Cassandra Voices

Category: Science & Environment

  • It is Time to Change the Environmental Story

    There will ultimately occur conflagration of the whole world … nothing will remain but fire, by which, as a living being, and a god, once again a new world may be created and the ordered universe restored as before.
    Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum ‘On the Nature of Gods’ (45BCE)

    I –Buddha in the Garden

    On a recent trip to Belfast my attention was drawn to a small statue of the Buddha in the garden of a house I was staying. In a cityscape distinguished by myriad places of Christian worship – from ‘low’ church chapels with gaudy signs, to matronly Anglican churches, and looming Catholic cathedrals – I wondered whether greater devotion towards the ideals of the contented-looking representation before me would prove more conducive to reconciliation than pathways offered by Christian sects, alike in their devotion to a single biblical source.

    Can the tenets of any religion be dismissed as projections of economic and other power relations? A materialist conception certainly explains a lot – the use of doctrine for political ends such as keeping women in servitude – but is at odds with curious dynamics internal to traditions. Adherents may be urged into irrational acts, from welcoming a stranger into their homes on appointed days, to growing beards to a certain length. These do not appear fitted to please any capitalist overseer.

    Marx recognised the suffering which impels faith in the deliverance of a higher power. Nonetheless, he viewed belief in the supernatural as an opiate, and a superstition to be overcome on the road to a rational Communism. Missing from that materialist school of thought, however, is acknowledgement of the possibility of ‘magical thinking’ co-existing with scientific rationality, even in the same brain. As the Danish physicist Neils Bohr put it: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function (Turok, 2012, p.77).’

    There may of course be irreconcilable tensions between religion and science, as with the museum that Creationists have built to provide an account of the nearby Giants Causeway to fit with ‘Biblical history’. This may lead to a perception that battle has been joined between the values of the Enlightenment and barbaric fundamentalists. This could, however, lead to a denial of the creative fictions contained in religions.

    Perhaps the main reason that religions endure in ‘advanced’ technological societies is because they offer a trove of stories the loss of which would diminish our humanity. The fables emanating from the sacred texts of Christianity are interpreted by each generation in novel ways. This can involve a setting aside of scientific evidence, as where Kerry TD Danny Healy Rae says God is responsible for the weather and thus Climate Change too, but not always. The account may involve a weighing of moral scales, where virtue is rewarded, and vice punished.

    The will of God, or gods, may seem capricious – as where Abraham agrees to sacrifice his first born son – but might also yield powerful insights. Many atheists fixate on the interpretations of religious dogmatists, and do not allow for creative ambiguities, which a mind open to magical thinking, however fleetingly, accommodates.

    It is, nonetheless, fair to say that the bible, the main corpus of the various Christian faiths, enjoins belief in one God ‘the Almighty’, which is shared with its monotheistic cousins Judaism and Islam. History suggests this story lends itself to appropriation by male autocrats justifying absolute power.

    But are the mythologies of Ancient Greece and Rome which furnished their religions, or the animist faiths of tribal societies, any less prone to dominance by power-hungry males? Certainly the father of the Greek gods Zeus was a bit of a scoundrel. Are animists necessarily kinder to the earth than ‘people of the book’? This is unclear because animists religions have never exercised the kind of dominion over the Earth that the bookish people wield.

    The peculiarity of Buddhism is that it is a both a religion which indulges in magical stories, and a philosophy, albeit one requiring a leap of faith into the idea of karma, which says the actions of an individual affects that person in this and subsequent lives. It is well-adapted as a method of self-improvement, impelling restraint, but the Buddha in his meditative posture seems a little removed from the cut and thrust of this world for my liking; that story by itself cannot sate my appetite for ‘true’ fictions.

    Art is a repository of fictions, often requiring a suspension of belief, and a surrender to magical thinking. This is the wonder we feel when staring into ‘the heavens’ of a Renaissance basilica’s ceiling, or as we enter ‘the world’ of a novel. In many respects being an artist is akin to a religious vocation, an idea which co-habitats slightly uncomfortably with any economic assessment of utility.

    The twentieth century has witnessed the implosion of many hallowed artistic forms leading to what Edward Clarke has described as post-modern decrepitude, but the fictions keep bubbling up through popular songs, cinema, and perhaps in the new wave of virtual reality via the digital medium.

    II – ‘The only thing that can displace a story is a story’

    Environmentalists are prone to despondency, as most of humanity blithely ignores scientific projections. Despite repeated warnings of the dire consequence of Climate Change, and the Sixth Extinction which has seen humanity wipe out sixty percent of the Earth’s wildlife since 1970, behavioural change is painfully slow.

    Last year George Monbiot proposed a simultaneously simple but elusive solution: change the story, writing:

    Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals. We all possess a narrative instinct: an innate disposition to listen for an account of who we are and where we stand.

    Monbiot argues that a string of facts, however accurate, will not correct or dislodge a powerful story, and often simply provoke indignation if a prior narrative ‘truth’ has been established. ‘The only thing’, he says, ‘that can displace a story is a story’. He concludes that those ‘who tell the stories run the world’.

    Currently it is fair to say that the neo-liberal ‘story’ is ascendant. The American Dream, that anyone can be successful as long as the pesky state does not impose red tape and steal their hard-earned lucre, still animates many. The corollary is a fatalistic narrative which sees no other outcome than a steady slide into an ecological abyss.

    To alter these stories we could understand better their primary means of conveyance: natural languages, which, unlike mathematics, have evolved in humans through use and repetition, without conscious planning or premeditation.

    The fate of human languages has mirrored the fate of animals in Nature. The seminal technology of writing – a secondary modelling system based on a prior system of spoken language – standardised dialects previously subject to inter-flow and cross-fertilization. This brought a hitherto unexperienced permanence, superseding oral recitation in poetry, which changed subtly with each telling. We can only now look back on that oral universe preceding writing through the prism of our own literary universe.

    According to Walter Ong: ‘Writing or script differs as such from speech in that it does not inevitably well up out of the unconscious.’ He asserts nonetheless that writing ‘heightens consciousness’ by creating distance, or objectivity. He adds: ‘though inspiration continues to derive from unconscious sources, the writer can subject the unconscious inspiration to far greater conscious control than the oral narrator.’

    This profoundly altered ways of thinking: interiorizing consciousness; allowing unprecedented analysis in philosophy; and providing a recording apparatus crucial to scientific enquiry. According to Ong: ‘examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading. (Ong, 1982, pp.77-94)’ This tool has allowed man to assert control over Nature. Technologies accumulate as knowledge is passed down through generations, and interrogated in texts.

    Later, print technology reduced the number of dominant languages, enforced by military and economic might. Less than one hundred human societies developed vernacular literatures. Thousands of languages perished, their marvels scattered like desert sands beneath towering pyramids.

    Now with the arrival of the Internet barely a dozen languages exert an irresistible pull on those still standing. It is not inconceivable that the various translation tools we have at our disposal will reduce human communication to a single language, English most likely.

    II – Agricultural and Technological Revolutions

    Similarly, with the domestication of animals (cattle, pigs and sheep especially) and plants (principally wheat, rice and corn) over the course of the First Agricultural Revolution (from c. 10,000 BCE) homo sapiens – already in possession of fire and domesticated dogs – became dominant in most fertile regions of the world. It was then that exploitation of the biosphere commenced in earnest, although early humans had previously wiped out megafauna, once they migrated out of Africa.

    It is no coincidence that writing was invented in the Middle East, where agricultural surpluses first freed a small intellectual strata from the demands of labouring to produce food. Henceforth agriculture and writing would form a mutually-enforcing alliance.

    The development in Europe of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg circa, 1450 – as well as improvements in the quality and supply of paper – helped bring the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. The improved legibility of texts permitted rapid, silent reading. This created further scope for interiorization of consciousness, a defining feature of the Western mind.

    There followed a Second Agricultural Revolution – involving improvement in crop and animal breeding, enclosure of estates and the adoption of new machinery – that swept through north-west Europe in the eighteenth century, placing further pressure on wildlife habitats. Thus, the last Irish wolf was hunted to extinction in 1783, by which time most of the island’s native forests had been stripped away to make way for agriculture, especially cattle.

    The rapid dissemination of ideas brought by the Gutenberg Press was also instrumental in the colonisation of the globe by Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards. This presented new lands and pre-agricultural peoples to exploit, as well as a fruitful exchange between the primary food crops and domesticated animals of the Americas (including corn, potato and turkey) and Eurasia (especially wheat, rice, cows, pigs and sheep).

    Apart from genocide, plague and irredeemable cultural loss, this brought annihilation to wildlife, particularly in the Americas where megafauna such as the buffalo were wiped out in the nineteenth century, to make way for cattle.

    The mid-twentieth century witnessed the Third Agricultural Revolution, or Green Revolution, including widespread adoption of newly-invented artificial fertilizer, derived from natural gas using the Haber-Bosch process, mechanisation, and the development of high-performing cultivars. This raised crop yields prodigiously allowing human population to increase from one and a half billion in 1900 to over seven billion today.

    Now in this the Anthropocene many free animals survive only through piecemeal human protection. Our dominance extends to every continent, while thousands of species die out each year. Ecocide continues apace in the Amazon rainforest, and elsewhere.

    The Internet – our latest communication breakthrough – places further pressure on minority languages. Will it accelerate the Sixth Extinction and devastating Climate Change? Or could it shatter a long-standing perception of a divide between the rights of homo sapiens and all other species? Can we move from human rights towards a more expansive idea of rights for all of Nature? To do so we must change the story.

    IV – The Greek Legacy

    The first comprehensive writing system, cuneiform, was developed in Sumeria, just over five thousand years ago, diffusing slowly around the globe.

    Later the Ancient Greek alphabet accurately fixed the sound of language for the first time by introducing vowels as letters. This according to Ong ‘analyzed sound more abstractly into purely spatial components (Ong, 1982, p.90)’, making it easier for anyone to attain literacy. It allowed fuller description than unvocalised Semitic scripts, or pictographic alphabets such as Chinese, whose vast number of characters lends itself to educational elitism.

    The breakthrough in script seems to explains the extraordinary eruption of Ancient Greek culture which laid the foundations of Western music, mathematics, philosophy and literature. Regrettably however, through Plato especially, the notion of human superiority over all other animals was implanted, a philosophical assumption that furnished the Abrahamic faiths with reasoned justification for the mythology of man being made in the image of God.

    This idea of a divine right over Nature became axiomatic, even surviving the profound questioning of religious assumptions in the Enlightenment. This is the story we must change.

    V – Virtual Reality

    The Internet brings unmatched access to knowledge: a universal human library. A young child can easily access information about the plight of other animals, and develop an understanding of the looming threat of Climate Change. But the technology also has an as yet unchecked capacity to distract and isolate, especially through the smart phone device. How are we are we then to reach a point where we accept the true fiction that any one individual’s life can make a difference?

    The physicist Neil Turok describes the digital format as, ‘the crudest, bluntest, most brutal form of information that we know.’ In this form, he says, everything is reduced to ‘finite strings of 0s and 1s’, with analogue information ‘infinitely richer. (Turok, 2012, p.230)’ The Internet effectively conveys attenuated images and sounds, but other sensations, and connections, are unavailable, even those conveyed in seemingly obsolete books. This suggests it could breed isolation, perhaps compounding an apathy towards ecological collapse.

    Yet through the Internet we demystify specialisations in various domains; text shifts into pictographic emoticons; hyperlinks move us beyond the linear progress of the book form; video is cinema-for-all – while photographs implant images telling a thousand tales; the division between virtual and real collapses, especially in gaming technology. There is also another avenue for the spoken word, via traditional ‘radio’ stations, and the podcast is a powerful new medium, offering an opening for the revival of oral poetry perhaps.

    Down through the ages poetry has been in metaphorical play with Nature, while novels generally move into the interior world of the narrator. In the latter, phenomena such as storms or floods tend not to intrude – they serve no moral purpose – whereas the ancient poet is in dialogue with a cosmos of which he is at the centre. Poets used mythologies to bind peoples into a singular tribal identity.

    For the ancients, whose laws and customs were conveyed through poetry, disastrous weather was seen as punishment by the gods, perhaps for failure to perform the requisite sacrifices. In contrast, the rational person-of-the-book, explains bad weather in terms of air currents moving around the globe, and reasons there is nothing one person can possibly do to alter these conditions. Novels according to Amitav Gosh:

    conjure up worlds that became real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness. Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created, nor will they refer to the passage of a thousand year: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delineated horizon of a novel (Gosh, 2016, p.61).

    The earlier poetic view, however obscurantist, actually offers a greater likelihood of someone taking responsibility for their actions, as the person-of-the-book may more easily dwell in his interior world. How then can we reconcile scientific reason with a belief that individual actions feed into a collective responsibility?

    Can Homo Digitalas move beyond her solitary life into a universal scheme of responsibility? If we believe ourselves to be part of a greater whole the possibility for collective action may yet arise. The Internet may broaden the fiction of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’, enlivening what is a scientific myth of Gaia: an imagined community of Nature, including ourselves.

    The novel, written from the perspective of the solitary individual at a fixed moment could pass into obscurity. The Internet can engender new artistic forms closer to the spoken tradition of poetry, with a common vision in aeons and origins. An older relationship with the word might be restored, with mythology and scientific rationality co-habiting to create a new story.

    Already, however, we see social and political cleavages opening up, linked to the arrival of the new medium. Just as the rupture of Gutenberg’s Press awoke sectarian identities, leading to the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century, similarly the fingerprints of a technological shift seem evident in contemporary clashes.

    To realise fresh narratives out of the Internet we need to adapt our behaviour, tempering our dependence on the smartphone device. An interface less conducive to isolation is surely necessary.

    In the meantime Nature groans under the weight of human exploitation, and we demand a Fourth Agricultural Revolution bringing humans and other animals into an elusive symbiosis. Few languages may survive the Internet, but that technology may help engender a unifying mythology, maintaining our precious Nature. Without this we seem doomed.

    References

    Amitav Gosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016.
    Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Metheun, London, 1982.
    Neil Turok, The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos, Faber, London, 2012.

  • Animal Proteins Make Cancers Grow No Matter What the Original Cause

    The possibility of an association existing between animal protein and cancer goes back at least to the 1960s.  At that time in the Philippines, a slowly increasing incidence of liver cancer was taking place amongst children that carried a high mortality rate. Because such cancers were very rare in this age group, news of the outbreak spread to the USA and prompted Virginia Tech. University to send a young nutritional scientist over there to see what was going on. His name was T. Colin Campbell.

    Even before this visit took place researchers had already come to the conclusion that dietary factors were the most likely cause of the cancer, as the onset of the disease appeared to coincide with the discovery that large areas of the peanut crop had become infected by a fungus. It was, therefore, believed that the fungus was carcinogenic for the liver, and this theory was considerably reinforced when it was discovered that new cases of the disease plummeted as soon as children were instructed to avoid peanuts from fungus infected areas.

    I – Campbell in the Philippines

    That was how matters stood when Colin Campbell arrived on the scene. By then, not alone were researchers confident that the exact cause of the cancer was known, they were also satisfied that they could prevent new cases developing, simply by ensuring that peanuts from fungus-infected-areas were not eaten. In fact, all that seemed to remain for Campbell to do was to familiarize himself with the research that had taken place, and to read some of the case histories that had been documented.

    It was while this evaluation was taking place, however, that a very puzzling statistic came to the researchers’ attention. It was discovered that it was only children from wealthy families that were dying of the disease; children from poor families, although they appeared to eat just as many peanuts as rich children, did not develop the cancer, much less die of it.

    This was such a strange finding that doctors were forced to consider the possibility that factors other than peanuts might also be playing a role in the development of the cancer. It was decided, therefore, to identify all the major dietary differences that existed between the two groups of children. It was a task that proved surprisingly easy as it quickly became apparent that the main dietary difference between them was in the amount of animal protein being consumed.

    Children from rich families ate lots of animal protein in the form of milk, cheese, eggs, poultry and all sorts of meats and these were precisely the foods that poorer families often could not afford.

    It was a bit of a dilemma. If indeed it was only children of the rich that were developing liver cancer then one would have to conclude that there existed an association existed between the proteins that rich children were eating and the growth of the cancer. Few doctors could have felt entirely comfortable with this assumption, however, as it had long been acknowledged that animal protein was the most nutritious food that money could buy.

    When shortly thereafter Campbell headed back to the USA these were the thoughts that were buzzing about in his head. Certainly there was convincing evidence that the liver cancer outbreak in the Philippines was primarily due to a fungal infection of the peanut crop, but what then was one to make of the fact that it was only the children of the rich, eating lots of animal protein, that were dying from the disease?

    Bewildering questions sometimes turn out to have very simple answers and this was one such case.  It was Colin Campbell that solved the riddle. What occurred to him was that if indeed animal protein was so wonderfully nutritious for the cells of humans and many other animals, then surely they would also be highly nutritious for these same cells should they become malignant. Indeed one might even suspect that cancer cells, with their inherent characteristic of out-of-control-replication, might actually require the nutritional power of animal proteins, if they were to thrive and grow.

    II – Laboratory Tests

    Once back in the United States, Campbell set to work and began by checking the medical literature, in case some research might have taken place on the subject of liver cancer that had previously escaped his eye.

    To his surprise he found that there was one scientific paper published by two Indian researchers in ‘The Archives of Pathology’ from February 1968. These researchers, Madhavan and Gopalan, must have been on much the same track then as Campbell was now. They too were interested in the apparent association between animal protein and liver cancer, and they had carried out research that involved setting up experiments using laboratory rats.

    All the rats were first exposed to some well known carcinogens with the intention of causing at least some of their liver cells to develop cancer.  One group of the rats was then kept on a diet containing 20% animal protein in the form of casein from cows’ milk, and a second group was fed 5% casein. The results were remarkable in that the cancer cells in every rat fed on the 20% diet began to grow while little change occurred in the cells of rats on 5% casein.

    On the strength of this scientific paper from India and his own experiences in The Philippines, Campbell wrote a large number of articles on the subject for top scientific journals in the USA. The articles received a lot of attention but much of this was critical as his suggestion of there being an association between animal protein and cancer was considered too farfetched to be accurate.

    Campbell’s reaction was to set up his own experiments using, laboratory rats and the results were almost identical to those achieved by the Indian researchers. By this time he had become Professor of Nutrition and Biochemistry at Cornell University, where he remained for twenty-two years, and while there he carried out many more experiments on rats for the benefit of his students.

    One of the more important findings he made during these experiments was that it was entirely possible to switch the growth of cancer on and off, simply by varying the amount of animal protein in the diet. When plant proteins were used in these experiments no such results were achieved.

    III – Resistance of Vested Interests

    By now Campbell had come to believe that he had a very significant discovery on his hands and attempted in every way possible to get his message across both to the general public and to the medical profession. He continued to write articles and lectured widely on the subject in many universities. He also wrote a number of books. His first and most famous book, The China Study (Dallas, 2005) sold well over two million copies, and was reviewed favourably in The New York Times. Even so, and notwithstanding the fact that he was now a full professor with tenure at one of the major universities in the United States, his work remained unread by the vast majority of medical doctors.

    In The China Study Campbell makes no bones about the vested interest groups that confronted him whenever he brought up the subject of a relationship between animal protein and cancer. He listed three main groups.

    The very powerful pharmaceutical industry with its enormous influence in practically all areas of medicine headed the list. Their immense wealth comes from the vast sums of money they earn from producing drugs to combat disease. Cancer drugs rank high in this research and so in monetary terms at least, the pharmaceutical industry would have most to lose should Campbell’s ideas prove correct.

    Next on the list of vested interests came the farming community and the associated food industries. It was these that produced most of the animal protein that we consume, and needless to say they were none too pleased to find that their products were now being accused not alone of making cancers grow, but also of contributing to the greenhouse gasses responsible for Climate Change.

    Ranked third on Campbell’s list of vested interests came the medical profession itself. The surprise here was that doctors were not ranked at number one as down through the years  Campbell and his theory had been completely ignored by cancer specialists.

    My own feelings are that the entire medical profession have made a very big mistake in not researching the subject. It would have been so easy for them to do so, and all relevant findings could then have been fully established.  But such is life, and we all make mistakes. Overwork amongst wealthy, specialist doctors is widespread and while practice sometimes makes perfect, rushing headlong in the wrong direction helps nobody.

    IV – Family Doctoring

    My credentials are that I had been a family doctor in Ireland for many years and in 2005, after reading The China Study, I became convinced that some sort of relationship existed between animal protein and cancer.

    I was sufficiently impressed to ask some cancer specialists that I knew what they thought about Campbell’s theory, but they all had more pressing problems on their minds. It was their lack of response that forced me to consider the possibility of carrying out some research myself. Cancer being such a common disease a busy family doctor could expect to have about seventy cancer patients, at various stages of the disease, attending the practice at any one time. So I had plenty of material to work on.

    What I did was simply to bring up the subject of a possible association between animal protein and cancer with every cancer patient that passed through my office. I explained to each of them how I had been influenced by Colin Campbell’s book and suggested that they too should not alone read it, but should seriously consider going on an animal protein-free, plant-based diet, straight away.

    It was a big ask, but people generally listen to what a family doctors has to say, and most of my patients decided to give the diet a try. As time went by and everybody became increasingly aware of just how difficult it was to give up eating their favourite foods, attitudes began to change and this was not helped by a lack of support for the diet from cancer specialists. For a time it began to appear that my whole research effort might go down the drain.

    V – A ‘Eureka’ Moment

    What was becoming evident was that the diet was just too difficult for many people and there did not appear to be much that I could do about it.  Making the diet more palatable was the only solution that came to mind but this didn’t appear very realistic. Or was it?

    I had a sort of eureka moment when I began to realise that for those that were struggling with the diet, no great harm could be done by allowing fish to be eaten a few times per week. It was not something that I had read about in Professor Campbell’s writings, or anywhere else for that matter, but I had always wondered whether fish might be in a different category to other forms of animal protein.

    I explained to patients that little or no direct research had been done on the subject of fish eating and cancer, but pointed out that people living In Japan and other parts of the world with strong fish eating cultures were amongst the most long-lived on the planet, with very low cancer rates. There was also the fact that recent evolutionary research was suggesting that mankind appeared to have evolved walking in or around river estuaries eating plants and shellfish. Perhaps this could offer some explanation as to why fish protein might be an exception to the rule.

    It was a bit of a gamble but it appears to have paid off.  Certainly the diet with fish included became much easier to follow, and soon it was not only the strugglers that were eating fish a couple of times a week, most of my cancer patients were doing so also while otherwise strictly adhering to a wholefood plant-based regime.

    Patients welcomed this small change in the diet, and few if any now lapse. We are all learning as we go along.

    Many patients recount how they experience an improved sense of wellbeing after being on the diet for only a matter of weeks. This may just be in the head, but I suggest that improved wellbeing reflects how the cancer cells inside them have stopped replicating.

    Improved wellbeing also appears to be associated with a good long term prognosis, and I now suggest to patients that most of them should be able to return to their normal pre-cancer lives, within a matter of weeks and broadly speaking this is what I have seen.

    *******  

    My hope for the future is that all patients diagnosed with any form of cancer will automatically stop eating animal protein as soon as the diagnosis is made. This is a risk-free form of treatment, and far from interfering with treatments given by cancer specialists, makes recovery more rapid and assured.

    I also emphasise to patients that by staying on an animal-protein-free, plant-based diet indefinitely that not alone are cancers very unlikely to return but that they also have a much better chance of avoiding most of the chronic diseases we are prone to, including coronary heart disease.

    Over the years I have put together a short book explaining why I have gone down the path that I have taken. The book recounts a number of case histories that readers should find helpful. The title is Stop Feeding Your Cancer and it is available for purchase on Amazon.

    Dr John Kelly MB.BCh.BAO.DCh.LM.MRCGP
    jkellypiat@yahoo.com

  • What We Learn On Psychedelics

    At a festival recently I fell into the company of an exuberant character in his early twenties. After a while this smiling extrovert revealed he was tripping on LSD. Between performing acro-aerobics, and welcoming lashes from a fly-swatter that generated a temporary tattoo, he declared he was going to take a further dose. I dutifully warned him to consider biding his time, but he laughed off my concerns and threw the tablet down the hatch. Last I saw he was leading a toaster around by its chord, proclaiming – wild-eyed – it was his cat.

    Festival frolics.

    I wonder has he since returned to a respectable job to draw a wage, that ‘one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar’, as Allen Ginsberg puts it in his ‘Howl’, with festive memories sustaining him through the tedium of spread sheets or digital marketing. I pray he has not fallen over the edge into insanity, and like Carl Solomon in Ginsberg’s epic poem of post-modernity, ended up in a mental asylum:

    where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

    or

    where fifty more shocks will return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

    To be clear, LSD, or acid, can, in rare circumstances, trigger a first psychotic episode, and should be treated with extreme caution. It is also a controlled substance, with possession or intent to supply ordinarily prohibited in most countries.

    But after decades of identification with an orgiastic counterculture – famously with Timothy Leary’s 1960s rallying cry ‘to turn on, tune in and drop out’ – research scientists are returning to examine its profound therapeutic capabilities, including for treatment of seemingly incurable depression.

    The ritualistic abandonment that I encountered at that festival is giving way to ‘white coat Shamanism’, where guides reduce the chance of bad trips, and lasting insanity, as well as more measured ingestion, including ‘micro-dosing Fridays’ in Silicon Valley.

    Could its use yet realise a paradigm shift in how humanity interacts with the world, such as was hoped for by many of the 1960s evangelists, including Allen Ginsberg himself?

    I – LSD and Psilocybin

    There are two main varieties of psychedelics, or hallucinogens, in use: lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or ‘Acid’) , and psilocybin, commonly referred to as ‘magic mushrooms’.

    Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman discovered the properties of LSD in 1943, after deriving it from a naturally occurring compound called ergot, a fungus that infects grains, especially rye, exposed to moisture. Indeed, the visions – beatific and diabolic – commonly reported by peasants and others in the Middle Ages, and generally associated with the effects of starvation, have been attributed to this fungal growth in staple foodstuffs (Ferrières, 2006, p.141).

    Hoffman himself had little doubt as to the significance of his discovery for humanity, subsequently writing:

    the feeling of co-creationism with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and materialist and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong (Pollan, 2018, p.26).

    The difficulty, however, for Sandoz, the Swiss laboratory which manufactured it, was to find a practical application for the curious, mind-altering compound. Throughout the 1950s the company responded positively to most requests from bodies engaged in research; this included the CIA’s MK Ultra Programme, involving trials on thousands of participants, mostly without their consent, in order to advance techniques in mind control.

    Its discovery also ushered in a new class of anti-depressants, through an understanding of serotonin; and, notably, successful trials on alcoholics, before its use became tied up – inextricably it would seem – with the counterculture of the 1960s, and was prohibited in the U.S.A. from 1966. Timothy Leary believed that if four million people experienced its effects it would bring about major changes to society, in the end only two million gained the experience.

    Nonetheless Michael Pollan writes of the period:

    LSD truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego and unconscious) and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority and then to lines of every imaginable kind between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material (Pollan, 2018, p.214).

    Psilocybin, the other psychedelic in common use, also known as ‘magic mushroom’, is of far more ancient vintage in human culture, especially in the New World. It played a role in Mayan religious ceremonies, to the disgust of the Catholic church, which in 1620 described the use of plants for divination as an act of superstition ‘opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith (Pollan, 2018, p.109)’.

    Despite the appalling repression by Spanish authorities of this and other aspects of the indigenous culture including foodstuffs like amaranth, the use of these substances survived in popular Mexican religious rituals. These were first brought to the attention of the English-speaking world in a seminal article for Life Magazine written by New York banker R. Gordon Wasson in 1956, entitled ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’, which contained the first known use of that term.

    Wasson and his wife inveigled there way into one of the secret ceremonies; ultimately to the cost of the healer who was shunned by her village community after the revelations encouraged a steady stream of drug tourists to descend on them.

    Terence McKenna has since popularized an hypothesis – ‘the Stoned Ape Theory’ –  proposing that consumption of these mushrooms brought an expansion in human brain capacity. The idea is no longer so far-fetched when one learns that several tribes still feed psychoactive plants to their dogs to improve their hunting ability (Pollan, 2018, p.123), although it remains speculative.

    Psychedelic mushrooms were also probably used by the Ancient Greeks in the Eleusinian Mysteries, initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone. Elsewhere in Europe, the Viking berserkers may also have been under its influence, explaining a disregard for personal safety in battle.

    We may safely assume that such a powerful compound was well known across Europe, and probably used in various ceremonies, before the adoption of Christianity appears to have brought an end to its use. Monotheism does not appear compatible with the ambiguity fostered by hallucinogens.

    II – The Ego is Stranded

    Neuroscientists have isolated a hub of brain activity in the cerebral cortex known as the Default Network Mode (DMN). This performs metacognitive processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions, moral reasoning and ‘theory of mind’, all commonly associated with expression of ego, leading it to be referred to as the ‘me’ network (Pollan, 2018, p.302-4).

    Revealingly, the DMN is only operational late in a child’s development, by which time a strong sense of self has been asserted, and a roaming imagination has given way to more ‘sensible’ considerations.

    The DMN exerts an inhibitory influence on lower parts of the brain, like emotion and memory, which may help someone maintain a singular focus. According to Marcus Raichle it ‘acts as an uber-conductor to ensure that the cacophonies of competing signals from one system do not interfere with those from another (Pollan, 2018, p.303)’.

    In experiments carried out under Robin Carhart-Harris volunteers were given psilocybin in a controlled environment. This revealed that the steepest drops in DMN activity correlated with the subjective experience of ‘ego dissolution’. This disinhibition may explain why thoughts, and even visions, not normally present during waking consciousness float to the surface of our awareness. In this Ted Talk he explains the benefits of the experiments:

    As the influence of the DMN is unseated a feelings of connection with other ‘beings’ around us tends to manifest, making us ‘at one’ with Nature, a common experience among those under the influence of psychedelics.

    This occurs alongside the disintegration of the visual processing system, allowing thoughts and even music to conjure images. The brain as a whole becomes more integrated as new connections spring up among regions that ordinarily keep to themselves, or were linked only via the central hub of the DMN. As Michael Pollan puts it: ‘The brain appears to become less specialized, and more globally interconnected, with considerably more intercourse, or cross-talk, among its various neighbourhoods (Pollan, 2018, p.316)’.

    Franz Vollenweider also refers to ‘neuroplasticity’, whereby a window is opened in which destructive patterns of thought and behaviour are easier to change (Pollan, 2018, p.320).

    III – Invention or Creation?

    When Michael Pollan consumed magic mushrooms while researching his recent book on psychedelics he finds himself believing the trees in his gardens were the equivalent of his parents. As an atheist, he dismisses the idea there was anything supernatural about this ‘heightened perception’ requiring belief in a divinity, or magic, to explain it (Pollan, 2018, p.136), but his connectedness is nonetheless a fiction without scientific basis.

    No great distance would appear to lie between Pollan’s belief in the truth of his mind’s subjective, and unprovable, conjecture, and a religious outlook, which George Steiner defines as ‘an endeavour to grasp, to offer thanks for, the gratuitous miracle of creation (Steiner, 2001, p.128).’

    Steiner distinguishes between creation, which he connects to a religious belief in the truth of a fiction, and invention which arrives in science and technology.

    Psychedelic drugs appear to play a role in permitting advances in the latter, but, surprisingly, not the former. Among those who tried LSD in the 1960s were technological visionaries in Silicon Valley, who began to revolutionize computers. These engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, finding it helpful for visualising staggering complexities in these dimensions, and holding it all in their heads.

    Scientists are not generally associated with mind-altering drugs, but the confounding influence on otherwise highly-rational, even rigid, minds may increase the possibility of technological innovation.

    The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who who was fascinated by science throughout his life, once mused on the counter-intuitive nature of scientific understanding:

    When we try to recognise the idea inherent in a phenomena we are confused by the fact that it frequently – even normally – contradicts our senses. The Copernican system is based on an idea which was hard to grasp; even now it contradicts our senses every day … The metamorphosis of plants contradicts our senses in the same way (Holmes, 2009, p.247).

    Quantum Uncertainty is similarly counter-intuitive (how is something simultaneously a wave and a particle?). A fixed appreciation of ‘reality’ often must be set aside in order for a breakthrough to occur, permitting the vision that God plays dice.

    What holds for scientific invention does not seem to apply to artistic creativity. The prevalence of LSD in the avant-garde of the 1960s Counterculture dissolved much of our cultural inheritance – not least the literary canon in the eyes of Post Modernists – but since the 1960s it is hard to identify an artistic genre that has advanced in any way comparable to previous movements, such as the Romantics, or even Surrealists, both of whom we continually hark back to in common speech.

    In his account of the music of the Beatles Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald points to the effect of the LSD on the wider culture:

    Though framed into terms of sexual liberation and scaffolded by religious ideas imported from the Orient, the central shift of the counterculture was drugs, and one drug above all: d-lysergic acid diethylamide 25, or LSD.

    With the removal of what he describes as ‘the brain’s neural concierge’:

    The LSD view of life took the form of a smiling non-judgmentalism which saw ‘straight’ thinking, including political opinion across the board from extreme Left to Right, as basically insane. To those enlightened by the drug, all human problems and divisions were issues, not of substance, but of perception. With LSD, humanity could transcend its ‘primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility’ and, realising the oneness of all creation, proceed directly to utopia.

    He continues:

    Using it, normal people were able to move directly to the state of ‘oceanic consciousness’ achieved by a mystic only after years of preparation and many intervening stages of growing self-awareness – as a result of which most of them not unnaturally concluded that reality was a chaos of dancing energies without meaning or purpose. There being no way to evaluate such a phenomenon, all one could do was ‘dig it’. Hence at the heart of the counterculture was a moral vacuum: not God, but The Void.

    While pop music and television flourished, initially at least, McDonald identified a clear degeneration in older artistic forms. Thus:

    Classical music, once an art of expression, became a pseudo-scientific, quasi-architectural craft of technique whose principles of design, opaque to the ear, were appreciable only by examining the ‘blueprint’ of the score. Similarly the rapid succession of conceptual coups in the world of painting and sculpture, so novel at the time, turned out to be merely the end of modernism and, as such, the dying fall of Western art. Overtaken by the ‘artistic discourse’ of post-modernism, art became as literary as post-Wagnerian classical music was visual, producing the arid paradox of paintings to listen to and music to look at. Shorn of their content, art, music, and literature degenerated by increasingly inconsequential stages from art about art, to jokes about art about art, and finally to jokes about art about art (McDonald, Ian, 2005, pp. 15-23).

    Artistic creativity has been described as a form of divine madness, in which an immediate reality is dismissed in favour of the constructs of the imagination. Thus the nineteenth century John Ruskin asserted a belief in ‘spiritual powers … genii, fairies, or spirits’, claiming, ‘No true happiness exists, nor is any good work done … but in the sense or imagination of such presences.’ Who in their ‘right mind’ could conceive such an idea, yet such conceit is often a necessary tool for an artist. Whatever brain activity that is going on with the artist it does not appear that her ego needs to be dissolved.

    In his essay ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900) W. B. Yeats refers to the ‘ministering spirits’ evident in his subject matter’s poem ‘Intellectual Beauty’: ‘who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the Elemental Spirits of medieval Europe, and the Sidhe [sic] of ancient Ireland’. In quoting that poem he evokes the mythical síde, nourishing his own Art:

    These are ‘gleams of a remoter world which visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of the senses, sounds ‘folded in cells of crystal silence,’ ‘visions swift, and sweet, and quaint,’ which lie waiting their moment ‘each in its thin sheath, like a chrysalis,’ ‘odours’ among ‘ever-blooming Eden trees,’ ‘liquors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or can make tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘the golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams’; ‘the phantoms’ which become the forms of the arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,’ ‘casts on them the gathered rays which are reality’; ‘the guardians’ who move in ‘the atmosphere of human thought,’ as ‘birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,’

    Louis le Brocquy’s Portrait Head of W.B. Yeats.

    The vivid fantasy of the creative artist may generate eidetic images, which are a type of mental picture, a vision, not necessarily derived from an actual external event or memory. This sounds much like the experience of someone on LSD, but the chemical manipulation of the brain does not appear to yield the same creative fruits, probably because, as MacDonald opines, it bypasses years of preparation.

    IV – Paradigmatic shifts

    Michael Pollan suggests that ‘Homo sapiens might have arrived at one of those periods of crisis that calls for some mental and behavioural depatterning’ (Pollan, 2018, p.124), resulting in a greater environmental awareness. Here he rather appears to be reprising Timothy Leary’s suggestion that widespread LSD use would dissolve the stolid social structures of post-War America, But in artistic terms this may prove to be fool’s gold, only leading to further dissolution and isolation.

    Unfortunately, a common feature of the perceived wisdom derived from drug visions is its sheer banality: love is all we need, etc. Psychedelics may shake up rigid thinking among scientists, and have important therapeutic capabilities that should be better understood, and utilised, but there seems little prospect of profound artistic departures occurring under their influence.

    Art at its best is invariably a hard-won product of intense labour, and drugs are generally a distraction. Thus Yeats opined in ‘Speaking to the Psalter’ (1903): ‘All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination (italics added)’. The best works of art, capable of changing the way we think and act, seem to emerge when a narrow imaginative journey occurs, and LSD would in all likelihood just interfere.

    Ginsberg’ ‘Howl’, like Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’, is instructive in this regard. I am guessing he wrote while he was sober, before he had ever sampled LSD, and it is a singular journey and experience that nonetheless is part of a conversation within a canon: ‘Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war’. He knew intimately the sacred cows of meter and rhyme he appears to be dispensing with, which may not be said for many of those that have followed in his wake.

    The paradigmatic shifts we require in order to generate a genuinely “oceanic compassion” will not involve, alas, seeing one’s cat in a toaster at a festival, but will surely demand intense labour, in many artistic forms, in order to overthrow the toxic assumptions of our time.

    That is not, however, to say that any state should criminalize these drugs, and drive their use underground. What we need is education. Anyone who embarks on a trip should be aware of what it entails, and certain personality types should be seriously discouraged from making use of them.

    Perhaps the greatest irony of LSD is that many of the flighty characters who seek out LSD are precisely those who should avoid it, whereas the rigid personality types, who are unlikely to use it, might actually benefit from its unseating of the ego, and the eureka moments of scientific inspiration it appears to impart.

    But unfortunately, as Timothy Leary put it: ‘Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them’.

    References

    Madeleine Ferrières’s Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006.
    Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Harper Press, Croydon, 2009.
    Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the 1960s, Pimlico, New York, 2005.
    Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, Penguin, New York, 2018.
    George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2001.

  • Sprawl: the Origins of Dublin’s Car Dependency

    During the 1990s the Irish state achieved economic lift-off, with almost double-digit growth each year. Outward migration flows not only halted, but actually reversed, leading to an unforeseen surge in demand for residential and commercial spaces. Notably, much of this pressure occurred in the Greater Dublin Area, where growth was most focused.

    A study at the turn of the century noted that the preferences of both businesses and ordinary homeowners were, ‘determined primarily by access to vital infrastructure’. Deficiencies in administrative coordination had already, however, generated substantial urban sprawl, particularly as ‘management of the peripheral development of the region is seen to be inadequate’.

    Matched by weak bureaucratic control, low density real estate development associated with sprawl occurred only with ‘the private motor car becoming the preferred or only method of transport in such areas’. The authors concluded that ‘previous commitments made to principles of sustainable development are null and void (Shiels and Williams, 2000).’

    I – Sustainable Development

    In attempting to resolve this the national policy document Sustainable Development: A Strategy for Ireland (Department of the Environment, 1997), had advocated minimising growth in transport demand, ‘and it was recommended that this be a leading consideration in future land use planning (Murphy, 2004)’.

    The National Spatial Strategy (2002) further addressed the unchecked growth, recommending mixed-use and higher density development, which would focus on public transport centres. It also recognised a need to minimise urban sprawl, and maintain physically-compact and public transport-friendly cities. This stated policy of moving away from car-dependent development was refined further in the ‘2004 Regional Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area, 2004-2016 (Phillips et al, 2004)’, which emphasised the need for new developments to be sited along high qualify transport corridors.

    Although access to public transport, and lax planning controls, have been major factors in bringing about car-dependent real estate developments, other aspects of governance have also contributed. Not the least of these have been fiscal policies in the housing area, which ‘have tended to systematically favour and support new building at greenfield locations’, these included inter alia ‘preferential taxation treatment in terms of stamp duty and first-time buyers grants (Williams and Shiels, 2000)’.

    Not only are such developments car-dependent, but ‘allied with an increased dependence on edge city retail development encourage car usage and complement the edge city employment pattern in a combination which negates stated policies on sustainability (Wiliams and Shiels, 2000)’. Hence, a vicious circle develops wherein cars are not only required for accessing new developments, but this spawns further car-dependency, both by virtue of the remoteness of the location in the first instance, and because the car becomes, far and away, the most convenient way of getting around.

    Between 1994 and 1999, with rising prosperity, rates of car ownership rose by a remarkable 164% in the Dublin area, but this was nothing compared to the exponential increases in outer commuter areas, such as County Louth, where ownership soared by 433.5% (Williams and Shiels, 2000).

    With Dublin house prices soaring by 136% between 1994 and 1999 (Department of Environment and Local Government, 2000), a commuter belt emerged spanning an area within ninety kilometres of the city, and encompassing towns such as Gorey, Portlaoise, Mullingar, and Dundalk. Clearly, therefore, it is not that real estate development occurred simply because of road transport access, but because of the absence of affordable housing in central locations.

    II – Deindustrialisation of the Urban Core

    Another factor has been the deindustrialisation of Dublin’s city centre, in line with international trends, with plants, and hence places of work, relocating to the edge of the city (Murphy, 2004). Such changing commuter patterns have also placed a premium on car-based travel.

    The facilitation of real estate development has not, however, been occurring on an entirely ad hoc basis along existing roads; a Dublin Region ‘edge city’ developed along an entirely newly-built road, that now forms ‘the central axis of Dublin’s edge city’, namely the M50 C-ring motorway (Williams and Shiels, 2000).

    As with the residential sector, it appears that commercial growth was greatly driven by a lack of supply within the traditional downtown Dublin business district, where in 1999 vacancy – and hence supply – was estimated to be as little as 1.45% (DTZ Sherry FitzGerald, 1999).

    The centrality of the M50 to Dublin’s new business axis is referred to in Chaos at the Crossroads by Frank McDonald and James Nix’s polemical account of Ireland’s construction craze. The authors claimed that ‘Gold-plating of greater Dublin through the NDP’s roads programme’ copper-fastened the location’s distinct advantage as the focal point of the new ‘hub and spoke’ motorway network that was rolled out under the NDP’s national roads programme.

    Hence, while the Dublin region commercially developed, they contend that many areas were bypassed – albeit new developments could occur along the spokes.

    Moreover, the projected cost of the national roads programme began at €6.8 billion, before climbing to €16 billion at the time of McDonald and Nix’s publication, who noted that the Department of Finance in 2002 had warned internally that the ultimate cost would likely rise to €22 billion, an estimate which has since been proved correct.

    As subsequently described by the National Roads Authority in ‘A Decade of Progress 2000 – 2010’, overall this has meant ‘All told, over 1,200 kilometres of motorway and over 400 kilometres of single carriageway and link roads were built’, during these years, and also ‘some 100 grade separated junctions’.

    III – The Poor Relation

    In contrast to the apparently endless cash shovelled into a seemingly never-ending roads programme, not one kilometre of greenfield heavy gauge railway was built. Instead, as noted by McDonald and Nix, additional commuter trains were only laid on in response to demand in outer-lying towns such as Gorey, Portlaoise and Mullingar; matching this was NRA resistance to bus lanes being developed along national routes.

    As is noted also by McDonald and Nix, public transport is at a fundamental disadvantage when dispersed development occurs. This leads to ‘empty bus syndrome’ wherein the further a bus has to travel at peak times in order to pick up passengers, the less viable the service becomes.

    Hence, when the Gorey Local Area Plan was published in 2002, and the population had risen by 44% between 1996 and 2002, it noted ‘that ‘as much as 70% of the town’s new residents commute to Dublin on a daily basis, mostly by car (McDonald and Nix, 2005)’.

    Gorey could be viewed as a microcosm for what was happening elsewhere; McDonald and Nix recall how thirty-seven acres of agricultural land beside an interchange on the new Gorey bypass, belonging to the elderly mother of a Fianna Fáil councillor Lorcan Allen, was rezoned without public consultation, and without any significant repercussions for the councillor.

    Thus, the car-dependent pattern of commuter housing along or close to the new motorways, leading away from the main urban centres, became a feature of development in that period – with Killenard off the now M7 in Co. Laois described as the ‘most shocking’ – while separately McDonald and Nix predicted that much of Westmeath’s development would likely be a ‘necklace of villages’ along the M6 route.

    Notwithstanding the relationship between property development and new road schemes, the effect of good public transport on the value of real estate also became apparent – albeit belatedly.

    A 2008 paper by Karen Mayor et al evaluated the financial impact of suburban rail transport – including the two light rail Luas lines – on the price of nearby property. At the time of the 2007 census a mere 7% of commuters in the Greater Dublin Area travel by rail, in contrast to the 49% traveling by private car.

    In total 6,956 house prices ‘covering most of the Dublin area’ were assessed to evaluate appreciation in house value attributable to proximity to the rail network, bearing in mind other environmental amenities, and the structural characteristics of the houses themselves.

    They found, ‘properties within 500 metres to 2 kilometres of a light rail station are found to sell for between 7% and 17% more than properties not in proximity of the station’, with proximity being a decisive factor – typically 12–17% when within 500 metres.

    Yet when the DART was analysed, the authors found the ‘station premium is approximately 5%’ – a lower figure they attribute to good buses services already existing, and also the antiquated rolling stock. A further complicating factor was that while there seemed to be a correlation between demand and proximity to functional stations, ‘train tracks however are considered a disamenity and reduce the price of a dwelling’.

    The authors concluded that ‘rail connections have value to home owners, but also that not all connections are equally valuable (Mayor et al, 2008)’.

    IV – One-off Housing

    No review of the relationship between property development and transport in Ireland in recent years is complete without some assessment of the phenomenal amount of rural bungalows being built, where ‘single rural dwellings (SRDs) dominate the rural housing profile, accounting for all dwellings in some Electoral Divisions and 80% on average’ (Keaveney, 2007).

    Keaveney notes:

    Clearly, accessibility to urban centres and by road networks has continually been a driving force in the location of housing. Densities in 2002 reached up to 25 households per square kilometre along the national road network and adjacent to urban centres.

    Hence while many of these houses are supposed to be for the benefit of the local economy, it seems reasonable to deduce that a premium is placed on good road access – although this is a variable factor that is probably best determined on a case-by-case basis.

    Despite high level official policy statements and aspirations regarding sustainability, the institutions of the state encouraged private car transport in a manner that not only subverted such sentiments, but also opened up virgin lands for property developments that otherwise would have been inaccessible, uneconomic, or both.

    While a genuine shortage of supply combined with economic prosperity drove demand, these two factors alone would not have created car dependent outer suburbs and developments. Without aggressive promotion and development of roads by the authorities – usually requiring property developers to provide car spaces – it would not have been possible in many instances to construct the low-quality unsustainable sprawl we now live with.

    References

    Brendan Williams and Patrick Shiels, ‘Acceleration into Sprawl: Causes and Potential Policy Responses’, ESRI, Dublin, June 2000.
    Department of the Environment, Ireland, Sustainable Development: A Strategy for Ireland, Department of the Environment, Dublin, 1997.
    Department of Environment and Local Government, Annual Report, 2000.
    DTZ Sherry FitzGerald, Annual Report, 1999
    Karen Keaveney, ‘Contested Ruralities: Housing in the Irish Countryside’, PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2007.
    Karen Mayor, Seán Lyons, David Duffy and Richard S.J. Tol ‘A Hedonic Analysis of the Value of Rail Transport in the Greater Dublin Area’, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, January, 2008.
    Frank McDonald and James Nix, Chaos at the Crossroads, Gandon Editions, Dublin, 2005.
    Enda Murphy, ‘Spatial Restructuring and Commuting Efficiency in Dublin’, Trinity College Dublin Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, 2004.
    National Roads Authority, ‘A Decade of Progress 2000 – 2010’, Dublin, 2010.
    Tom Phillips, Atkins, the Urban Institute Ireland and Goodbody Economic Consultants, ‘Regional Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area’, 2004-2016, Dublin 2004.

  • Cancer – A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves

    We have not slain our enemy, the cancer cell, or figuratively torn the limbs from his body … In our adventures we have only seen our monster more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways – ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal selves.
    Harold E. Varmus, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (Stockholm, 1989).

    Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
    Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York, 1962)

    Over a decade ago my mother was diagnosed with skin cancer, in the form of a melanoma on her face. At the time this did not seem a big deal, at least once a surgeon had removed the offending growth and performed a successful skin graft. It had been caught early enough to prevent metastasis, or so we thought.

    The ‘scare’ probably shook her more than we recognised. The diagnosis must have realised her worst nightmare after the loss of her own mother, to what seems to have been breast cancer at the age of just fifty.

    Most obviously she became fretful at being exposed to the sun, though by then this would probably have made no difference.

    In hindsight, perhaps she never fully recovered her poise. I suspect an accumulation of worries affected her health, contributing to the later metastasis of the cancer. Revealingly, a recent survey of seventy thousand women, aged seventy or over, showed that an optimistic frame of mind correlated with a reduced risk of cancer, and other fatal diseases. This bolsters Iain McGilchrist’s suggestion that all medicine should be seen as ‘a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy’.

    Genetic determinism portrays physical bodies as distinct from minds. But this neo-Cartesian view ignores the bewildering complexity of our brains, within which McGilchrist estimates there are more connections ‘than there are particles in the known universe’.

    It should offer solace to those with a genetic history of the disease that minds are exceedingly complex, and malleable, instruments.

    According to Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), ‘the Ancient Roman doctor Galen reserved the most malevolent and disquieting of the four humours for cancer: black bile’. He attributed just one other disease to an excess of this ‘oily, viscuous humour: depression’. Indeed melancholia, the medieval name for ‘depressions’ draws its name from the Greek melan, meaning ‘black’, and khole, meaning ‘bile’; Mukherjee describes how ‘Depression and cancer, the psychic and physical diseases of black bile, were thus intrinsically intertwined.’ Moreover, Andrew Soloman quotes an expert to the effect that anxiety, ‘a response to future lost’, should be regarded as  ‘fraternal twins’ with depression, ‘a response to past lost (quoted in Pollan, 2018, p.389)’.

    Although during the Renaissance Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) established that black bile does not exist, the coupling of the two ailments by Galen, who informed Western medicine for over a millennium, is noteworthy. Contemporary approaches may profitably look backwards, as Mukherjee puts it: ‘Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians because few other professions depend as acutely on it’.

    That is not to say, of course, that cancer is somehow ‘all in the mind’, but increasing focus on the role of depression or stress, and ways of counteracting these, from spirituality to artistic expression or enjoying the great outdoors, would surely be beneficial.

    II – The Human Genome Project

    Mukherjee argues that cancer ‘is stitched into our genome’: somatic cells, along with the bacteria in our body with which we generally co-exist symbiotically, are in a constant flux of death and renewal, such that most of our cells survive no longer than seven years, before being replaced by new ones.

    As we grow older glitches – entropy – enters into this process of renewal. Mukherjee writes: ‘Oncogenes arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells’. It is usually as if we become jaded by a lifetime’s effort, and errors creep in.

    Predicting the behaviour of these mutations has, however, defied understanding since the ‘War on Cancer’ began in the early 1950s. The outbreak of certain rare forms can be traced to genetic inheritance, but the onset of the vast majority is not preordained.

    Mukherjee argues that ‘the Human Genome Project will profile the normal genome against which cancer’s abnormal genomes can be juxtaposed and contrasted’. However the number of genetic mutations involved in most types runs into three figures.

    At best scientists have been able to glean from genomic evidence that certain individuals do not benefit from particular therapies. But this is not the same as understanding at a cellular level why most cancers appear, and pinpointing the preventative measures which ought to be taken.

    Inescapably, the claims of genomic research arrive through the prism of justifying hefty research grants.

    The author of The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (2012), Rupert Sheldrake has sought to puncture the optimism of those who believe the Human Genome Project will yield infallible algorithms predicting our future life and health: ‘The optimism that life would be understood if molecular biologists knew the ‘programs’ of an organism gave way to the realisation that there is a huge gap between gene sequences and actual human beings’.

    Mukherjee also acknowledges the great variety of environmental factors, which switch on and on off the genetic mutations which give rise to cancers:

    Our bodies, our cells, our genes are being immersed and re-immersed in a changing flux of molecules – pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task then is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.

    Revealingly, in a recent U.S. case a jury awarded DeWayne Johnson €289 million in damages against Monsanto, the manufacturers of Roundup a glyphosate weed killer in compensation for the onset of his cancer.

    Other confounding factors include the emerging field epigenetics, our co-habitation with bacteria – itself in constant evolution – and even altered states of consciousness.

    III – Metastatic Melanoma

    Exposure to the sun’s UV-A and UV-B rays is considered the leading cause of melanomas. The incidence is particularly high among Australians, most of whose ancestors evolved in cool and cloudy Northern European conditions, and, surprisingly, Switzerland, where a fondness for the sunny piste seems to be to blame.

    My mother was not particularly pale-skinned, and nor was she ever a sun-worshipper. I recall her scrupulously applying sunscreen on herself, and her children, on beach holidays. The best guess is the damage stemmed from sunburn as a child or young adult. That her life coincided with a depletion in the ozone layer, which filters UV rays high up in the atmosphere, could also have been a factor. It has even been hypothesised that sunscreen itself contains carcinogenic properties.

    When my mother’s cancer returned three years ago, in the form of tumours on the lung it did not seem such devastating news. The first battle had been won, and why not this? If I had known that a metastatic melanoma is usually considered a death sentence, and that treatments only tend to extend life by a few months, I would have reacted differently.

    I remained bullish in my assessment as, a short time beforehand, she had embraced a wholefood plant-based diet. From the start I was skeptical about the treatment, fearing this could do more harm than good; as the sixteenth century physician Paracelsus put it, ‘every medicine is a poison in disguise’.

    Probably wisely however – though I will never know – I kept my counsel, at least to her, and most of my family. I cannot imagine how I would feel if I had persuaded her to get off the treatment, and she had died soon afterwards.

    However, I recently revisited a passage from Professor T. Colin Campbell’ 2013 book Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, in which he describes the response of his wife Karen to a metastasised (Stage 3-Advanced) melanoma on her lymph gland. She refused any of the treatment alternatives her oncologist recommended, much to his annoyance.

    Campbell writes perceptively: ‘Cancer patients intensely want to believe in their oncologist, whom they see as holding the key to their recovery’. Despite refusing treatment, including surgery, Karen Campbell, maintaining a wholefood plant-based diet had lived a further eight years by 2013 without ill-effects, and appears to be still alive today. Obviously we cannot extrapolate too much on the basis of one case, but I cannot help asking myself: ‘what if?’.

    My mother was put on one trial treatment, and later a different one, of a form of immuno-therapy, which harnesses the immune system to attack cancer cells. It came as a shock to her system. Some months into it she developed a sore throat and high fever, which eventually required hospitalisation, and an antibiotic drip.

    Living with my parents through much of the long treatment period I was on hand for many of the oncology treatment days, and the debilitating nausea that followed. Her vitality declined precipitously: from being a committed walker, she found it increasingly difficult to go any distance; whether the cancer played a part in this I do not know.

    She managed, nonetheless, to take the odd foreign trip, overcoming her nerves, and became a grandmother to two further grandchildren in that period.

    She lasted almost three years on the treatment, maintaining the plant-based diet throughout – although she did occasionally eat fish after being encouraged to increase her protein intake. According to the consultant she was top of the class on the basis of her scans. He always professed satisfaction at how well she was doing, which did not exactly chime with the increasing levels of nausea she was experiencing. This also required her to take more and more medications, which lowered further her vitality.

    IV – Plant-Based Prevention?

    Disconcertingly, Mukherjee characterises the history of cancer research as, ‘intensely competitive’, and featuring, ‘a grim, nearly athletic, determination’. It seems patient welfare, as opposed to survival, has not always been to the fore, as experts compete for the next breakthrough in extending life, or finding an ever-elusive cure. The same commitment has not, alas, been shown to prevention strategies, which would bring no reward to the pharmaceutical sector that generally funds the research.

    In 2014 a retired Dublin G.P. John Kelly published a book entitled Stop Feeding Your Cancer in which he argued that ‘The minds of cancer specialists were so cluttered with their pharmaceutical and surgical obligations that they were unable to accommodate critical revisionary thinking.’

    Kelly’s account, which has been criticised for cherry-picking data, was inspired by his reading of the same T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study (2005). Campbell, no ethical vegan, conducted experiments on two groups of laboratory rats infected with cancer. The first group were given a diet comprising twenty percent animal protein. They all promptly died, but the second group were given a diet of only five percent animal protein, and all survived.

    Campbell performed these experiments in the Philippines after observing a lower survival rate among affluent cancer patients with diets high in animal products, compared to their impoverished peers on diets low in meat and dairy. In the laboratory Campbell also found vegetable proteins did not promote cancer, even when consumed in large quantities.

    IV Cure or Cause?

    The heartening news at the beginning of this year was that my mother’s tumours had all but disappeared from her lung, but she nevertheless continued to get sicker and sicker.

    Over time her face took on a disturbingly yellowish hue, which was eventually diagnosed as jaundice – in Galenic terms an excess of yellow bile. A good friend who is a G.P. confided to me that the overwhelming likelihood was that this was linked to her cancer.

    Still it was a great shock when the news came through of another tumour blocking her bile duct.

    It required a painful operation, on an already weakened patient, inserting a tube to stanch the flow of bile into the bloodstream. It never worked properly, and she declined painfully from that point, despite my father’s best efforts to master the appendage.

    I cannot help wondering whether, considering the prolonged bouts of nausea, the treatment itself had caused the inflammation which produced the tumour; the history of cancer is replete with examples of ‘cures’ doing more harm than good. For example, many chemotherapy agents are known carcinogens, and listed on the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Group 1 list as such.

    Mukherjee also describes chemotherapists as acting like ‘lunatic cartographers’ who ‘frantically drew and redrew their strategies to annihilate cancer’. My mother went through immuno-therapy, but the basic approach of poisoning the body in order to kill the cancer appears to be the same.

    It also begs the wider question as to whether a prolonged period on a debilitating cancer treatment is a life worth living.

    The absence of preventative cancer programmes in our systems of public health is nothing short of scandalous. The Chicago Tribune acknowledged in 1975 that the idea of ‘preventive medicine is faintly un-American. It means, first, recognizing that the enemy is us’. Where America leads other nations appear to follow.

    In Plato’s idealised Republic, Socrates castigates doctors that prolong the life of patients without curing them. He pays tribute to the carpenter who, after being prescribed a lengthy treatment regimen, replies:

    that he had no leisure time to be ill and that life is no use to him if he has to neglect his work and always be concerned with his illness. After that he’d bid good-bye to his doctor, resume his usual way of life, and either recover his health or, if his body couldn’t withstand the illness, he’d die and escape his troubles.

    There are of course now many procedures that are relatively simple – such as removing skin cancer – but I cannot help feeling, notwithstanding medical advances, that I too would prefer to die on the job rather than go through a debilitating, long-term course of cancer treatment. I prefer the preventative measure of a plant-based diet to reduce my own risk of developing cancer

    V – Depression

    Like many patients after a terminal diagnosis my mother developed symptoms of depression for which she was prescribed medication. She also benefitted greatly from spiritual counselling in the Catholic tradition from a devoted friend.

    She cast away doubts and annoyances with the Church, realising great benefit from simple prayer, during what the philosopher John Moriarty has described as a universal Golgotha experience. This may give Christianity an enduring relevance, despite historic failings.

    Those resistant to religion might consider the effect of psychedelic drugs on terminal cancer sufferers who experience depression. In How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018) Michael Pollan reveals how in NYU and Hopkins trials 85% of cancer patients showed ‘clinically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression that endured for at least six months after the psylocybin sessions’. Fascinatingly, in both trials ‘the intensity of the mystical experience volunteers reported closely correlated with the degree to which their symptoms [of depression] subsided’.

    *******

    There are no simple answers to the questions I have raised in this article, but based on my experience of losing a close relative to cancer, and reading up on the subject, I would argue that we need to alter the paradigm of research, to explore more fully preventative strategies rather than simply addressing the disease after it has emerged.

    Cancer is not all in the mind, and nor does it ever seem likely to be eradicated fully, but that correlation between good health and a sunny disposition is notable. Can general practitioners, in particular, develop ways of lifting our moods – without recourse to medication – while retaining a focus on physical signs of illness? Perhaps we need to train a new kind of physician, with mindfulness at the core of their study.

    Finally, why is it that public health authorities do not display the same commitment to dietary change as is shown towards curbing tobacco smoking? One conclusion that might be drawn is that pharmaceutical companies, and other vested interests, are an obstacle to this coming about.

     

    Jacqueline Armstrong RIP

  • A Sanctuary away from Ireland’s Cow Herds

    W.B. Yeats’s poem, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ retains an appeal more than a century after its publication in 1899. Musicians in particular – from Christy Moore to Mike Scott – have been drawn to its magical imagery and measured cadences.

    One cruel New Years’s morning a few years ago its opening lines: ‘I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head’, popped into my head after romantic hopes had been dashed the night before. I realised a dose of Nature was the only conceivable cure.

    Like Yeats, most of us feel overwhelmed by our racing thoughts at times. Then the sanctuary of a forest or running water can still the mind. Nothing ever feels quite so bad in a beautiful natural setting.

    We may also draw lessons there, as in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, where Duke Frederik finds ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’.

    But what if, instead of a resplendent Nature, we encounter a degraded landscape and poisoned waterways? What message burns into our souls if the hazel woods are reduced to cow fields or sitka spruce plantations, where birdsong is no longer heard?

    Even in Yeats’s time there were few of the virgin forests, which once covered the entire island. As Frank Mitchell puts it:

    It is hard for us to picture the majesty and silence of these primeval woods, which stretched from Ireland far across northern Europe. We are accustomed to an almost treeless countryside, and if we can find anywhere some scraps of ‘native’ woodland, we are disappointed by the quality of the trees(1).

    And the picture is getting worse, with increasing use of chemicals, and intensification of agriculture: the Slow Death of Irish Nature.

    Irish agriculture is neither efficient, timeless, nor equitable. It remains afloat because of European subsidies, holding in perma-frost a system designed to satisfy the appetites of the British Empire, enriching a small number of large farmers and industry barons especially, while most farms teeter on the brink.

    Structural deficiencies are skillfully concealed from the Irish people by obsequious, and often corrupt, politicians, a desultory education system, and a compliant media. Only the prospect of hundreds of millions in fines for failure to reduce runaway Greenhouse Gas Emissions may save the land from further despoliation; but even one mitigation strategy, of planting monoculture plantations, is eroding biodiversity further.

    The exploitation of Ireland’s Nature goes hand in hand with the exploitation of millions of domesticated animals and human beings.

    Karl Marx highlighted a disturbed metabolic interaction between human society and the environment under a capitalist system, which he termed metabolic rift. The intensification of agriculture depletes nutrients from soils, which Marx viewed as analogous, and kindred with the exploitation of labour, leading to an alienation from Nature.

    ­II – The Great Hunger

    To my knowledge Ireland (North and South) is the only substantial region in the world with a lower population today than in the 1840s. The population peaked at almost 8.5 million, and has only reached 6.5 million today – a considerable rise on the 1950s, when it had dipped below three million in the South.

    The steady decline was intimately connected to a shift away from a predominantly mixed agriculture, with an emphasis on tillage and subsistence, to a system based almost exclusively on generating livestock for the Imperial British market.

    The catalyst was the Great Famine 1845-1850, although the move away from tillage was also a product of Britain finding cheaper sources of grain after the Napoleonic Wars. Remarkably, according to Amartyra Sen: ‘In no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of the people killed … as large as in the Irish famine of the 1840s(2)’.

    The Great Famine was devastating to the three million depending, almost exclusively, on the potato for nourishment. By the eve of the disaster that vulnerable cohort of cottiers and subtenants occupied just one million acres, representing a mere five percent of the of the total acreage of land suitable for agriculture(3).

    With twenty million acres available to produce the population’s food, even with the worst conceivable crop failures, an abundance of food could have been grown to feed the entire population. But the market demanded cattle ‘on-the-hoof’, exported live to England, and other livestock products. The land was not the patrimony of the people, but a generally absent landlord class.

    To produce and trade commodities for the Empire required a substantial comprador class, who profited from the shift. Famine survivors took advantage of the land clearances as Kerby A. Miller writes:

    an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties(4).

    Abandoned cottage, County Sligo.

    Strong farmers and merchants formed the backbone of the political movements which agitated for possession of the land, and ultimately Irish independence. But tenant ownership and national sovereignty did not reverse the agricultural transition of the post-Famine era. This system depended on low labour inputs for profitability, ensuring a rapid flow of emigration throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

    Revealingly, when works were undertaken on the substantial farmhouse where my father grew up in Sligo the slates on the roof were dated to the 1840s. It is disturbing to consider a prosperous farmer building his homestead there off the back of wealth from lands seized from smallholders. Joe Lee imagines the effects across much of the country:

    They will have seen corpses, if not in their own dwellings, then on the roads and in the ditches. Many are likely to have felt a degree of guilt, of the type that often afflicts survivors of tragedies, not only of the Holocaust, but of events like earthquakes, and mining catastrophes … A sense of guilt can simmer below the surface to perhaps breakout in uncontrollable and, to uncomprehending outside observers, in apparently inexplicable ways(5).

    The Irish nation still lives with an echo of this survivor guilt, that has expressed itself in ways we do not yet fully comprehend. One such may have been a distortion of sexuality amidst extreme piety; another perhaps, a loathing for the land itself, still expressed in a ruthless exploitation that often seems wanton in its disregard.

    III – Irish Farming Today

    Teagasc’s recent National Farm Survey for 2017 revealed there were 84,599 farms in Ireland, with an average of income of €31,374. Of these 15,639 were dairy farms with an average income of €86,115. There were a mere 7,387 tillage farms (many growing feedstuffs for livestock), with an average income of €37,158. The remainder – three quarters of all farms – were (dry) cattle and sheep farms, with an average income under €15,000. Indeed, thirty-five-per cent turned a profit of less than €10,000.

    According to the report (on p.5): ‘In general, farm income continues to be highly reliant on direct payments. In 2017 the average total payment received was €17,672 per farm, this accounted for 75% of average farm income.’

    Remarkably, on an average dry cattle or sheep farm over 100% of ‘income’ derived from direct payments (subsidisation), while almost €20,000 of an average dairy farm’s substantial earnings, came from subsidies. It is a truly dysfunctional system.

    Seventy-five percent of Irish farms would go out of business overnight under a free market, while a small number of already wealthy farmers receive subsidisation totalling approximately €300 million.

    The government has committed to expanding agricultural production, particularly the dairy sector, under a report entitled, without irony, FoodWise 2025. However, a 2018 Teagasc report admits that these aspirations will ‘provide a significant challenge to meeting emissions targets, particularly as agriculture comprises one-third of national emissions and 44% of the non-Emission Trading Sectors (non-ETS).’

    Revealingly the image chosen by the authors of the plan does not reveal a single tree or bush.

    A growing proportion of Ireland’s agricultural products (including the thousands of animals shipped abroad in appalling conditions) are exported to non-EU states, including undemocratic regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. The powdered milk market is of particular importance, with Ireland the second leading exporter to China, after New Zealand. Exclusive Breastfeeding is recommended by the WHO for babies up to six months of age.

    Ireland grows little of its own food, relying on exports for the majority of fruit and vegetables the latter of which, remarkably, form less than 1% of overall energy intake, a deficiency linked, in all likelihood, to the obesity pandemic(6).

    Contrary to the portrayal of Ireland as ‘the Food Ireland’, the country is actually a net importer of food calories, making us vulnerable to food ‘shocks’, including major storm events – such as the recent ‘Beast from the East’, when supermarkets supply chains failed. Yet Ireland’s temperate climate is suited to year-round cultivation of a wide variety of crops.

    The beef industry has been subject to a succession of scandals over decades, including what amounted to a government bail out for Goodman International in the early 1990s. More recently we saw horse meat being substituted for beef. The industry has enriched a small number of barons, especially Larry Goodman who had an estimated net worth, along with his spouse, of €706 million in 2015. It would take the average dry cattle farmer, on €15,000 per annum, 47,000 years to accumulate that fortune. The disparities in wealth in Irish farming are probably greater now than ever.

    The main farming organisation, the IFA advocates on behalf of an increasingly obsolete system, where food prices for consumers are so high that Tesco’s executives reportedly referred to the country as Treasure Island; while ruining the environment, and leaving most farms on the brink of collapse.

    In 2015 that organisation was rocked by revelations that general secretary, Pat Smith, had received pay and perks worth some €1m for 2013 and 2014. For good measure, his payoff amounted to €2m. Just as eye-watering for ordinary farmers was how then IFA president, Eddie Downey was receiving almost €200,000 annually, some eight times the average farmer’s income at the time.

    Most disturbingly, however, is the extent to which the state projects a green image for Irish farming, using taxpayers money, through the Origin Green advertising campaign, which the Irish Wildlife Trust has described as a sham.

    As part of a global insectaggedon, pesticide use has continued to climb in Ireland, posing grave dangers to essential pollinators. A third of Irish bee species could soon be extinct. According to Professor John Breen Irish grasslands are useless for bees: ‘Intensification of our farming is the key issue,’ he says. ‘It has taken a toll.’

    Meanwhile half of Ireland’s waterways are now polluted, mainly by farm run-offs.

    The long-term prognosis for Irish agriculture is extremely bad. The system cannot endure indefinitely. We are leaching the soil of nutrients, and contributing significantly to Climate Change, while exploiting the understandable desire of farm families to stay on their land.

    Exploitation of the landscape of Ireland goes hand in hand with the exploitation of most farmers, confirming Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. Farmers should instead be supported to restore biodiversity, and grow crops, primarily for local consumption, both of which would be long term investments in the health of the population.

    IV – Returning to the Source

    ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ is an imaginative vision for Ireland, reinvented as a glimmering girl. Yeats was singing a nation into being. But he would later bemoan the death of Romantic Ireland, as a rising class of Strong Farmers and their heirs, whose sons entered business and the professions, fumbled in greasy tills, adding the half pence to the pence, and prayer to shivering prayer.

    The 1916 Rising claimed the land of Ireland to be the patrimony of the people, but the interest of individual property owners has long held sway, under a 1937 Constitution that has been interpreted to favour the wealthy, as opposed to the common good.

    It was on one memorable journey, which I took during my early twenties, that I woke up to the damage being done to our environment.

    The morning after the night before, I felt overwhelmed by Dublin life, and determined to proceed by foot to find a sanctuary away from the city. I would find a spot to camp, removed from the banter, bright lights and braggadocio.

    I proceeded south through drab suburbs punctuated by ugly strip malls, attesting to poor planning in the city’s hinterland. I crossed a wide and ominous motorway under construction that became the M50, and proceeded to climb hills beyond the city limits; an endeavour increasingly fraught on roads lacking footpaths.

    As cars shot by spewing noise, pollution and anger, I chose to proceed off-piste. After scaling fences and passing through a few deserted cow fields, I  encountered ugly groves of immature spruces being fattened, like turkeys, for the satisfaction of a North American Christmas fantasy.

    Eventually the terrain grew sparser, boggier and less fenced-in. At last I met a variety of deciduous trees; the spectacle a sprawling magnificence of autumnal colours as my legs wearied under the strain of my pack.

    I began to collect firewood as I proceeded, soon gathering a sufficient quantity for my purposes. At last I reached the source of the River Dodder, a tributary of the Liffey, which passes within a hundred metres of my family home. Unconsciously, I was reaching back into my own origins, and I felt a spring in my step.

    As the light declined, waves of midgies brought crass irritation to my reveries, but soon the sun had disappeared altogether, and smoke from the fire deterred my tormenters. I prepared a meal consisting primarily of potatoes – the food of our impoverished ancestors –that I wrapped in tinfoil and cooked in the ashes of the fire.

    All about was a glorious silence, and the stars, usually masked by urban light, appeared as a hidden script that I had failed to notice. At last I felt at home.

     

    (1)  Frank Mitchell, Reading the Irish Landscape, (Dublin, 1990), p.89.
    (2) Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: the Delusion of Destiny, (New York, 2006), p.105.
    (3) Raymond Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production (), p.85.
    (4) Kerby Miller, ‘Emigration to North America in the era of the Great Famine’, in Crawley, Smyth and Murphy, Atlas of the Great Famine ( p.221.
    (5) Joseph Lee, ‘The Famine as History’, in O Grada, Famine 150: commemorative lecture series, (Dublin, 1997) p.168-9
    (6)  Colin Sage, Tara Kenny Connecting agri-export productivism, sustainability and domestic food security via the metabolic rift: The case of the Republic of Ireland (2017), p.19
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245226351730006X

  • A Guide to Preventing Data Leakage

    The Internet is a big old scary place, full of dark corners, strange protocols, dodgy individuals, unscrupulous corporations and cynical state-level actors.

    The tools we use to access the Internet, though often very powerful, remain badly-designed. This is true not only in terms of the User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI), but also in how they let us use and manage our data.

    Most big Internet/Web companies use “dark patterns” to exploit normal human behaviors profitably, and often without serious consideration of the consequences to the average human psyche.

    Every day there are hundreds if not thousands of severe security breaches, and every month or so we hear of egregious acts of deliberate abuse, or contemptible neglect on the scale of millions of individuals affected.

    This is made worse by the sheer amount of data our devices leak, all the time. Pretty much every computer has a hardware backdoor, either explicitly as in the Intel Management Engine (perhaps added at the behest of the National Security Agency), and most mobile telephone modems are little black boxes over which the user has no control. Location, browser history, contacts, messages, emails, etc., etc,. are all leaked in multiple ways, through apps and websites, through wifi and 4G, and worst of all directly from the operating systems.

    For example, in this video, we load the following sites simultaneously in a Firefox browser and use Lightbeam to visualise all the links made between sites by loading shared assets such as images, scripts, style sheets and other data common to any website.

    Simulating a typical browsing session on 18 sites (nytimes.com, theguardian.com, huffingtonpost.com, en.wikipedia.orgi, skatehut.co.uk, amazon.com x 2, vox.com, bbc.com, cracked.com, facebook.com, trivago.ie, skyscanner.net, nbcnews.com, answers.com, weather.com, ie.match.com, imgur.com) you can see 384 different servsers now have data on how you access these websites. The extreme amount of inter-connectivity is quite a show!

    Now we reload the same 18 pages with partial tracking prevention plugins to Firefox and observe only 58, and these only minimally.

     

    What follows is a guide to ‘tightening up’. This advice is intended for personal use. It is broken down into sections so it can be implemented in stages. Each section is colour-coded according to difficulty as follows:

    Easy – even for Grandpa

    Normal – can set up email on phone

    Hard – summon nearest teenager

    Difficult – might need professional help

    Problem: Hardware

    At the bottom of the stack we have the hardware problem, which is that most computers are not totally under the control of their users, and usually have at least one but often two or more completely independent, remotely-controlled, onboard computers. On Intel chips it’s called the Intel Management Engine, on AMD it’s called the AMD Platform Security Processor. Most mobile telephones use a proprietary technology from Broadcom, a massive US company, and are made in China, and are known to have a variety of intentional holes in their security.

    Solution: Use AMD products on the Laptop/Desktop and wait for Purism Mobile (and verified RISCV in the long term).

    AMD make all the main desktop/laptop/server chips that are not made by Intel, and have a better reputation.

    The Purism mobile project (Librem 5) is the great hope for everyone interested in fully user-controlled mobile phone. It will hopefully be ready in about a year. RISCV is a completely open, community-created, modern-chip-architecture that promises high-performance in both number of computations per second and energy use.

    Problem: Operating System

    Here we get to the big one, the choice of “church”. There are four main options: Apple, Google, Microsoft, GNU/Linux.

    Apple is the most cultish OS, a mono-aesthetic walled garden, famous for its ‘taste’ and convenience, infamous for its rigidity and cost. They manage their app store jealously, refusing programs that interfere with their ability to profitise your time on their systems. They have a well-funded reputation for safety, frequently destroyed for those in the know by errors such as the ability to login in remotely as administrator without a password. Their mobile efforts are more secure in some ways, but Apple themselves still extract huge amounts of ‘telemetry’ on every user, for their own and others benefit.

    Google offer Android. Google make money by selling advertising to third parties, along with detailed information about how to use best their platform. Android, though quite secure in certain aspects from a technical point of view, is still essentially a mobile person monitoring device. Google recently removed their famous “Don’t be evil” motto from their handbook.

    Microsoft sell Windows 10, the latest version of the most widely and successfully attacked operating system ever. Microsoft have been in trouble all over the world for their antics. Their devices send vast amounts of ‘anonymized’ data back to headquarters deliberately, and to pretty much every major Internet crime group as well.

    GNU/Linux is a multi-decade community-driven operating system initiated by one of the true heroes of privacy and freedom: Richard Stallman. It is now developed all over the world, in the open, by companies such as Google (who use it internally to power their advertising thought-trap) and organisations such as CERN and NASA. It powers most of the Internet, and is freely used on everything from wireless routers to phones to laptops to supercomputers.

    Solution: Linux Mint, the easiest and most polished operating systems distribution (free as in speech and as in beer)

    Difficult, but not impossible

    Problem: Safe Browsing

    We use a browser for nearly all our general use of the Internet. This is great as it provides an all-in-one tool that can do everything from email to games, but distressingly insecure as it is a one-stop-shop for tracking people’s habits online. There are four main browsers, each associated with one of the operating systems listed above.

    • Apple – Safari (also runs on Microsoft)
    • Google – Chrome (also runs on Apple, Microsoft, GNU/Linux)
    • Microsoft – Edge
    • Gnu/Linux – Firefox (also runs on Apple, Google, Microsoft)

    Solution: Firefox and Tor Browser Bundle

    Only one choice here, but it comes in two varieties: Firefox, and Firefox packaged as the Tor Browser Bundle.

    Firefox is a powerful, research-driven, privacy-focussed, standards-compliant, community-backed browser. All the code is open-source, meaning is can be and is examined out in the open by experts all over the world. The non-profit organisation that oversees Firefox, Mozilla, is very clear in its motives. The Tor Browser Bundle wraps the browser with the Tor project, providing vastly increased anonymity online, at the expense of being slower to use due to the added encryption complexity.

    Firefox is better with plugins, here are a few to get you started (these can break many websites):

    Problem: Your Internet Service Provider/Mobile Phone Operator

    Companies that sell you Internet Access are almost all required by law to record a lot of data about your activity.

    Solution: A Virtual Private Network such as Proton VPN

    A VPN sets up an encrypted point-to-point link from your computer/phone to another computer in a server farm elsewhere on the Internet. This hides your IP address (one of the most important tracking details), and some other data.

    Solution: Use TOR

    TOR is a method of encrypting your network traffic over a randomised colection of links over the Internet. It is quite secure, more so than only a VPN, but really quite slow. Used with a VPN (computer -> VPN -> TOR) it is quite effective.

    Problem: The Law in every jurisdiction

    Every Government on the planet reserves the right to legislate on people’s use of the Internet, and exercises it to varying degrees. The Government of the U.S.A., instrumental in the development of the Internet, reserves quite ridiculous authority to interfere, and uses and abuses this with aplomb.

    Solution: Stay in the EU/become an EU citizen

    Amazingly, the EU, the latest political hegemony in the most consistently abusive collective polity in human history, is now the bastion of Human Freedom. It is actually becoming quite effective in this role, and improving all the time.

    Solution: Enforce Human Rights Law

    ‘Article 12.

    No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.’

    Problem: Web Services and Social Media

    The entire business model of providing web services (email in your browser, for example) and social media is to monetise the data you give up by using these services.

    Solution: Don’t, just don’t (at least not yet)

    There are a small number of privacy-respecting web-services/social media organisations that provide most, but not all, of what we expect from these systems. They are still young, suffer from technical and User Experience problems, and have yet to achieve critical mass. In a few years, perhaps sooner, the landscape will be very different. Instead, just give people a ring, or write them a postcard, or just make sure to look them up next time you are near. If everyone reaches out the world becomes small.

    The Electronic Freedom Foundation provides the best overall guide to being safe online. Read more here.

  • Drinking from the Waters of Prevention in Public Health

    The Lancet’s recent editorial, ‘Austerity in Spain: time to loosen the grip’, argues that low government expenditure was ‘undermining the principle of universal coverage’ in that country. They point to pensioners devoting a substantial proportion of their incomes to medicines, and warn of excessive delays in elective surgeries being carried out. Detrimental effects are particularly evident among socially marginalised groups, such as migrants, they contend.

    Yet in spite of these privations the authors note that life expectancy in Spain had reached 83 years in 2015, up from 79·3 years in 2000, the highest, on average, of any EU country. Unconvincingly, they assume the repercussions ‘of the financial crises are not necessarily all detrimental: ‘increases in healthy behaviours (eg, cycling, walking) and reductions in risky activities (eg, consumption of alcohol or tobacco) might occur’.

    It is a common misconception that increasing health expenditure in any Western society will bring about a rise in life expectancy. In fact, there are rapidly diminishing returns on investment. Primary care, especially in maternity services and pediatrics (including selective use of antibiotics, and vaccination), certainly minimises premature deaths, but most healthcare addresses the symptoms rather than acting on the lifestyle triggers of the diseases that are now the greatest cause of mortality (and morbidity) in the Western world.

    This reflects the Tudor-Hart Inverse Care Law, which states: ‘The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served. This … operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.’ In other words, efficiency declines as expenditure increases, and the freer the health market the worse the outcomes.

    The two main causes of mortality in the Western world are cardiovascular disease and cancer. An early diagnosis may indeed nip a problem in the bud, but does not address the social and environmental drivers of these maladies. The hospital experience itself may even be unhealthy, as an expansive 2014 Swiss cost-benefit analysis of Mammogram services suggests. One in five of the cancers detected with mammography and treated was not a threat to the woman’s health, and did not require treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery or radiation.

    In fact, the adverse effect of medical treatment is one of the leading causes of death in most developed countries: especially the high-spending United States, where in 2000 Dr. Barbara Starfield estimated:

    • 12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgeries.
    • 7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals.
    • 20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals.
    • 80,000 deaths/year from nosocomial infections in hospitals.
    • 106,000 deaths/year from nonerror, adverse effects of medications.

    More recently in 2016, a John Hopkins team calculated that 250,000 deaths were caused by medical errors each year, making iatrogenic illness the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after cardiovascular disease and cancer. This serves as a particular warning to those countries converging with U.S. norms, where health care is largely left to market forces.

    Yet health discourse continues to promote the scientific holy grail of the wonder cure, even for ailments intimately related to lifestyles and environmental factors. This approach may be traced to a Romantic era of science at the end of the eighteenth century, and has profound implication for government funding of health services.

    Moreover, when a person is afflicted with serious a disease the demand for a cure becomes a matter of life and death. Most of us will do anything in our power to survive, crying from the rooftops if necessary. A healthy person, on the other hand, is generally oblivious or uninterested in why they remain hale and hearty. Stories focusing on the affordability of medicines or failures in health services have far greater news currency than the multifarious reasons why one society is less prone to disease than another.

    A rational health system would continue to pursue medicinal breakthroughs, in collaboration with but not at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, but place greater emphasis on addressing the complex aetiology of pathologies, in particular lifestyle and other factors that give rise to cancers and cardiovascular diseases.

    II Lifestyle Factors

    The advancement of lifestyle change, as opposed to dispensing medicines, would also require a cultural shift among the medical community, which could have revolutionary ramifications for society.

    By and large doctors are trained to intervene against clearly defined pathologies, mainly through medication, and have less training in ‘soft’ psychological skills, which might alter self-destructive behaviours at source. Psychiatry, psychology’s close relative, is a specialised branch of medicine, overwhelming devoted to treating mental illness rather than providing guidance to society at large. Moreover, the complexity of lifestyle factors often renders research data unsatisfactory, with findings easily dismissed as conjecture or mere correlation.

    Nonetheless, in a research paper this year entitled: ‘Impact of Healthy Lifestyle Factors on Life Expectancies in the US Population‘ researchers attempted to show that countering a range of unhealthy conditions including being a smoking, maintaining a high body mass index, taking little or no exercise, and consuming a poor diet and alcohol to excess, could significantly increase life expectancy:

    The United States is one of the wealthiest nations worldwide, but Americans have a shorter life expectancy compared with residents of almost all other high-income countries, ranking 31st in the world for life expectancy at birth in 2015.3 In 2014, with a total health expenditure per capita of $9402,4 the United States was ranked first in the world for health expenditure as a percent of gross domestic product (17.1%). However, the US healthcare system has focused primarily on drug discoveries and disease treatment rather than prevention. Chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer are the commonest and costliest of all health problems but are largely preventable.

    It is notable that the U.S. spends the highest proportion of its GDP on healthcare in the world, yet witnesses poor outcomes relative to other developed nations. This reflects the Tudor-Hart Inverse Care Law, which Obama’s Patient Care and Affordable Care Act (so-called Obamacare) redresses. Ironically, this is being whittled away by the Trump administration, who enjoyed support in the Presidential election from states where more than four out of five of those who rely on Obamacare reside.

    Aside from insufficient access to Primary Care, the U.S.’s disease burden also arises from addictions to junk foods, drugs and cars. Medications or surgery do little to confront the obesity pandemic, or drug dependencies, including the opiate crisis which killed more than 33,000 thousand in 2015.

    Rather than ramping up access to healthcare the authors instead recommend adherence to a ‘low-risk lifestyles, which could:

    prolong life expectancy at age 50 years by 14.0 and 12.2 years in female and male US adults compared with individuals without any of the low-risk lifestyle factors. Our findings suggest that the gap in life expectancy between the United States and other developed countries could be narrowed by improving lifestyle factors.

    The logic of this emphasis is consistent with the explanation of the authors of The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Floud et al., Cambridge, 2011) for why average life expectancies have risen across the world over the past three centuries.

    Crucial breakthroughs in raising global life expectancy arrived first in England in the late eighteenth century with government intervention in the grain market, which stabilised prices, thereby averting periodic famines. The average age at death climbed more dramatically once clean drinking water became available at the end of the nineteenth.

    An important consequence of early-nineteenth-century urbanisation had been ‘the deterioration of the quality and quantity of the water supply(1)’. Drinking water only improved after substantial state-funded infrastructural investment in the 1890s. Thereafter, a range of water-born diseases like diarrhea, cholera and dysentery ceased to trouble the population to anywhere near the same extent.

    The authors make a significant claim:

    it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it(2).

    They acknowledge that drugs like insulin, penicillin and prontosil as well as the mass immunizations of the post Second World War era made a difference, but maintain that adequate nutrition and clean water were the main determinants which overcame the infectious diseases which had carried off most of the population until that point.

    III Smoking and Obesity

    Today the drivers of disease in developed countries are manifold, but one factor often overlooked is the stress of living in perpetual income insecurity. This goes some way towards explaining why it tends to be the poor who make unwholesome food choices, especially favouring refined sugar, and continuing to smoke in spite of vivid health warnings.

    Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes the ubiquity of smoking as a clear index of the state of civilisation: ‘If smoking is defined as an ersatz act which absorbs the increasing nervousness of civilized man, affecting the body’s chemistry as well as motor function, then this penetration of our culture by smoking demonstrates to what depth the culture is permeated by nervousness.(3)’

    Moreover, the medical writer Kurt Pohlisch describes how: ‘In the act of smoking the nervously restless hand fixes on a purpose.’ He continues: ‘Smoking creates both a feeling of activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity … In terms of motoricity, pharmacology and sense psychology, smoking creates a cheerful mood, highly varied nuances of physical feelings, an agreeable stimulation with which to perform intellectual work, a pleasant sense of calm, a state of contentedness, satisfaction [and] easy cordiality.(4)’

    Consequently, a substantial minority continue to smoke, despite constant and graphic advice to quit. What the campaigns against smoking fail to recognise is the role played by smoking – and the use of other drugs – in relieving the stress of living in perpetual income insecurity.

    Smoking: ‘activity in leisure and one of leisure in the midst of activity’.

    Similarly, sections of societies living under free market conditions are prone to unhealthy dietary patterns. Avner Offer asserts: ‘Among affluent societies, the highest prevalence of obesity is to be found in countries most strongly committed to market-liberal policy norms.’ He argues: ‘if stress generates obesity, then welfare states protect against stress, and are likely to have lower states of obesity.’

    He says: ‘it is appropriate to think of the rise of obesity as an eruption, and to look for another eruption to explain it’. He identifies this as the emergence of the New Right in the late 1970s, and the market-liberal regimes that subsequently carried out their economic and social programmes in the main English-speaking countries, and elsewhere.

    He argues ‘the economic benefits of flexible and open market liberalism, such as they are, may be offset by costs to personal welfare and public health, which are rarely taken into account’, citing the example of the UK where adult obesity has tripled since 1980. An obesogenic environment was actually largely in place by the 1970s: car-use and television-watching were well established, and food was already sugary, cheap and plentiful before Margaret Thatcher came to power. The same stress-inducing conditions emerged in the United States under Ronald Reagan.

    Increased stress levels, especially fueled by employment uncertainty affect dietary choices: ‘Physiologically, stress leads individuals to prefer fatty and sweet foods, and frequently to consume more calories, exacerbating weight gain, especially in the form of risky abdominal fat.’ The idea of a link between insecurity, stress and obesity is supported by the ‘social gradient’ of obesity’: it is most prevalent among those at the bottom of the social ladder.

    Illuminatingly, in the month after September 11th, sales of snack foods increased by more than 12% across the United States as paranoia, verging on hysteria, swept through the country. Overall: ‘among rich nations, the USA and Great Britain have experienced the greatest income inequality since 1980 and the greatest increase in the prevalence of obesity(3)’.

    Peter Whybrow connects these responses to our early evolution. He argues that stress causes the lizard core of our brains to release dopamine, a hormone connected to pleasure, after consuming fatty and sweet food.

    He paints a lurid picture: ‘In the presence of continuous psychosocial shocks, a complex work environment, repeated deadlines, a difficult marriage – the alarm bells are continuously ringing and the stress response is continuously in play. In consequences, the body is maintained in a high state of psychological arousal, where the vulnerability to chronic illness is increased, with obesity as no exception.(4)’

    IV The Miracle Cure

    Richard Holmes argues that several crucial misconceptions crystallized around the idea of science at the start of the nineteenth century, aspects of which continue to confound our understanding of public health.

    There emerged at that point, ‘the dazzling idea of the solitary scientific ‘genius’, thirsting and reckless for knowledge, for its own sake and perhaps at any cost’. This is closely connected with the idea of the ‘Eureka’ moment: ‘the intuitive inspired instant of invention or discovery, for which no amount of preparation or preliminary analysis can really compare(5).’

    Western medicine perpetuates what is essentially a mythology of invention, assuming genius will produce a wonder cure for diseases such as cancer; just as Edward Jenner developed the idea of vaccination for small pox by infecting a young farm boy with the disease after first giving him a dose of cowpox. He had learnt from local folklore that milk maids who developed that mild condition never contracted the deadly pox.

    The chronic conditions we confront are not, however, susceptible to silver bullet breakthroughs in the form of drug interventions or vaccination. Medications may extend lives but generally fail to eliminate the diseases or address underlying causes. Nonetheless, the media is transfixed by tantalising cures lying on the horizon.

    One notable exception is the long-standing campaign against smoking, but as indicated, governments fail to recognise why people refuse to give up. Meanwhile, we see desultory efforts to warn against or tax consumption of ‘pure, white and deadly’ refined sugar, or red and processed meat, categorised as possible and probable carcinogens by the WHO. Likewise the transport infrastructure of most developed countries is designed primarily for motor cars, leading to a serious lack of physical activity.

    In the past doctors displayed greater awareness of the lifestyle factors that lead to disease, including the health benefits, or otherwise, derived from staple foodstuffs.

    By the seventeenth century bread was a vital element in the diet of most Parisians, who, on average, ate a remarkable one kilo-and-a-half per day. At that the time the perceived adulteration of bread with ‘barm’ or yeast, as opposed to the traditional sourdough ‘levain’ method, produced a medical controversy, leading to the formation of an expert medical panel.

    In condemning the use of yeast, the leading medical expert Gui Patin stated:

    To say, as those who defend it do, that they have not seen anyone drop over sick or dead from eating this bread is not a good way to clear it of the faults with which it has been charged. It is like sugar refined with lime or alum, or heavily salted, peppered and sliced meats, or wines in which one tosses lime or fish glue, or other things bad in themselves which men concerned about their health avoid, even if none of these things causes death or threatens one’s health on the day it is ingested(6).

    In spite of his advice the Paris parliament maintained a policy of laissez faire. The preference of bakeries for yeast is explained by it acting faster than levain. Since the arrival of the Chorleywood Process we have reached a point where most bread is no more than a junk food, which is surely a significant, slow-burning cause of disease. Indeed, the quality of a country’s bread may be an overlooked comparative indicator of its overall health.

    The early nineteenth century radical doctor Thomas Beddoes defined the philanthropic doctor as ‘one who is humane in his conduct not so much from sudden impulses of passion as from a settled conviction of the miserly prevailing among mankind(7)’. Many doctors today display these qualities, but are often ground down by a system which processes disease. As specialisation increases compassion declines, with the body reduced to its composite parts. The pharmaceutical industry also increasingly distorts priorities, even in ostensibly publicly funded systems of healthcare.

    As his career drew to a close, Beddoes made a number of simple proposals for raising public health: he suggested that all wives should be provided (free of charge) with anatomy lectures, washing machines (steam-powered), fresh vegetables and pressure cookers(8). These proposals would not be out of place today.

    The emphasis of public health should shift to the general practitioner, whose role could be more educative (lessons in anatomy that Beddoes speaks of) than prescriptive, and the idea of general physician perhaps revived.

    V The Wide Angle

    ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ is the centrepiece of a ninth century Irish mythological cycle. It consists of a series of fantastical episodes of enduring interest. One such is the story of Nuada who loses his arm and authority in battle. We learn that the court physician Diancecht fashions him a prosthetic silver limb in its place.

    In the meantime, Diancecht’s son Miach begins to heal Nuada’s real severed arm, but the father prefers his own methods and surgically kills his son by removing his brain. Miach is buried by his sister Airmed and from his grave sprout three hundred and sixty-five healing herbs, which she orders in her cloak. Diancecht has other ideas, however, scattering the herbs, each of whose value would remain obscure.

    The possibilities of Miach’s more complimentary approach, rather than Diancecht’s artificial limb, suggests that healing may come from within the body itself, while the scattering of the healing herbs represents ignorance of the cures available in Nature.

    Diancecht wish to preserve the dominance of his profession might serve as a metaphor for the approach of the pharmaceutical industry. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma (London, 2012), in particular, has drawn attention to serious corruption in that industry. But medication will remain all-important as long as disease, not health, is the focus of public policy.

    Human beings cannot expect to live forever, but serious reductions can be made to the burden of disease. We can address drug addictions, the quality of food and increase physical activity, but stress and low-level depression, lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices. If you take your meal in a car, as is the case with up to twenty per cent of those consumed in the U.S., it is more than a nutritional issue.

    The culture of Spain is notable for its conviviality, although one could overstate how mealtimes are not rushed affairs, or that work can always be done manana. Nonetheless, the siesta is still respected, and the life-affirming fiesta an important dimension of civic life. However, the recent economic crisis, and current political turn, may be eroding aspects of this way of life. Moreover, the Mediterranean diet is no longer followed, and obesity increasingly apparent.

    Notably, the generation in Spain enjoying such longevity today spent most of their working lives in a political system that protected industry from foreign competition, and, especially after the Socialists came to power at the end of Franco’s dictatorship, lived under a welfare state.

    The generation at work in Spain today, or not as the case with so many, are subject to greater uncertainties in life than their parents, with potentially long-term health consequences. Indeed across Europe life expectancies have actually gone into decline for the first time since records began. This may reflect the stress induced by increasing income insecurity and inequality  in the era of the euro.

    Altering any culture is slow work, but a rational view of public health should recognise a cultural dimension to most infirmities. A breakthrough in public health could be to see all medicine ‘as a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy’, as Iain McGilchrist put it.

    We may also return to a more general appreciation of our reality that animated the first generation of scientists, including polymaths such as Alexander von Humboldt who wrote: ‘In this great chain of causes and effects no single fact can be considered in isolation.’

     

    (1) Roderick Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700 (Cambridge, 2011), p.173

    (2) Ibid, p.178

    (3) Wolfgang Shivelbusch Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York, 1992) pp.96-111

    (4) Ibid, pp.96-111

    (5) Avner Offer, R ‘Time Urgency, Sleep Loss, and Obesity’ in Avner Offer, Rachel Pechey, and Stanley Ulijaszek, Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies (London, 2012) pp.129-141

    (5) Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p. xvii

    (6) Madeleine Ferrieres Sacred Cow Mad Cow (Translated by Jody Gladding) (New York, 2006), p.188

    (7) Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008) p.286

    (8) Ibid, p.302

  • The Slow Death of Irish Nature

    ‘Blade Runner 2049’ is a sci-fi follow up to the 1982 cult classic starring Harrison Ford and Sean Young. Our future hero is Ryan Gosling who navigates a lonely, desolate world amid general dystopian bleakness. The viewer is told that by 2049 all ecosystems have collapsed, leaving a sterile planet, allowing humans to survive only due to our air and water purifying technology. Food is the produce of industrial laboratories and citizens eek out their pointless existences huddled in soulless (and loveless) cities. It’s not pretty, and 2049 is only 30 years off – eek!

    Although evidently a work of fiction, the idea that we stand on an ecological precipice is very much the stuff of daily news. Two studies in particular, one on the decline of insect populations in Germany, the other on the disappearance of farmland birds in France, really let the headline writers out of the traps.

    Scientists warn of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after study shows flying insect numbers plummeting by 75% warned the London Independent; Europe faces ‘biodiversity oblivion’ after collapse in French birds howled the Guardian, which went on to say that “intensive farming and pesticides could turn Europe’s farmland into a desert that ultimately imperils all humans”.

    Environmentalists lap this up – it bolsters what we’ve been crying about for years (and decades in some cases). Maybe, now that we’re all about to die a horrible death, politicians and policy makers will finally take us seriously and do what’s necessary to avert calamity. But hold up a sec. How exactly does turning Europe’s farmland into a desert imperil all humans? Sure, flying insects pollinate crops – and I’ll miss apples and strawberries when their price rockets because pollination has to be done by people with feather dusters – but I’m not going to starve! Where are the facts behind these doomsday assertions? What does it even mean when an ecosystem collapses?

    II

    Surprisingly, the idea of ‘collapse’ is not nearly as well studied as you might imagine. The book of the same name, by polymath Jared Diamond, looked at the collapse of societies, or human civilisations, which generally features environmental change as one of a number of factors.

    For instance, the collapse of the Viking settlements in Greenland was largely due to the inability of the farmers, with their cows and oats, to adapt to colder conditions – even thought the Inuit alongside them did just fine hunting and gathering.

    The Maya civilisation of Central America may well have collapsed primarily due to environmental changes, but it did not mean that all the Maya people died out – many people of Maya descent live in Central American countries today.

    We have our own example right here in Ireland – the Céide Field dairy farming community on the north coast of County Mayo made a living from the land up to about 5,000 years ago. Some believe that the collapse of their society was partly due to deforestation, which made the soil wetter, and promoted the spread of bog and the loss of nutrients. Yet farming in Ireland continued.

    Instances where all life has been destroyed are rare if non-existent – the only example I can think of are the oceanic dead zones where so much farm and human waste has been dumped in the sea that bacterial action has sucked all oxygen from the water (none of these thankfully are anywhere near Ireland). Even deserts are not dead.

    The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the global body which monitors the health of Earth’s ecosystems and it is best known for its conservation assessments of individual species, which results in endangered species lists (or ‘red lists’ as they’re known). Its assessment of habitats – that is, the environments in which species live – is much less developed. It does however provide a useful definition to allow us to tell when a whole ecosystem has collapsed:

    “An ecosystem is considered collapsed when it is virtually certain that it’s defining biotic [living] or abiotic [non-living] features are lost, and the characteristic native biota [i.e. the plants and animals] are no longer sustained. […] Collapse is a transformation of identity, a loss of defining features, and/or replacement by a different, novel ecosystem”.

    As an example it shows how the Aral Sea in Central Asia, which was once the fourth largest inland water body in the world. Extraction of the water for agricultural irrigation meant that by the late 1980s  most of the water had disappeared along with the community of plants and animals which once lived there. The Aral Sea today is not a dead zone, plants and animals continue to live there, but it is drastically different to what it was. It no longer supports the livelihoods which once sustained themselves by fishing, and salt intrusion from deep in the soil means that it may never recover.

    Another example of ecosystem collapse is the Grand Banks cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland. There, despite the ending of all fishing in the 1990s, the cod have not returned. In both cases, the loss of the ecosystem led to devastating social and environmental disruption. Yet nobody died and life in these areas goes on (of the human and non-human kind), and a new normal has settled in. Sad tales to be sure, but it’s a far cry from Hollywood disaster zone.

    III

    To get a glimpse of what it’s like to live in a collapsed ecosystem just take a trip to Iceland. When the first human settlers arrived there around the end of the first millennium AD they found a country that was up to 40% covered in forest. The rest of Iceland was covered in a near-sterile ice sheet or bare volcanic rock.

    Like farming communities everywhere they set about felling the trees to plant crops or graze animals. The forests were a source of fuel and fodder for people and their animals but nevertheless deforestation continued right up to the 1950s. The result was massive soil erosion which prohibits the growth of any vegetation, as well as destructive sand storms as the fierce sub-Artic wind whips up the loose soil.

    Today Iceland has virtually no forest left and establishing new woodland has proven to be extremely difficult. Much of Iceland is now technically a desert. Nevertheless, its small population enjoys a high standard of living and a consumer culture that is available to anyone else in the world on a middle-class income.

    It is currently enjoying a tourist boom, with more visitors perhaps than it can cope with, and these people are drawn primarily for its dramatic landscapes. Modern technology means that no one goes hungry or wants for freshwater. They have abundant geothermal energy which is even being harnessed to grow peppers and tomatoes in polytunnels outside Reykjavik. They also have a renowned fishing industry which, due to good management, is still productive.

    Visitors to Iceland scarcely notice that they are traversing a collapsed ecosystem but are nevertheless enthralled by its beauty and grandeur. So the question is posed: is it possible for the natural world to collapse all around us and, rather than provoking death and destruction, for it be met with a shrug? Maybe there will be no point of reckoning, no fulcrum upon which the attention of politicians will swing towards policies which are genuinely geared towards restoring the living world. Maybe it will happen and we’ll be too busy on our screens to pay any attention.

    IV

    Take a look at the environmental history of Ireland. It is believed that when people first arrived on our island the land was cloaked with extensive oak forests. In between there were wetlands (bogs, swamps and the like), lakes and rivers, and maybe the very tops of some of the higher mountains had no trees. The oceans teemed with life.

    Now-extinct Sturgeon in the Natural History Museum.

    5,000 years ago the first farming communities emerged and, just like in Iceland, this was associated with deforestation. Some species went extinct in this time, such as the brown bear, lynx and wild cat, and this is bound to have had an effect on the forests that remained. Up to 500 or 600 years ago, most of these ecosystems on land and sea were largely intact. Forest cover had reduced dramatically (one reference gives forest cover as about one eighth of the land cover in 1600) but our rivers ran free, great wetlands held flocks of cranes and wolves were widespread.

    By 1800 the forest ecosystem had collapsed completely, at this stage only tiny fragments remained while key forest animals like the wild boar had vanished (wild boar increase woodland biodiversity and help in the germination of tree seedlings by rooting in the soil). The wolf was also extinct. Most people appreciate that food webs are impacted when only one species is taken out, though oftentimes the exact impact can be hard to discern. Not the wolf – we now know just how important the presence of a top predator is in keeping all the plants and animals in check, not only deer but the smaller predators like foxes.

    By the end of the 1800’s not only the wolf but all the large birds of prey (two species of eagle, Red Kite, Buzzard, Osprey, Goshawk and Marsh Harrier) were also gone. By 1920 the extinction tally was added to further. Even the North Atlantic Right Whale – hunted off the coast of Donegal in the early 1900s – had disappeared completely.

    All the same, the rivers were still bursting with fish and pollution was virtually unheard off. Vast oyster beds around the coast had been dredged away but the sea’s bounty remained  immeasurable. There had been lots of turf-cutting for domestic fuel but there were still vast areas of intact bog and fen, and floodplains which attracted enormous numbers of birds – particularly those which laid their eggs on the ground, like Corncrakes, Lapwings, Curlews and Redshanks. In winter these areas hosted great flocks of wintering geese, ducks and swans. The air would have constantly been alive with their calls. Since that time let’s take a look at what has happened:

    • The area of midlands raised bog has been reduced to 0.63% of its original extent, primarily from industrial-scale open pit mining. There are no untouched bogs remaining and the best example (Clara Bog in Offaly) has a road slicing through it.

    Industrial scale peat extraction is a feature of many midland counties.

    • The Office of Public Works have deepened and straightened 11,500km of river channel under the Arterial Drainage Act of 1942, cutting rivers off from their natural flood plains. Impassable dams on the Shannon, Erne, Liffey and Lee (among others) mean migratory fish cannot access their traditional spawning grounds. Salmon and Eel populations have collapsed to the point where both species are threatened with extinction. There are virtually no Salmon in the River Shannon above the Ardnacrusha dam today.
    • Approximately half of water bodies (lakes, rivers, estuaries) are polluted while the number of ‘pristine’ water sites has dwindled from over 500 in the 1980s to only 21 today. There is no river left in Ireland healthy enough to allow Freshwater Pearl Mussels to breed in.

    Drainage has drastically altered many Irish rivers, leading to flooding.

    • Of the great peat bogs which stretch across the West of Ireland and other mountain areas, only 28% are ‘worthy of conservation’ – as the rest has been destroyed beyond salvation by conifer plantations and drainage, while fires, turf-cutting, wind farms etc. have left none of our upland habitats in ‘good condition’ according to the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

    Conifer plantation smother landscapes, communities and wildlife.

    • Fish are no longer present in coastal waters in any abundance – traditional fisheries for Herring, Mackerel, Cod, Whiting, Bass, Sole, Plaice, Turbot and other flatfish have all but disappeared. ‘Fishing’ today in these areas is not for fish but crustaceans (prawns, crabs and lobsters) while the real fishing is done by enormous factory boats far out to sea. Bottom trawling and dredging – which obliterate seafloor communities of plants and animals – is carried out practically everywhere, and sometimes more than once a year. It not only results in habitat loss but overfishing of non-target species and colossal waste (up to 90% of the contents of a prawn trawl can be dumped overboard).
    • Modern farming relies increasingly on inputs of chemical sprays or reseeding, which eradicates wild plants and animals with brutal efficiency. The next time you look at a farmer’s field see how many flowers or flying insects you can count.
    • 62% of sharks and rays occurring in Irish waters are threatened with extinction. Some, such as the angel shark, flapper skate and porbeagle shark, are critically endangered.

    Bumble bees are vital pollinators of wild plants as well as fruit crops.

    • Conservation assessments have been carried out for mammals, birds, moths, plants, mayflies, dragonflies, amphibians, reptiles, freshwater fish, butterflies, water beetles, freshwater molluscs, sharks, and bees. On average a third of all of these species are either ‘threatened’ or ‘near threatened’ with extinction.
    • There is documented evidence that about 115 species of plant and animal have gone extinct from Ireland since the arrival of humans. Many more have gone from common and widespread to the verge of extinction in the space of my lifetime, such as the curlew, the nightjar and the purple sea urchin (I’m 44).

    In the words of the IUCN all of our ecosystems – on land and at sea – have suffered a transformation of identity, a loss of defining features and a replacement by a different/novel ecosystem. They have all collapsed. Yet this has largely gone unnoticed, unremarked upon and even unappreciated by many environmentalists and ecologists in Ireland.

    IV

    Today, unlike the Greenland Vikings or the Maya, we draw on resources from across the entire planet. My ice cream might contain palm oil grown on land which once had rich Indonesian rain forest, the steak I order in my local restaurant may come from a cow raised on deforested land in Brazil or my smoked salmon may be indirectly resulting in overfishing of a fish species I’ve never heard of before, in a lawless part of the high seas.

    Many Irish cows, destined to be eaten in China, have been raised by eating not only locally grown grass, but soya products from South America. Much of the time it’s virtually impossible to know what the impact of our purchasing decisions has been. Does this mean that while we may live happy, cosseted lives in our own degraded environment, we are really just exporting ecosystem collapse to the farthest reaches of the planet? Are we living on borrowed time?

    Nearly 10 years ago an international team of scientists tried to answer this question and the answer was: probably. Their paper, Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity, published in the journal Ecology and Society in 2009, identified nine planetary boundaries within which ‘humanity can operate safely’. These included climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, use of freshwater, biodiversity loss and land-system change.

    For three of these, climate change, biodiversity loss and disruption of the nitrogen cycle, we have already broken through the limits of what is sustainable. In 2012 a study led by Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley was published in the journal Nature. It asked whether humans are forcing a planetary-scale transition “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience”. It concluded that the plausibility of such an eventuality “seems high”. One of the authors told the New York Times that “the situation scares the hell out me”.

    In Ireland these arguments seem abstract despite the fact that the natural world has collapsed all around us. We rely entirely on purification technology for drinkable water as the water from rivers and lakes would otherwise make us sick. Thousands of people have been put out of work around our coasts after fish populations vanished, and continue to disappear (there is currently talk that traditional eel fishermen are in line for compensation in return for handing in their nets; the volume of exported lobsters fell by 20% in 2017 etc.).

    Extinction brings with it the irreversible loss of heritage, tradition and folklore. Across Ireland farming of any kind is increasingly a loss-making enterprise – according to Teagasc sheep, beef and tillage sectors rely entirely on state aid for an income. Even the much-touted dairy sector is heavily dependent upon subsidies which perversely promote pollution, habitat loss and further extinction.

    We have a forestry sector which is dominated by non-native conifer monocultures to produce cheap furniture and costs Irish taxpayers €100 million per year. Meanwhile climate change, along with ecological collapse, has left farmers and foresters more vulnerable than ever to extreme weather events, disease and other influences beyond their control. These changes will be calamitous for some, but for most it will unfold with a shrug.

    V

    Our lives are not quite as devoid of colour as the inhabitants of the imaginary city in Blade Runner but they are increasingly dependent upon technology and more divorced from nature. Few people today know the taste of wild salmon or hear the sound of the curlew and we are all the poorer for it.

    To bring nature back we need to change the story. We need to start talking more about the opportunities and not only about the threats. What if we planted enormous forests of native trees in which there could be food production, recreation and valuable timber? What if we could rebuild the health of the sea so that a net full of fresh Herring or Oysters or Turbot could be sold at the pier from a small, low-impact fishing boat? What if we restored our uplands and rivers so that anglers could once again catch monster Salmon; or if we had clean water to drink, and farmers could pick up a pearl (from a Freshwater Pearl Mussel) from the bottom of a sparkling river? What if we transformed the open cast peat mines across the midlands into a wilderness with bears, cranes, wolves and flocks of wild birds which darken the sky?

    Killarney National Park – under threat from invasive species and grazing by animals.

    These are experiences which would enrich our country not only for visitors but for the people who live in these areas. We have a long way to go before life itself is snuffed out and Ireland still has amazing wildlife spectacles. But these are getting fewer in number all the time. Dramatic changes are upon us and uncertainty lies ahead. We can shrug our shoulders and allow ourselves to be carried away, or we can be bold and create a future for our children which is not merely habitable, but rich and rewarding.

    Pádraic Fogarty is an ecologist and campaign officer with the Irish Wildlife Trust. His book, Whittled Away – Ireland’s Vanishing Nature was published in 2017 by Collins Press. He tweets under the handle @whittledaway

  • A Garden Should not Require Permission to Live on Earth

    This article was triggered by events that took place at the Community Garden located on Oliver Bond Street, Dublin 8 before Christmas 2017. Our petition and a background story can be found here. 

    The average person living in a city centre has very little interaction with actual soil: city dwellers spend most of their time outside walking on pavement while visually surrounded by a concrete jungle. Exposure to city green spaces typically takes the form of manufactured parks, managed by The City, that are suited to the frameworks for gentrification. That is why it seems obvious to me, that the following conversation relating to the Community Garden spaces in the Liberties neighborhood’s, would not be taking place if the spotlight was on a Community Garden in Ballsbridge.

    Community Gardens in Dublin: the Current Model

    The political lock out of the Oliver Bond Street Community Garden, is an excellent demonstration of how something that should be natural – plants, living outside, in their native environment; can turn into a disaster once people with zero compassion, respect, or knowledge for the health and wellbeing of the environment, see an opportunity to validate their ‘power-over’.

    The current situation in Dublin regarding space concerns has manifested a ‘secret garden culture’ among Community Garden Growers and Inner-City Gardens.

    These independent green spaces are being seized before they have the opportunity to fully blossom beyond the developmental phase because success in the form of social economy would increase a garden’s staying power. During the developmental stages these gardens are still malleable – their roots are not as strong and are therefore easier to weed out. This internal pressure to maintain Green Space autonomy has skewed public opinion on the value of Inner-City Gardening by deflecting the positive impact that these spaces can have on communities. How can the public truly understand and reap the long-term benefits from something that has never been allowed to come into full fruition?

    What does this pattern really reflect? The Necessity for a shift in public opinion

    At its core, the primary challenge for gardeners in Irish culture is a lack of public respect. This devaluation is an unusual condition that does not seem to exist in any other major European city. In Dublin, Community Gardens have been categorized as ‘substandard green spaces’ in an effort by the City to demean and add further fuel to the existing stigmatization that paints Community Gardens as no more than part-time, temporary hobby plots. As a result, there is no culture of Inner-City Community Gardening in Dublin.

    Culture of Convenience

    Removing the soil from produce has removed society’s connection to nature. The soil that gave life to the food you eat is commonly called ‘dirt’ and is seen as an inconvenience. We want produce that is “clean” and shiny.

    Today’s supermarket shopping experience reflects the principles of a complacent nation, as it is no longer a sensory one. You cannot touch or smell half of the produce that you purchase if you shop in major supermarkets, because these products are pre-washed, and pre-packaged in plastic with a barcode to cater to you: the dis-engaged consumer, who expects an impersonal self-serve experience that is fast and easy. We live in a time where people expect instant gratification, and that often comes at an environmental cost.

    Gardens take time and work – people are impatient. Culture of convenience is a culture of laziness and corporations have groomed and now cater to this model. As a result, many people have zero awareness of how to grow their own food due to the reliance they put on everyone BUT themselves. People no longer take responsibility for themselves because they no longer know how to trust themselves and this manufactured condition becomes more dangerous when detachment from self-sufficiency correlates to people unconsciously giving their personal power away.

    Corporation stimulate demand in order to survive, and exert more power through the development of ‘hero worshiping’ (the corporation), which develops a victim mentality in the consumer. Linking back to independent spaces: if people are able to use Community Gardens to figure things out for themselves: experiment, learn, and generate ideas as solutions, then they can step back into their own personal power. Community gardens reflect creativity and rebellion and that challenges those that cling to the initials and titles next to their names.

    Control

    The space-race perception in Dublin is one that creates the notion that sharing is not possible. It suggests that because there is not enough room, that you can only have either housing or green spaces, not both. And because Community Gardens generally do not provide secure profit to the Council, they are the first to face extinction.

    It is very important to make the distinction that the space issue is structural – and if The City maintains the attitude that Independent Green Spaces are not valuable, then they are communicating to the public, that the wellbeing of its citizens is insignificant, when in the same race as profit. By making a mockery out of Green Spaces in order to shape public opinion, The City is participating in environmental injustice – more specifically, food injustice

    Community Gardens add a sense of “wildness” to a neighbourhood – plants can grow as they wish, people from all walks of life can equally come together and put their hands in the soil and get ‘dirty’; everyone is reminded that an object as small as a seed has the capacity and potential to grow into something more, when given the space and nourishment to expand and change. Community Gardens have endless potential just like the people involved in them – a simple reminder that it is the passionate people that make a city compassionate.