Tag Archives: Larry Speight

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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Eco-Awareness 

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News, , , ,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

Our cultural heat dome

We are inclined through habit, conditioning and inertia to live in the pond circumstances have placed us in and are reluctant to change one iota of the negative aspects of how we live even when advised to by a concerned professional such as a medical doctor, counselor or psychiatrist. Many of us are so habituated to how we live and the prism through which we make sense of the world that we put up with the restrictions, burdens, boredom and for some the nagging sense of a life unfulfilled because change takes effort and involves social, financial and self-esteem risks.

Our inclination to live as we have always done is the real impediment to whole-heartily addressing the ecological catastrophes and social justice issues that exist locally and globally. Ecologically these include the degradation of the life support systems we depend upon namely water, air, and in the case of organisms, their extinction. The latter includes not only birds and mammals but pollinators and the multitude of micro life-forms of which healthy soil is composed.

The most serious and prolific of social justice issues are those that are out of sight. Among these are the millions of underpaid and poorly treated workers shackled by overseers to workstations in China and countries in S.E. Asia who produce much of what people in Ireland regard as indispensable not least of which are clothes and digital devices.

Almost completely absent from our mental audit of the world is the human suffering and destruction to eco-systems caused by mining the raw materials that are used in the manufacture of these consumables as well as the ecological costs involved in the transportation, packaging, storage and eventual disposal of them. Few will be aware, as the thinktank Circle Economy tell us, that a colossal 106 billion tonnes of materials are used by the global economy every year. Much of this, even the things that can be resold, repaired and recycled, end up in landfill sites, and as has been well documented, in the marine environment.

Our complacency is such that instead of taking action to stop the bleeding of our living Earth we advocate that government and corporations increase the level of bleeding, deceiving ourselves of the reality of what we are doing. The euphemism for the butchering of our biosphere and the suffering it causes, especially to indigenous societies, is ‘economic growth’.

The idea that continual economic growth is an all-round good thing is so embedded in our psyche that the news presenters and commentators on media outlets that proudly claim to be impartial frame economic growth in celebratory terms and lament indicators of ‘economic stagnation’. This fossilised thinking is prevalent across our cultural firmament.

An illustrative example are the spring and summer weather forecasts. When this spring’s temperatures across our island reached 22 and 23 Celsius on a daily basis the weather presenters used cheery words when announcing the prospect of further dry days some going as far as encouraging their audience to light barbecues.

No mention is made of the fact that without regular rainfall the rivers, lakes, reservoirs and aquifers become depleted with the result that society suffers. This includes industry, agriculture, hospitals, schools, day centers and homes. Prolonged spells of high temperature cannot only cause inconvenience but they affect mortality rates. A study published in Nature reports that between June and September 2023 an estimated 47,690 people across Europe died from heat-related causes.

Climatologists describe extended hot dry periods as heat domes in which a large area of high pressure in the atmosphere traps hot air preventing it from escaping. It could be said that the predominate ideas concerning economics and what it means to live a meaningful life are trapped in a cultural heat dome. The dome is forged by the formal education system, religion, government policy, advertising and social media to the end of sustaining consumerism whose reason d’etre is not wellbeing but capital accumulation.

The expected outcome of the ideas trapped in our cultural heat dome is contained in the global warming statistics which indicate that the warming of the planet is on an upward trajectory and expected to reach between 2.5 and 2.9 Celsius above the pre-industrial level by the end of the century. This breaches the 2015 Paris Agreement’s 1.5 Celsius global warming threshold above which the edifice of global civilisation could well collapse.

A life-support system that shows every sign of functioning below the capacity required to sustain civilization is the collection of life forms known as biodiversity. Given that 75 % of global food crops are dependent on pollinators including bees, butterflies, bats and birds the rapid decline of these combined with the decrease of soil fertility could see the demise of the intensive agricultural system that has developed since the end of the Second World War.

In regard to this the International Trade Association informs us that 80% of the food eaten across the whole of our island is imported. This includes animal feed, fruit, nuts, vegetables as well as a wide range of processed foods. Our vulnerability, not only as an island people but as a global community, is compounded by the digitalisation of almost every sphere of our lives as well as our dependency on the complex, highly sensitised supply networks.

It is sobering to think that civilisation is the proverbial camel waiting for that last straw to be placed upon our back.

We, however, don’t have to accept the self-harming ideas trapped in our cultural heat dome. These include that nonhuman nature has no moral standing and there are no alternatives to continual economic growth and our highly circumscribed political democracy. These are not laws of nature. They are cultural, time specific, and can be changed through education. A good start would be for schools to teach the new generations how to process their emotions, critique ideas, make and repair, grow and preserve food in an ecologically friendly way and apply empathy in the nonviolent resolution of conflict.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: The recent wildfires

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News, , , ,

by Larry Speight –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eco-Awareness: Interdependencies and interconnections

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

With two children born into my extended family these past two weeks I am reminded that we are vulnerable, interdependent creatures liable to all types of mishaps most especially in our early and late years. If born with a disability or a medical condition we may live a life of acute vulnerability and dependency even during what otherwise would be our years of greatest strength, resilience, confidence and ability.

Evidence suggests that babies are aware of their vulnerability from the moment they are born and communicate their needs and anxieties to their parents and carers through crying and gurgling, the use of their limbs along with a range of facial expressions. As they grow and become more capable they rely less on physical support. The self-reliance of adulthood belies the fact that we are vulnerable our entire life through our immersion in a complex web of interdependencies.

A lack of awareness of our interdependencies is a disability on par with having a dormant antennae as we are unable to read the signs of impending ecological, economic and political upheaval if not utter disaster.

In hunter-gatherer, low intensity agricultural societies the extended family and community teach each new generation all the knowledge, skills, aptitudes and values they need to survive, thrive and live fulfilled, meaningful lives.

In industrialised digitally reliant societies like our own we supplement and reinforce the education received from family and community with a rigorous and minutely planned formal education system which inculcates children and young adults with the knowledge, skills, values and aptitudes it is thought they need to earn their livelihood and contribute to society. There are exceptions, in Northern Ireland a disproportionate number of inner-city working-class boys in Unionist communities leave school without the qualifications employers and higher educational institutions require.

In the 2024 – 2025 N.I. Executive budget £2.76 billion is reserved for education, which places it second in the expenditure league to that of health. Likewise in the Republic of Ireland. Its 2024 budget allocated 11.9 billion Euro to education placing it second in expenditure to that of health. This pattern of expenditure is the norm in high and middle-income countries. Yet, in spite of the importance countries regard formal education they fail to adequately prepare pupils to live in our interdependent and interconnected world.

An important reason for this is because governments and many parents view formal education through the lens of economic returns. Understandably parents are inclined to see formal education as the means that will enable their children to earn a decent salary throughout their working life. While governments regard formal education as essential to economic growth which Rachel Reeves, the UK Chancellor, never ceases to tell us is the UK government’s number one priority, its raison d’etre, the metric by which it thinks its tenure will be judged. This is something it shares with most governments regardless of what their political credo is on the left – right spectrum.

The goal of economic growth means nothing less than endless consumption which has catastrophic ecological consequences and is thus short-sighted and self-defeating. One of these consequences, as the World Bank informs us, is that 2.1 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste is generated every year of which, it is conservatively estimated, 33% is not treated in an ecologically safe way. In Fermanagh people throw away so much waste that the county’s only landfill site will have reached capacity much earlier than once expected.

The fixation on economic growth means that the entire Earth is considered a sacrifice zone to the end of enabling the transnational corporations and the exceedingly wealthy to accumulate money without end. President Trump’s “drill baby drill” rallying call encapsulates the widespread dearth of appreciation for the intricacy of the natural world.

The UK prime minister Keir Starmer, who regards economic growth as the be-all and end-all of government policy, is of the same mind as Donald Trump as is evident by his intention to weaken planning controls which were enacted to protect the nature that makes life possible for us all. The governments in both parts of our island are similarly minded.

Robert Kennedy in his presidential campaign speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968 clearly understood the life-impoverishing consequences of the religious-like veneration of economic growth as measured by Gross National Product saying that “it measures everything … except that which makes life worthwhile.”

One of the failures of formal education is that it does not equip pupils to understand the full measure of ecological and economic interdependencies. Grasping this helps us decipher the messages we are assailed with through the multiple media outlets about the nature of the world and the values and intentions of the key characters in the drama such as politicians and financiers.

In other words, knowing about our interdependencies and interconnectedness helps us discern fact from fiction, understand complexities, appreciate nuance and context which enhance our ability to make decisions that serve our interests, our local community and people in faraway places.

A case that aptly illustrates this, and effects the amount of money in our pocket, is that one of Donald Trump’s main election campaign promises was that he was going to introduce tariffs, which he said on innumerable occasions is the most beautiful word in the English dictionary. According to the research the majority of those who voted for him did so in the belief that tariffs would mean lower prices in the shops. The opposite is the case.

Pivotal decisions made on the basis of misunderstanding and ignorance are common and can largely be avoided through awareness of our interdependencies and interconnections. Schools are well placed to inculcate in the younger generation the practice of searching these out and most adults can integrate the practice into their own life. This is a critical aspect of education and as Mary Colwell, naturalist and author, recently said, as quoted in the Guardian: “Education is the most important thing we can do for the planet at this moment.”

Eco-Awareness: We are nature and it is us

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The anguish and pain that humans and nonhumans are enduring because of climate breakdown, the loss of bio-diversity, the pollution of rives, lakes and sea along with other human created harms could at root be attributed to believing that humans exist outside the orbit of what is conventionally thought of as the natural world.

This belief, which is an illusion as it is simply not true, can in part be attributed to religious doctrines which hold that of all the billions of species that have ever existed and might exist in the future, humankind is the only one that has a destiny outside of nature. This belief holds within it the idea that the Earth, with its neural-like connected life forms, is on a moral par with the merchandise we habitually discard.

The designation of the Earth as a thing rather than a being and the hubris of thinking that our species is exceptional, has in no small way led us at to treat the Earth as we see fit. We behave like the overseers of a factory deciding what resources to utilize and when. That these resources before they were extracted from their home place might have had qualities, relationships and self-interest does not concern us.

This misconception of our place in the natural order explains our individual and collective response to the collapse of the natural world. The response of governments and corporations to the ecological breakdowns is to employ what are thought to be technological remedies such as the replacement of petrol and diesel vehicles with electric ones, replacing the generation of electricity with solar, wind and nuclear and the use of so-called artificial intelligence to improve efficiencies.

The wellspring of these proffered solutions to our self-made ecological catastrophe is not to conserve what is left of the living Earth and enable the millions living in dire poverty to live better lives but to enable consumerism and the exploitative enterprises and structures it supports to continue unabated. Kate Crawford points this out in her very readable book Altas of Al (2021).

What is not open to discussion by those whose hands are on the steer of the global economy is the option of making a swift but orderly transition to a way of life that is not based on treating our biosphere as a thing and sustaining an economic political system that has been designed to enable the transnational corporations and finance companies to make extraordinarily large amounts of money. An alternative that is within our cultural frame of reference is communitarianism.

The nub of what communitarianism is can be found in the ancient texts. In the New Testament for instance, Acts 4. 32-36, reads: “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. … There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as had need.”

This practice of caring for each other is a lived experience in every Irish townland as witnessed in the aftermath of Storm Éowyn when neighbour helped neighbour to clear local roads of fallen trees, provided flasks of hot water to those who had no electricity and called on the vulnerable. The mobilisation of community resources to address needs was an integral part of rural life in Ireland until recent years. I recall in the mid-1990’s seeing farmers in County Fermanagh help each other bring in the harvest. This practice involved families working together officially began on Lughnasa, 1 August, and ended on Gleaning Sunday or Domhnach Deascan, the 15 August.

Implicit in the willingness to help each other is the predilection to see ourselves in the other, which is empathy. In this epoch of willfully destroying the Earth’s life support systems there is a need not only to help and cooperate but to see ourselves in nonhuman life-forms. We need to treat the biosphere, which means the waterways, flora, fauna, fungi and air in our neighbourhood, the places we walk through and where children play, as we want to be treated ourselves. In other words, we need to apply the Golden Rule of ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ to all life forms. That our society’s default mode is to behave otherwise does not nullify the ethical validity and survival value of the golden rule.

As the practice of working together as a community has a long pedigree so is the idea that Homo Sapiens are an integral part of nature. The evidence for the latter is recorded in Irish name places many of which refer to natural features and myths that suggest a reverence for the land. To give an example, one translation to English of the Irish name for the 33-mile long Sillees River, which originates in Lough Achork and flows through south-west Fermanagh,  is ‘Stream of the Fairies’. In times gone by the idea of fairies articulated the view of nonhuman nature as a sentient being which although at times difficult to understand deserved to be treated with respect.

The idea of ecosystems, geological features and nonhuman life-forms having the status of persons is not only a part of Irish mythology but one increasingly embraced by governments. An example is in late January the New Zealand government conferred legal personhood on Taranaki Maunga, a prominent mountain, granting it all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. In 2017 India granted the river Ganga and its largest tributary the Yamura the status of a person. Can we expect the Northern Ireland Assembly and the government in Dublin to grant personhood to rivers, hills, woods and even whole bioregions sometime in the near future?

We don’t need to wait for our institutions to become more enlightened in order to treat nonhuman nature with respect which I am sure our descendants will be glad we did.

Eco-Awareness: Trumpism and the burning of Los Angeles

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The burning of Los Angeles this January has more than any other extreme weather event impressed upon many people across our island that climate breakdown is a serious threat to their everyday life. These weather events include the floods that engulfed Valencia in Spain in 2024 killing 216 people, the drought in faraway Amazon which has devastated the biodiversity of the region and caused hardship to millions of people and the powerful typhoons which wreaked havoc in many regions of the world.

It is too early to know the extent to which Storm Éowyn, which left 250,000 premises in Northern Ireland and 725,00 in the Republic of Ireland without electricity can be attributed to global warming. However, as all things are connected it is likely that climatologists will attribute some of its ferocity to human behaviour.

The reason for the Los Angeles fires’ seismic impact on people’s sense of impunity is the percolation of the thought through layers of emotional resistance that if the homes, schools, health centres, places of worship and leisure facilities of the richest people in the world, living in the richest country in the world, can be erased as if hit by a nuclear bomb then a catastrophic weather event can happen to any community including one’s own.

Another reason the burning of Los Angeles awakened many to the seriousness of climate breakdown is the mythological status of the city. Los Angeles is not only the sprawling home of 4 million people but the affluent neighbourhoods embody the attributes of one of the United States’ most persuasive moral narratives, the American dream. The term, coined in 1931 by James Adam in his book The Epic of America, refers to a composite of affluence, wellbeing, technological convenience, personal fulfilment and community cohesion contained within a setting of designed elegance brought about through individual initiative and hard work.

In the popular imagination the rich neighbourhoods that turned to ash is where the immortals lived and to see flames consume their wealth reminded us of our earthiness, that we are mortal. This is a positive thing, most especially if the realization widens our circumference of compassion and makes us steadfast in our effort to create a local economy and international economic order based on the fact that we are an integral part of nature.

The costs to nonhuman life caused by the Los Angles fires can only be estimated but we know that 27 people were killed, 100,000 people had to be evacuated, 14,000 structures were destroyed, more than 16,000 hectares burnt and the estimated financial cost is $275 billion. To put these figurers in a local context the number of people evacuated is the size of the population of Limerick or three times the combined population of Enniskillen and Omagh and its cost exceeds the annual block grant Stormont receives from Westminster by a multiple of 20.

While the fires raged data from the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that the average global temperature for 2024 was more than 1.5 C above the pre-industrial baseline breaching the target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement. New Scientist, 18 January 2025, reports that many experts in the field think that keeping the average global temperature below the 1.5 C target is unachievable in spite of the increasing use of solar and wind energy.

There is little doubt that the temperature of the planet will continue to rise if President Trump is able to implement the environmental policies outlined in his inauguration speech which includes ending the Green New Deal, exporting “American energy all over the world” and building “automobiles in America … at a rate that nobody could have dreamt possible just a few years ago.”

In the manner President Trump was able to persuade constituencies he had gravely offended to vote for him he could persuade a significant number of governments and business leaders worldwide to fall in line with his war against the biosphere in the hope of reaping short-term financial gains.

A psychological strategy Trump used was to persuade people to align their sense of identity with regressive nationalistic myths. Thus, if a person is repeatedly told that they can play a part in making their country great they may deduce that they can become great, as in significant, through supporting Trump.

In the international political arena Trump is using coercive control in the form of threats to get governments to align their stance on issues with his.

Another factor that comes into play in the mechanics of denial and self-delusion is that of simultaneously knowing and not knowing the unmentionable. Fintan O’Toole explores this in relation to the Catholic Church and the Irish State’s joint oppression of women and children from the formation of the Irish State up until the passage of enlightened legislation in the 1970s.

In his book We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2021) He writes:

Ours was a society that had developed a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time.

Referring to a priest he says:

He knew that awareness is not acceptance, that seeing is not believing, that the obvious can remain obscure. (p.168)

Wilful blindness in the face of the obvious is not unique to Ireland but common across the globe as demonstrated by our anaemic response to the warming of the planet, our relentless extinction of nonhuman life, and the cruelty of factory farming in which animals, such as poultry, are denied the exercise of their natural inclinations and killed without every seeing the light of day.

The Labour government in the UK exemplifies this wilful blindness. Whilst they lament climate breakdown and the extinction of species they pursue the very policies that cause both. Like the priest referred to by O’Toole they act on the presumption that seeing is not believing.

The best way to detect the flaws in competing narratives and meet the ecological challenges of our time is to exercise our critical faculties and consider the legacy we ought to leave future generations whilst preparing for all manner of extreme weather events.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Trump and not joining the dots

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News, ,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

The economic power and cultural influence of the United States gives it global reach which means that the outcome of the country’s presidential elections affect people across the world including everyone on this small island. While the polls suggested there would be a close outcome in this year’s election the scale of Donald Trump’s win astounded many. He secured more votes than his contender Kamala Harris in almost every demographic and received a sizeable number of votes in constituencies he offended. One such was the Puerto Rican community whose country a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square rally described as a “floating island of garbage”.

What accounts for Trump’s clear win? The polls indicate that the majority of people who voted for him did so because they thought that the economy was not serving them well in terms of the price of groceries and other day-to-day items. The intriguing thing is why did his supporters not realize that to put up tariffs on imported goods, as Trump has pledged he will, can only but lead to a steep rise in the cost of living. (*1)

Why did so many people from Central and South America vote for Trump when he was adamant that he was going to summarily deport undocumented immigrants who he said are not people but “animals” who were “poisoning the blood” of the country. (*2) Most of the undocumented he was referring to come from south of the US border which means that people originating from there will be continually asked by government officials and law enforcement officers to verify their status. This can only mean a life of anxiety and harassment and grief when family and friends are deported.

Voters troubled about the cost of living should not only have been concerned about Trump’s pledge to raise tariffs but his intention to deport undocumented immigrants as it is these people, thought to number between 11 and 20 million, who make up more than half the workforce in agriculture and food processing. (*3) Their removal will lead to deprivations and higher prices.

In other words, whatever the demographic, including millionaires, to vote for Trump was to vote against one’s interests which is a form of self-harm. This is counter to one of the cardinal views held about humans since the Age of the Enlightenment and is central to the capitalist construct which is that we are primarily creatures of self-interest. The reason why the wealthy won’t, in the long term, benefit from the triumph of Trumpism is because they, like every living entity on the planet, are dependent on the climatic conditions we have enjoyed since the end of the last ice age.

A reliable indicator of what Donald Trump’s second presidential term will be like can be gauged from his first term when he annulled over 100 rules and regulations that had been enacted to protect the country’s web of ecosystems from coast to coast, desert to forest. The rules and regulations included ones governing clear air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals all critical to the health and wellbeing not only of people in the United States but the entire planet as global warming emissions affect us all. A special report by the New York School of Law, March 2019, found that annulling these rules and regulations caused thousands of premature deaths in the United States and a significant increase in chronic illnesses, the majority occurring among those on low incomes.

Akin to the double-think of the ruling elite in George Orwell’s novel 1984 this roll back of rules designed to protect nonhuman life, the integrity of ecosystems and the health of the nation was carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The evidence suggests that during his second presidential term Trump will wage war against nonhuman nature with a vengeance as the person he has nominated as Administrator of the EPA is former New York Republican congressman Lee Zeldin. It is expected that top of Zeldin’s to do list will be to rescind the EPA’s most effective measures to reduce global warming emissions from vehicle exhaust pipes, power stations, oil and gas wells. Further, he will likely make many of the agency’s scientific advisors and researchers redundant.

As to be expected other Trump nominations share his worldview. Notable among these is Chris Wright who has been nominated as Energy Secretary. Wright is a fossil fuel executive who is an evangelist for the oil and gas industry and a vocal critic of efforts to reduce global warming emissions.

Given that Trump regards the United States as an extension of himself and made it clear that he would align the country with his imperialist paradigm if elected why did he receive the broad mandate he did? The answer, to quote William Shakespeare in his play Julius Caesar, is that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves ..”

Simply put Trump is not the problem as his second term as president is the will of the electorate. The fault, as in many countries including this archipelago, is that those who voted for him passively ingested what they were told by someone who presented themselves as their Saviour who could create Heaven on Earth, or in secular terms, Make America Great Again. As Trump told his audience and the world in his victory speech:

“Many people have told me that God saved my life for a reason. The reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.” (*4)

Leaving aside the question of when the United States could be said to have been great the fact that neither the electorate or media questioned the meaning of the term underscores the body politics’ unwillingness or inability to analyse competing paradigms. A plausible reason is that many peoples’ beliefs are enmeshed in their sense of identity and intuitively know that if the former is undermined or invalidated so is the latter. I suspect that for many of Trump’s fervent supporters invalidation would result in them feeling existentially lost and/or socially ostracised and that their dread of both is on a par with their dread of their or a loved one’s death. Sadly, this means that for this cohort of supporters arguments about the folly of voting for Trump are likely to result in reinforcing their support for him in an attempt to prevent themselves being lost in an existential wilderness.

This defensive if not passive disposition likely originates in educational, media and ecclesiastic cultures that discourage people from critically examining ideas, scrutinising orthodoxy and questioning taboos. Clearly those who voted for Trump never joined the dots and were not cognisant that we live in an interconnected, interdependent, consequential world in which it is healthy and astute to continually review one’s ideas towards the end of being a thoughtful neighbour and a good ancestor.

–

References:

(*1) Trumponomics tees off, The Economist, 16th-22nd November 2024

(*2) Maggie Astor, New York Times, 17 March 2024.

(*3) Trumponomics tees off, The Economist, 16th-22nd November 2024.

(*4) Harvest Prude, Donald Trump Takes the White House Again, Christianity Today, 6 November 2024.

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Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Not acting on what we know

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

One of the strands of modernity, perhaps its backbone, is the belief that we are rational beings. We tell ourselves that our decisions, especially critically important ones, are based on careful consideration of all the available information, a balancing of the pros and cons, align with our values and will help us achieve our goals. This thesis, like the fallacy of common sense, is based on the idea that we act on the basis of self-interest. A flaw in this idea is that many of us often don’t know what is in our self-interest and on many of the occasions that we can with confidence say that we know we don’t follow through.

A wisdom we can draw from this is that knowing on its own won’t save us from our follies both as individuals and a species. It is important to apply this when thinking about how we can best reconfigure our relationship with nonhuman nature.

What is clear from the evidence is that how we live today, and have being living since the advent of the industrial revolution, is not ecologically sustainable nor does it serve the interests of the majority of human beings and other sentient creatures including future generations.

The facts speak for themselves as made available through a number of peer reviewed studies published this October. One of these, the 2024 State of the Climate Report, published in Bio Science, informs us that out of 35 vital ecological signs that were assessed in 2023, 25 were the worst ever recorded. These include greenhouse gas emissions, the increasing size of the human population, which is growing by two million every ten days, the increase in the number of cattle and sheep, which are growing by 1.7 million every ten days, the rate at which glaciers are melting and the rate of deforestation.

The State of Global Water Resources, by the World Meteorological Office, informs us that in 2023 rivers across the globe dried up at the highest rate in three decades and that more than 50% of river catchment areas were in deficit.

A report with equally worrying findings is that by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London which found that wildlife populations worldwide have decreased by 73% in 50 years. Locally, the Northern Ireland Office for the Protection of the Environment found in its October 2024 report that the province has lost 50% of its biodiversity since 1970.

Sit for a moment and imagine how impoverishing and debilitating this loss of wildlife is.

If the trend continues in fifty years’ time we will have turned the world into a mosaic of dead zones where the only nonhuman life will be straight lines of monocultural crops regularly fed and protected by a range of toxic chemicals, which we in turn will ingest. With regard to oceans and lakes scientists tell us that they will contain more plastic than fish. This is but a segment of the nightmare world each one of is playing a part in creating

The report on water tells us that this autumn 3.6 billion people have inadequate access to water for at least one month a year. What we might ask will the number be when major rivers which are used for transport, irrigation, fishing, manufacturing, domestic consumption as well as generating electricity dry up? This has already begun to occur through a change in rainfall patterns brought about by global warming, mass deforestation, and the disappearance of the glaciers that feed the rivers that billions of people depend upon.

If in 2024 high-income countries think that unregulated immigration is a problem then how will they view today’s situation in a few decades time when billions of people find that were they live is fast becoming uninhabitable?

Summarizing the dire state the planet Professor William Ripple at Oregon State University and a co-author of the Climate Report said that:

“A large portion of the very fabric of life on our planet is imperiled. We are already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardizes the life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen.”

The all-important question is why when we know the dire state the Earth is in and how to rectify this don’t we act on what we know? By way of comparison if we discover we have a serious illness we do all we can to get better even undergo unpleasant procedures such as chemotherapy in the case of cancer. Why don’t we behave likewise in regard to our critically ill biosphere when the consequences of ignoring the issues will likely be the painful end of human civilization?

A plausible reason is the narrative many have internalised about our species’ place in the world which is that we exist outside the laws that pertain in the rest of the biosphere and that our lives and fate are separate from it. The belief means, bar a few exceptions, that we don’t apply the moral codes that regulate how we treat each other to nonhuman nature. A poignant example is the horrendous suffering endured by the billions of animals reared in what, if humans were kept in similar conditions, would be called concentration camps.

Not regarding nonhuman nature as a moral agent has become so embedded in the modern psyche by organised religion among other agencies and in spite of secularisation is held to be as incontestable as the force of gravity. The idea that we exist outside of nonhuman nature is encapsulated in texts which billions believe is the literal word of God. One such, which is attributed to Jesus, is: “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36). Believing in this credo, which engenders indifference to the wellbeing of the Earth, not only helps account for our destruction of it but for warfare and might be the determining and final thought of the person, if it ever happens, who presses the nuclear button.

Eco-Awareness: Valuing our waterways

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Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

When I was a boy of about five or six I would sometimes tilt my head back and open my mouth to catch the rain believing that it was as drinkable as the water that came out of the kitchen tap. This I later learnt was not true as the rain contained contaminates from factories, vehicle exhaust pipes and home fires.

All of these, and a host of other contaminates, have to be removed from the water piped into our homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, offices and factories. This means that although water is free at the point of use, collecting, storing, processing, transporting and then cleaning the water after use costs a great deal of money.

Given that clean water is vital to life and to the smooth functioning of society one might think that we place an exceedingly high value on it but we don’t.

If we did then the waterways on this island, which are oblivious to political borders, would be in excellent health from which hill walkers could draw water to make a hot brew and swimmers stretch their limbs. This, as scientific reports and personal experience tell us, is not the case. Everyone who pays attention to the local and national media would know that not only are the bodies of fresh water across these islands a danger to human and other life but the lack of water infrastructure prevents the building of new homes and other amenities.

The Fermanagh based Impartial Reporter highlighted this in a recent special report on the pollution of Lough Erne and the negative social and economic consequences. Lough Neagh suffers from similar but much worse pollution. In regards to Lough Neagh members of the public in mid-Ulster informed the BBC’s The Nolan Show, 13 September, that the water coming out of their taps tasted so foul they could not drink it. NI Water assured the public that it was safe to drink.

Fergal Sharkey, a clean water activist and one-time lead singer of the Northern Ireland punk-rock group the Undertones, is quoted in The Belfast Telegraph as saying of the N.I. Water Authority that: “It does not need plans. It does not need strategies. It simply needs the current law enforced.” This deduction means that the responsibility for the deplorable condition of water in Northern Ireland, and other jurisdictions, lies with the government minister in charge. In Northern Ireland this is Andrew Muir. As the pollution of Northern Ireland’s waterways is a result of neglect over a long number of years previous ministers in charge of water are also responsible for its deplorable state.

Why do ministers, and bodies with statutory responsibility for our water, turn a blind eye to the scientific evidence and the experiences of those who have suffered illness or loss of income because of the pollution? I would venture that the reason is that they see their job as primarily to facilitate profit making regardless of the cost to ecosystems and human health. This is the case not only on our island but in countries around the world whose bodies of water are also polluted,

This was vividly illustrated by the N.I. Executive’s 2013 Going for Growth strategy which prioritised the expansion and profit-making of the agri-food industry at the expense of the protection of waterways, biodiversity and human health. Evidence that supports this contention is that slurry, which is a mixture of livestock manure and water, and is spread on grassland, is mentioned only once in the 85-page Going for Growth document.

Slurry, which is heavy in nitrogen and phosphorus and is likely to contain the residue of antibiotics, finds its way into our streams, rivers and lake, and is a major contributor, along with untreated sewage, to the growth of blue-green algae which afflicts Lough Erne and Lough Neagh as well as other bodies of water. In 2023 blue-green algae found its way by means of the River Bann onto the north coast. This year it was confirmed in Portrush harbour.

The Going for Growth strategy is a classic example of compartmentalised thinking and reflects the prevailing view, which is contrary to the evidence, that our species exists a part from nonhuman nature, or what is often called the natural world. This sense of disconnection is in large part the result of us living in an increasingly complex technological world.

In regards to our acquisition of water we in high-income countries pull a cord, push a button, turn a tap or push down on a handle without having a clue about where the water comes from, where it goes, its real financial cost or its ecological value. This is the case in regards to almost everything we consume underscoring the case that most of us, including those with doctorates or are highly skilled in a particular field, live in a knowledge vacuum.

The sphere of our ignorance about the things that underpin our way of life is cosmic. It is a vast black hole of not knowing about the materials that common appliances such as smart phones, laptops, motor vehicles, medications and foot ware are made of. Most of us don’t know where the raw materials were mined, processed and manufactured into finished products. We know nothing about the nature of the working conditions and wages paid to all the people along this chain including the inventors, financiers, advertisers, accountants, lawyers, the people who place shop orders, track their delivery across multiple countries and process the relevant forms.

In regards to our polluted waterways we have the expectation of having drinkable water at the turn of a tap no matter what building we are in, the time of day and regardless of whether there is a prolonged drought or a deep flood. We want water whatever the circumstance, or restriction on the quantity, without being prepared, in the broadest sense, to pay for its actual cost which is a disposition predicated on us not appreciating its real value.

Eco-Awareness with Larry Speight: Anti-Immigrant violence and our destruction of the biosphere

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If you think the recent anti-immigrant violence across these islands and the declining health of the biosphere have nothing in common you would be wrong. They are both underpinned by dysfunctional ideas that have become as familiar as the wallpaper in our living room that we have ceased to notice them. That is until a calamity occurs such as the August riots, the blue-green algae on Lough Erne and Lough Neagh as well as last year’s climate-related flooding of Downpatrick and Newry. When such disturbing and preventable events occur we are initially taken by surprise and then realise that metaphorically we had fallen asleep at the wheel and were not paying attention to the social and environmental signals.

The anti-immigrant violence appears to have arisen out of mis- and disinformation spread by individuals with ill-intent and taken to be true by people who feel that it confirms their biases and who are disposed to express their affronted feelings through violence. The narrative they appear to have ingested is that they, the economically disadvantaged, are being further economically discriminated against in favour of recent arrivals who are identifiable by their skin colour, religion, name, accent or form of dress.

In regard to the declining health of the biosphere mis- and disinformation is propagated by the fossil fuel industries, transnational corporations and public influencers about the reasons for this as well as proffering insubstantial solutions. The cause is overwhelmingly attributed to individual choices rather that corporate strategies, and the solutions offered are mostly cosmetic, calibrated to resonate with the basic human bias against change, most especially our reluctance to undertake the life-style changes needed in order to avoid the expiration of civilisation along with many other species.

Another commonality between the anti-immigrant violence and our abuse of the Earth is a sense of disconnection and consequent lack of empathy. Judging from the dehumanising language used it seems the anti-immigrant violence is based on the view that the new arrivals are a category of human fundamentally different from them. This is not only categorically incorrect but wilful self-deception, which supported by incorrect information about the allocation of public resources, underpinned by simmering resentments, provided the basis for people, mostly males, to vent their aggression on those they labelled as different / alien / foreign.

As with the failure of some to connect and feel empathy for the new arrivals much of society is bereft of the ability to feel connected with the biosphere and feel compassion for the sorry plight of many of its persecuted species who, like us, have needs and interests. Feeling connected with the natural world is not a matter of taste but an imperative for without its diversity and renewing abilities we will cease to exist.

The case that our collective sense of disconnection from the natural world reduces our chances of survival in the both the immediate and long term is verified by the annual premature death of millions through living lives of extreme hardship due to loss of land, livelihood and home brought about by extreme weather conditions arising from our warming of the planet. A study published in the August edition of Nature Medicine illustrates this, calculating that 47,690 people in Europe died prematurely in 2023 due to hot weather, while the World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030, 250,000 people worldwide will die due to climate breakdown.

The inhospitable living conditions caused by climate breakdown are further exasperated by air pollution, the decrease in supplies of fresh water, fertile soil and people having to work in health destroying environments for the equivalent of a few pounds a day.

Arresting those who intimidate immigrants and putting them on trial, as should happen, is dealing with the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem which in large part can be attributed to the widespread lack of critical thinking involving the ability to disassemble and test the information we are exposed to whatever its source. The practice includes fact checking, contextualising, identifying bias, analysing cognitive dissonance and platitudes and asking what information and discourse is not in the public domain that should be. Changing our minds is one of the positive outcomes of critical thinking and contrary to what many believe it does not suggest feebleness but rather the opposite.

Critical thinking should be regarded as essential to wellbeing and active citizenship as knowing the Green Cross Code and putting litter in the bin. It is imperative that it is an integral part of the school curriculum beginning in Primary One and continuing into third level education.

There should be no sacred cows, as unfortunately there are in schools as well as the print and broadcasting media. Making an exception for even one body of belief or cultural tradition gives licence to all who adhere to ascribed beliefs to plead exemption on any number of grounds. These can be economic efficiency as embodied in the orthodoxy that there is no alternative to economic growth. Or beliefs thought to be sacred as contained in the Bible, the Quran and the Vedas, or a cultural myth of which there are many.

As we live in an interdependent world the teaching of critical thinking should be universal based perhaps on a UNESCO charter – one that references a nonviolent approach to resolving conflict and the necessity of living in a way that allows our nonhuman neighbours to live according to their nature free from persecution.

The anti-immigrant violence and the degradation of our living planet can at root be attributed to our failure to recognize that every living thing is of ourselves and that we are all immersed in the organic and human instigated churnings of life.

We are passengers on the same ship and we have to hone our critical faculties in order to avoid becoming ensnared in a web of false assumptions and deliberate untruths that undermine our ability to live fulfilling lives in a way that does not prevent others, including future generations, from doing likewise.