Tag Archives: Wildfires

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: The fires in North America

Eco-Awareness, Nonviolent News, , , ,

Larry Speight brings us his monthly column –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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