago in the landmark report on the consequences of continuous economic growth titled The Limits To Growth (1972). It was produced by an international team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the think tank The Club of Rome. Thirty million copies were published and the report’s findings were widely debated but the transition to “a stable state society” was never undertaken.

An equally important warning was given in Our Common Future (1987), also known as The Brundtland Report, published by the UN. It had more success in getting society and governments to recognise the serious plight the biosphere was in due to our inconsiderate behaviour. It coined what is now a classic definition of sustainable development. This is: “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

The report led to the first Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992 out of which came the Commission on Sustainable Development and in time the annual Conference of the Parties, better known as COPs, to address climate breakdown. They have been held annually since 1995. The most successful COP to date was the one held in Paris in 2015 in which agreement was reached by the governments of the world to limit global warming to 1.5 Celsius.

In spite of all the conferences, declarations, uncountable scientific reports on the ecological unsustainability of our economic order and the many successful nature conservation projects such as the RSPB’s Curlew protection programme on Upper and Lower Lough Erne, the protection of puffins on Rathlin Island and the Isle of Muck we are metaphorically clinging to the side of the life-boat.

Worryingly New Scientist, 14 March 2026, reports that the average global temperature is rising, sea levels are much higher than previously thought which if the trend continues will lead to the displacement of hundreds of millions of people, the loss of civil infrastructure, agricultural lands and habitat.

Just as disruptive, and unwelcomed by people who find prolonged cold weather insufferable, is the weakening of the ocean current which accounts for our mild climate. There has already been a measurable shift northward and as the New Scientist reports “any abrupt shift in the Gulf Stream could signal an imminent, catastrophic collapse in the ocean current.” If this were to happen the winter temperature in Ireland could at times drop to -20 Celsius.

Our ignoring the warnings of ecological catastrophe has led to the exceedingly poor ecological health of most lakes and rivers across the island including Lough Neagh, Lough Erne and Belfast Lough. The Guardian recently reported that genes capable of creating superbugs resistant to antibiotics have been detected in Lough Neagh and that a study found E coli bacteria in every sample of cattle manure tested in the Lough Neagh catchment area.

Genes capable of creating superbugs resistant to antibiotics could exist in other bodies of water. The existence of such genes is something the health and water authorities should take very seriously as the World Health Organisation describes antimicrobial resistance as “one of the most urgent, complex and frightening health challenges of our time”.

This situation alone highlights the case that if we value our health, which is not separate from the health of others, we need to embrace the credo of the likes of Rachel Carson, E.F. Schumacher and Manchan Magan and be cognisant that the technosphere is wholly dependent on the ecosphere and cease to be blasé about how we treat the only home we have.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Our degradation of nature is a national security issue

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

It is said that a government’s overriding responsibility is to provide national security or as the UK Home Office says: “The first duty of government is to keep its citizens safe and the country secure.” The reasoning is that without a secure and well-ordered society there will be economic instability and the government will not have the means to deliver social services such as health care, education and sanitation. The truth of this is borne out by the civil war in Sudan and President Putin’s war against Ukraine. In Sudan public services have collapsed and in Ukraine the government struggles to provide its citizens with electricity during their harsh winter due to the targeting of power stations and the national grid by Putin’s war machine.

Because of the tremendous suffering that results from wars and internal violent conflict national security is justifiably a government priority. The default view across the main political parties and most governments is that this can be obtained and sustained through military might. This, the evidence suggests, is mistaken.

A primary reason why interpreting the need for national security in solely militaristic terms is flawed is because of its exclusivity in that it ignores the multiple needs that human wellbeing is based upon which leads to depravations often resulting in civil disorder which can escalate into prolonged armed conflict. There are many examples of this occurring around the world including in Northern Ireland.

One of the many problems with militarism is that it has an unquenchable thirst for money in order for a government to develop and stockpile the means of war. When a war begins the unquenchable thirst includes both human and nonhuman life.

Militarism nullifies the very purpose it is purported to serve which is the welfare of those in whose name wars are prepared for and fought. The case of nuclear warfare underlines the point.

The nuclear weapons of the nine countries that possess them are immensely more powerful than the 15-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in August 1945. It killed an estimated 70,000 people instantly with many thousands dying over the following years. The bomb used on Nagasaki three days later killed an estimated 200,00 people. The UK’s submarine-launched warheads are six times more powerful than these bombs and the U.S. B-41 bomb is 1,500 times more powerful.

The impact of the use of these weapons is beyond horrifying in terms of the number of deaths, life-long injuries and loss of infrastructure, built heritage and cultural archives that would occur. In addition, it is estimated that disruption to the climate would lead to two billion people suffering from famine. A nuclear war would turn our Garden of Eden into a burnt, dusty, poisoned planet making life exceedingly difficult for future generations.

A high cost is born by militarism even if a shot is never fired. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute inform us that in a single year, 2024, $2,718 billion was spend on the military worldwide. In the course of a decade this is $20, 718, 000, 000. And guess what, no matter how much governments spend on the military they will always feel that it is not enough and demand ever higher sums from their citizens further depriving them of social services. By way of contrast most people and businesses don’t invest their money on unrealisable projects.

Another dimension to the idea that national security can only be obtained through the threat of mass violence is that it is wholly disconnected from what is the real threat to human wellbeing and survival, nationally and globally. This is the increasing inability of the biosphere to sustain the life-style enjoyed by people living in rich countries like our own since end of the Second World War.

This reading of the terrain is not only held by environmental organisations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace but also, as will surprise many, by the UK Government. The report ‘Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security assessment’ compiled by the Joint Intelligence Committee, on which the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHO sit, emphatically states that the declining health of the biosphere is a national security issue.

The report was held back from publication and only made public through a freedom of information request lodged by the Green Alliance. Number 3 of its 7 Key judgements reads.

“Critical ecosystems that support major global food production and impact global climate, water and weather cycles are the most important for UK national security. Severe degradation or collapse of these would highly likely result in water insecurity, severely reduced crop yields, a global reduction in arable land, fisheries collapse, changes to global weather patterns, release of trapped carbon exacerbating climate change, novel zoonotic diseases and loss of pharmaceutical resources. The Amazon rainforest, Congo rainforest, boreal forests, the Himalayas and South East Asia’s coral reefs and mangroves are particularly significant for the UK.”

This deduction applies to our own island as we like Britain share a similar climate and import most of our food, animal feed and fertilisers. In fact, the warming of the planet, loss of biodiversity, infectious diseases and multiple types of pollution affect everyone on the planet which makes a mockery of the idea that national security can be achieved through military might.

The best way to achieve national security is not by the main political parties, public commentators, think-tanks and so forth clamouring for an increase in military spending but by unrelentingly petitioning governments to address the root causes for the collapse of the eco-services we take for granted. Governments can work to restore ecosystems within their jurisdiction and through supporting international efforts help less wealthy countries heal their ecosystems. As the UK national security assessment says we are dependent on them. This is also the view of other governments.

Given this one wonders why governments misconstrue what it means to keep their citizens secure and safe.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The global is local

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

As the immediate has a profound effect on our lives it is not surprising that we on these islands are keen weather watchers and listen to weather forecasts throughout the day so that we can prepare for what is to come. Prolonged heavy rain might mean flooded roads requiring us to take detours to get to our destination and a storm might mean fallen electricity poles resulting in the loss of electricity to our homes. Knowing about what weather to expect incentivises us to prepare for it so that when it arrives we suffer less than we otherwise would have.

As a rule, we like to know about things in advance of them happening so that we can make the appropriate preparations, a redundancy for example. Under the radar of everyday life there is an industry that prepares us for death through encouraging us to draw up a will, write post-death letters to our loved ones and make provision for our funeral. As soon as young people get their first job they are encouraged to cast their minds 50-years into the future and save for their retirement.

The motto of the boy and girl scouts is Be Prepared.

Given humankind’s long history of living within set boundaries where our wellbeing was largely determined by local events it is not surprising that we in Ireland are inclined to frame issues in terms of the local. Until a few decades ago there were sound grounds for this, especially when much of our food was sourced locally. However, living as we do today in an exceedingly complex economy what happens globally is often more important that what happens locally. The price of oil is a case in point. A major disruption to the oil market could, within a matter of hours, raise the price of heating oil beyond most peoples’ means.

It is the global dimension to our lives that makes the annual two-weeks of negotiations on limiting global warming emissions under the auspices of the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) so important. The most recent one, COP 30, took place in Belem, Brazil this November.

Although the outcome was disappointing in that the petrostates along with other countries blocked reference in the final text to the core issue of transition away from fossil fuels. Agreements were reached on ecological literacy, climate-resilient health systems, expanded early-warning systems, climate justice and harmonising global carbon accounting standards.

The COP held in Paris in 2015 produced what is thought to be the most important outcome of all the COPs which is the agreement to limit global warming to 20 C with a focus on limiting the rise to 1.50 C as against pre-industrial levels. Today the global average temperature stands at 1.3OC and is on course to warm to 2.60 C by the end of the century.

There is almost near consensus among climatologists that to breach the 1.50 C limit will be catastrophic for life on Earth. Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, is quoted in the Guardian, 13 November 2025, as saying that: “A world at 2.6C means global disaster … (it) means the end of agriculture in the UK and across Europe, drought and monsoon failure in Asia and Africa, lethal heat and humanity.”

A temperature of 2.6C would lead to the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) which helps ensure that we on these islands enjoy a mild climate. It would also lead to in an increase in the melt rate of ice sheets resulting in a rise in sea levels displacing people in coastal towns and cities around the world including Dublin, Belfast, London, New York and Ho Chi Minh City. It would turn rainforests, which are one of the Earth’s major sinks for CO2, into savannah. Mosquito borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever, which are common in the tropics, would become more widespread.

What many will find particularly upsetting is that these likely outcomes are expected to occur within the life-span of children born in recent years who will live the nightmare of a chaotic world in which most of what we take for granted will cease to exist. This includes food variety and availability, water quality, electricity supply and convenient, comfortable transport.

One of the consequences of living in a world whose ecosphere is collapsing is that supply networks collapse with it. As an island people some might think that we have a propensity for economic self-sufficiency and should not be unduly worried about distant economic, ecological and political events. This view is mistaken.

Agriculture is an illustrative example. In spite of our island having mild weather and good soil 83 % of the fruit and vegetables we eat and 80% of the animal fed we use is imported. The latter comes from a variety of countries including Argentina, the EU, Brazil and the USA. When it comes to manufactured goods comparatively few are produced on either side of the border.

In the light of the ecological and economic catastrophe that will arise out of our collective mismanagement of our relationship with the rest of nature, which the former US vice-president Al Gore described at COP 30 as “literally insane”, what are we doing in terms of preparation? More to the point, what are we doing to avoid the predicted catastrophe?

If driving fast on a winding road we have the power to prevent a terrible collision by slowing down and driving with care. We don’t need to have a collision to learn a lesson about driving too fast. Likewise with the consequences of our consumer lifestyle which is eliminating biodiversity and raising the global temperature to a level that will make life unbearable.

While we should prepare for the collapse of the ecosphere and what this will mean in terms of meeting our everyday needs we should at the same time live in a more ecologically sensitive way whilst campaigning for systemic change underpinned by compassion.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Butterflies adapt

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Although humans like to disassociate themselves from the rest of nonhuman nature and hold that we are an exceptional species this is not the case which means that there is an enormous amount we can learn from nonhuman beings enabling us to relinquish the mindset that research shows is leading to only one destination, the collapse of the biosphere that we and other life-forms are dependent upon for our existence. The recent research on the breaching of two ecological tipping points suggests that this is likely to be sooner than previously thought. These are the loss of sea ice formation in the Antarctica and the demise of warm water coral reefs.

Dr. Jane Goodall, who recently died at the age of 91, overturned the conventional idea that what made humans exceptional was their tool making abilities. Her research of chimpanzees in the 1960s in Gombe, Tanzania, revealed that chimpanzees are not only capable of making tools but like humans are emotional creatures. They, like all forms of life, adapt to their environment, a fact which astounded most of the scientific and religious establishment when Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species in 1859. Until then it was thought, at least in the Western world, that God had made life-forms as finished entities as the various artistic depictions of Adam and Eve portrayed.

Darwin’s findings continue to be verified today. Photographer and researcher Roberto Garcia-Road, along with other researches, who are studying butterflies in the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo, have found that butterflies lose their vibrant colours when indigenous forests are cut down and replaced with eucalyptus plantations. Prompted by evolution the butterflies do this in order to increase their chances of survival.

The question is will we, in the interests of our survival as a species, respond in a positive way to the ever-increasing harsh realities caused by our disruption of the climate system as it has functioned since the end of the last glacial period which occurred about 11,700 years ago. Doing this would mean transitioning to a whole new way of life based upon living within the regenerative capacities of the biosphere which would inevitably mean living a reduced consumer-based lifestyle.

This, as many mistakenly assume, would not automatically result in a decrease in the quality of peoples’ lives. Rather, if based on economic and social equity, it could well lead to a mean improvement in the quality of everyone’s life most notably that experienced by the billions of people who waken each morning not knowing if they and their family will eat a nutritious meal that day.

To date the evidence suggests that we are so accustomed to living in ignorance about the life-story of the things we use on a daily basis that we are blocking out the signals that are telling us that it is imperative that we adapt or face, as all living things do, extinction. The life story of the things we consume includes where the raw materials come from, how they are processed and turned into manufactured products and farmed produce, how they arrive in our shops and the ecological consequences of using and disposing of them. Given our cultural imperatives and the lack of education about the life-stories of what we consume this ignorance is understandable.

Our blocking out the signals about the increasing inability of the biosphere to sustain us is in part due to the case that a) we don’t like change and b) hubris. The former is a trait shared with other species, a basis for which is that we feel safe with what we know and that a substantial change usually takes resolution and energy. Hubris, as far as we know, is a trait other life-forms don’t have.

Hubris is proving to be a fatal flaw for our species. One reason why it is so toxic is that those afflicted with it, which includes groups of people as large as nations, have such a sense of grandiosity they believe themselves to be immortal and thus feel they have no need to respect ecological limits and the right of other species to live their lives as determined by their nature.

Another dysfunctional aspect of hubris is that those ailed with it tend to think that their class, culture and civilization is superior to others. The later was the basis of the numerous cases of genocide that took place during the past 500-years of European colonialism. The ones we in Ireland are most familiar with are those committed against the indigenous peoples of Australia and the United States. Genocide based on the coloniser’s sense of superiority also took place elsewhere including in Africa, central and south America.

The signals we are not listening to are those that tell us that we are breaching planetary boundaries. New Scientist, 11 October 2025, reports one such breach is the loss of sea ice formation in the Antarctic as a result of the warming of the oceans due to human behaviour. If the trend continues the consequences will be catastrophic as Antarctic sea ice contains enough water to raise global sea levels by 58 meters. One does not need to be a mathematician to work out that if the sea ice melts the infrastructure of coastal communities around the world will be underwater. Before this happens migrations on a scale never witnessed will occur raising the question of where these billions of people will live. Another casualty will be the loss of cultural treasures held in museums, libraries, art galleries and archives. We can also expect the digital world to collapse when energy and water hungry data centers cease to function.

As there are biospheric tipping points there are positive social ones which could be triggered by a significant number of people developing a deep sense of affinity with and love for the awe-inspiring biosphere we are part of. As many sages and sociologists have noted we care for and protect what we love.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The new colonial power

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News, , , ,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The new colonial power

Reading the recently republished book Decolonising the Mind (1986) by the award-winning Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o prompted me to think about the ways, if any, the predominant western mindset has been colonised by the powers that hold sway over our life.

Thiong’o’s thesis is that the minds of African people, who are not the descendants of European settlers, have been colonised by the language of the countries that ruled over their continent of 54 countries through military might. Language is more than a medium of communication but a means of transmitting culture. (The only country that was not colonised by a European power is Liberia which was formed by emancipated slaves in 1847.)

Colonialism, which did not end in the 1960s as widely believed, not only seeks to retain control of the lands of the subjected people in order to exploit what they would call natural resources, the labour and ingenuity of the oppressed people but seeks to erase their culture. This includes farming methods, systems of wealth distribution, sense of community and their understanding of humankind’s place in nature which of course we are an integral part.

From the 1500s onwards the British, Dutch, French, German and Portuguese sought to eradicate indigenous cultures leaving no trace that they ever existed. In many regions such as Australia, the Americas, islands in the Pacific and Caribbean they succeeded in their efforts. Where physical extermination was not possible, or desirable from the perspective of the colonisers wanting cheap labour and consumers, they sought cultural annihilation through using language and religion to create a mindset that aligned with that of the colonist whilst ensuring that the subjected peoples were imbued with a sense of abiding inferiority vis-a-via their overlords.

As Thiong’o writes the: “most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship with the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control.”

Formal education and religion have for centuries been used to imprint a cosmology on minds. These two powerful agents of socialisation were joined in the course of the twentieth century by radio, cinema and television with large companies influencing spending habits through psychologically scripted advertisements, sponsored TV shows while the dissemination of the cultural values of the dominant paradigm were imbedded across the mass media output.

At the time of broadcast the imbedded values and depictions of how the world is thought to be might for some have been hard to detect as they were considered to be accurate and authentic and as ordinary as the wallpaper in our living room that we don’t see. However, looking at archival material many of the cultural views are blatantly obvious. John Wayne films are a case in point. In these films, which span three decades, women are depicted as less capable than men, the indigenous peoples of the U.S. as unruly, violent and malicious and black people are largely absent and when they have a presence play subservient roles.

The question we need to ask is who is colonising our minds today and with what cosmology. The three main disseminators of cultural values and norms in the twentieth century have been joined by a fourth, the internet which is dominated by what is called artificial intelligence (AI).

The internet is in the command of powerful companies such as Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Alphabet the parent company of Google. A few decades ago, these companies did not exist but today they own approximately twenty percent of the global economy and their CEOs are billionaires. They are not benevolent or ideologically neutral but have an intrinsic interest in maintaining the international economic order in its present form, increasing the financial profits they derive from it and the political and cultural influence their wealth brings. In terms of their reach, power and financial resources they can rightly be considered as imperial powers.

Whereas the nationalist-based empires of the past 500-years sought compliance from the people they subjugated by the imposition of their culture through language and the disempowering message of religion as embodied in the idea of a saviour and moral unworthiness, the digital colonial powers seek a different outcome.

This is one in which people hold that convenience is the gold-standard of the good life and the way this is obtained is through ownership and mastery of digital devices. Part of the lure is the sense of control digital technology gives people over their life. The newer the device, such as a smartphone, the more convenience they feel they have enabling them to do things that once were the reserve of mythological gods such as talking face to face with people on the other side of the world.

Although the outcomes the imperial powers seek appear to have changed from one of inducing a sense of powerlessness and inferiority in the people they reigned over to people having a sense of control over their life the essentials in regard to how we view and interact with nonhuman nature have not changed.

The modus operandi of the transnational companies and the majority of governments most of the time is to treat nonhuman nature as a warehouse of resources for humans to use without regard to consequences. In response to science highlighting the ecological folly of this and in countering people’s negative life-changing experiences of climate breakdown, loss of biodiversity and multiple types of pollution, the imperialist powers have it seems succeeded in persuading the majority of people that a thing dubbed green technology will enable us to continue to gobble-up the Earth with a clear conscience on the basis of the belief that there is no alternative to consumer capitalism.

In the digital age the colonised mind is one in which peoples’ ability to formulate a view of humankind’s place in the world on the basis of verifiable evidence underpinned by active compassion for all, including nonhuman life-forms, has been anaesthetised.

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l An A4 mini-poster for home printing on colonisation of the mind, based on the above piece, is available at https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Colonisation-mind-1.pdf and in the general posters section of the INNATE website https://innatenonviolence.org/wp/posters/

ECO-AWARENESS with Larry Speight:   A life-affirming funeral

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News, , , ,

On the occasions you are able to extract yourself from the bedlam of everyday life and immerse yourself in woodland or bracken-covered hills far from the sound of motor vehicles and blipping phones you will, if mindful of what is going on around you, likely notice that nonhuman life goes on without regard to human beings.

If in a woodland you will notice that the nectar seeking insects are self-intent and have no regard for you. The trees that have grown from seeds into tall, multi-branched, wide girth majestic beings will one day fall to the ground where they will decay and become part of the soil which sustains life. Visit an ancient woodland, even a moderately old one, and you will see flora in various stages of the life cycle all around you. The fallen, moss covered tree you happen to be sitting on might well have saplings growing out of it. By way of contrast humans are the only species who in death take from the earth and harm it rather than enrich it and thereby sustain life. We are the bio-world’s vandals and wreckers.

Take the average Irish funeral. When a person dies their body is injected with formaldehyde, a toxic chemical, in order to make them look as if they were not dead. They will be dressed in toxic clothes, placed in a brass handled, polyester-lined wood coffin with no inquiry likely made about where the wood and brass were sourced or where the coffin was manufactured. The deceased will have a religious service, perhaps attended by hundreds of people who will arrive and depart in their fossil fuel driven vehicles. Many will then drive to the place of burial which will once have been home to millions of microorganisms and part of a wider habitat. It will now be the site of life-killing leakages over a prolonged period of time. Marble headstone and curbs, transported by fossil fuel powered ships and lorries, will mark the grave upon which it is common for the grieving to lay artificial grass and flowers. These will have been made in a carbon-intensive manner, most likely in China, and transported by CO2 emitting vehicles.

Even if the dead are cremated there will be negative ecological consequences with the release of global warming gases and other pollutants which have a serious adverse effect upon the climate and biosphere. The mercury in dental fillings will be sent into the atmosphere and from there find their way into the food chain.

This is not the full tally of the ecological cost of the average Irish funeral. It is common that after the burial or cremation the mourners will gather in a community hall where lunch will be served which is usually sandwiches, cakes and biscuits along with a choice of tea, coffee or a sweet drink. Inevitably meat and diary produce will be an integral part of the lunch which could well be accompanied by a supply of plastic utensils. The production of meat and dairy is a significant source of global warming emissions, water pollution, loss of biodiversity and in some cases animal suffering.

Whilst death in nonhuman nature brings forth life, as in the Thunderbird or Phoenix of the mythology of indigenous North American people, the modern-day funeral brings death to other life forms and through degrading the biosphere harms human life itself.

Part of the irony of this lies in that the average Irish funeral is a profound religious event. Before death the hope of the deceased will likely have been that when they die they will be welcomed into Heaven where they will reside for eternity in the presence of God and family and friends who died before them. In the light of how most funerals are conducted this is akin to wanting to be invited to a garden party after you have trashed the host’s garden and smashed up their much-loved vintage car.

The expectation of being welcomed by the Creator after trashing their handiwork highlights the monumental disconnect between human society and the natural world we are a part of. If we foresee ourselves having a modern Irish funeral then our death will diminish the effectiveness of the processes that sustain life.

Fortunately cultural traditions change, even the most hallowed ones, such as how the dead are treated and funerals conducted. To avoid our death begetting death we can leave written instructions asking that our remains not be injected with formaldehyde, that we be dressed in worn clothes made of natural fibers. If there are none in your wardrobe they can be purchased for a reasonable price from a charity shop.

We are not obliged to be put in a wood coffin, or a coffin at all. We can simply be wrapped in a shroud; a well-worn cotton bedsheet would do. After we have been lowered into the ground there is no need to enclose the site with marble curbs and a headstone and the enclosure filled with decorative stones or adorned with artificial grass. A fruit tree can mark the site instead.

Those wishing to attend the funeral can be asked to car share, travel by bus, cycle or walk. The lunch in the community hall can be vegan, free of plastic utensils and paper napkins. The life of a tree can be saved, along with all the creatures that depend on it, through pinning the order of service on a notice board and writing the memorial on the back of used paper.

A life-affirming funeral rather that the dominant mode of present-day funerals is the one that is more rooted in tradition. A hundred years ago there would for instance have been no plastic utensils, paper napkins, individual order of service cards and very few of the mourners would have had a car to travel to and from a funeral. Further, a life-affirming funeral is by far the least expensive and therefore could be your last act of love for your next of kin.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Water, uisce, agua, eau, voda, maji, ma’a

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

Wherever we go in the world a word we will quickly learn to speak in the language of our host country after hello, good-bye, please and thank you is water.

As we can’t live more than three or four days without fresh water one would think that we would take better care of what globally is a scarce resource and locally can swiftly become one. As an island people who are surrounded by water, whose terra firma has ample lakes and rivers and where we expect it to rain at almost any time to think of fresh water as scarce is counter-intuitive.

The facts speak for themselves which is that most of the world’s water is undrinkable without expensive technological intervention. This is because 96.5% of water is sea water and much of the remaining 3.5% of nominally fresh water as found in rivers and lakes is immediately unusable as we have poisoned it. Aquifers contain approximately 33% of fresh water of which, according to the Stockholm International Water Institute, a third are depleted and according to the UNEP a high proportion are severely polluted.

The cryosphere, which are glaciers, ice caps and permafrost, hold 70% of the Earth’s fresh water. While relatively unpolluted the cryosphere is rapidly melting because of global warming.

Although the human body is commonly thought to be composed of flesh and bones, 60% of our physique is water. Another interesting thing about this solvent is the first forms of life originated and evolved in water. We, like so many other life-forms, are water-infused.

Given that we are largely composed of water, are physically sustained by water, emerged from water and depend on it for a wide variety of activities including washing ourselves, our clothes, cleaning our homes and growing food it is not surprising that in ancient Ireland bodies of water were thought to have a divine origin and were regarded as sacred.

Lough Erne for instance, which is the fourth largest body of water in Ireland, is named after a woman called Érann. In Irish mythology there are three stories about the lough’s origin. One, which resonates with other mythological stories about the origins of Irish rivers and lakes, is that a mythical woman named Erne, who was Queen Meabh’s lady in-waiting, fled with two other women from Cruachan, County Roscommon in fear of a fearsome giant and on drowning their bodies dissolved to become Lough Erne.

The Rivers Bann, Boyne and Shannon are other bodies of water reputed in Irish mythology to have their origin in drowned mythical women signifying their divinity. In spite of the mythology attached to our waterways, and our dependence upon them, we treat them as open sewers. Northern Ireland Water (NI Water) certainly does by the regular release of sewage into them as we know to be the case with Lough Erne, Lough Neagh and Strangford Lough.

NI Water are thought to be responsible for 24% of water pollution, agriculture 62% and septic tanks 12%. Another source of pollution is run-off from roads. As NI Water is a government owned company we the tax payers are the shareholders and can lobby our politicians to ensure that it treats our waterways in a way that enhances their ecological health which means not treating them as part of the sewage network. To do this it needs adequate funding which means that the public should be asked to pay the money required. The payment would not be a give-away but an investment in our wellbeing, that of our offspring and our entire bioregion.

This idea of paying more for our water is supported by the independent watchdog the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, which in a report in early June said that “The fundamental constraint on NI Water is a budgetary one”. In wanting to retain favour with the electorate the two major political parties in the Executive are opposed to direct water charges.

A similar situation exists in the Republic of Ireland where the water authority, Uisce Eireann, is a public body and the government plans to charge households only for excessive use which is 1.7 % above the average household amount of 125,000 litres.

In both jurisdictions, where the major source of water pollution is agriculture, the farming community, as represented by their unions, is dead-set against making the types of changes that will result in the elimination of nutrients and chemicals that are harmful to aquatic life. These include reducing the size of the dairy herd, better slurry management, creating buffer zones around waterways, planting native trees to prevent soil erosion and ensuring medicines given to animals don’t enter the water system.

To this end governments need to ensure that farms are economically viable.

It is a case of the authorities joining the dots and recognising that clean water is the basis of a healthy ecosystem, thriving and ecologically sustainable farms, is essential to building new homes and providing jobs across the economy including in outdoor pursuits which enhance physical and mental wellbeing.

There is a need for close cross-border cooperation on water quality and other eco-issues as we live a single bioregion with many bodies of water straddling the political border. Lough Melvin with its waters at one and the same time in County Fermanagh and County Leitrim is an example of this. The bio-rich waters of Lough Erne flow through County Fermanagh and into the sea at Ballyshannon in County Donegal.

The fact that farming families have an invested interest in passing on ecologically viable farms to their descendants gives us hope that regenerative farming will be embraced. A delay in doing so serves no one’s interests.

To treat our bodies of water with the respect they deserve, as something precious, would be in keeping with the ancient belief that water is sacred. For us in our homes and places of work this means not letting the tap run, reporting leaks and not flushing sanitary products down the toilet.

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