In so doing, Ireland had been overtaken by Singapore, a micro state that imports over 90% of its food. You might ask, how is it possible that this island of concrete was adjudged to be the most food secure place on the planet?
Singapore, ‘the world’s most food secure country’.
On closer examination, it seems this “research” had been sponsored by Corteva Agriscience, one of the largest producers of pesticides in the world, and now a subsidiary of DowDupont after a merger with Dow Chemical, (the corporation responsible for the Bhopal Disaster in India 1984). Such vested interests cannot be trusted as a reliable source in assessing the food security of nation states.
The fact that Singapore is ranked highest in a food security index sponsored by an agri-chemical multinational should come as no surprise, as these chemicals are much more likely to figure in industrially produced food systems, traded on a global market, rather than localized, subsistence food systems.
It also comes as no mystery to find the Irish independent presenting this highly dubious study as fact. That newspaper has historically represented the interests of the comprador, or broker capitalist class in Ireland; that revolving door between agribusiness, finance and politics, servicing the multinationals that have located in Ireland.
Food security in this scenario equates to commodities being traded on a global market with minimal restrictions. The evaluation is predicated on current availability, price and diversity of food consumed – regardless of productive factors or supply chain interference. It takes no account of the environmental or social consequences of this supply line, or any risks lying further down the line, whether a hard Brexit, a global pandemic, or that the global food system has eroded a quarter of all arable topsoil on the planet since the 1950s.[iv]
Despite supposedly being number two in the world in terms of food security, Ireland now imports the majority of its potatoes and nearly all its wheat flour; the main staple carbohydrates of the people of Ireland.
The Teagasc Consensus
A large part of the belief in distortions like these can be attributed to the neoliberal religion of free trade, which is engrained as a belief system in a great number of Irish farmers.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the adaptation of new and increasingly expensive inputs into agriculture have been sold as ‘progress’ to farmers. Numerous chemicals and pharmaceutical companies, including SmithKline, Pfizer, Merck, Schering Plough and Roche located their manufacturing facilities in Ireland during the 1960s and 70s, availing of lax or non-existent environmental regulation and lower labour costs. They stayed because of an attractive corporate tax regimes and unrestricted interference in Ireland’s educational system. By the turn of the twenty-first century they accounted for nearly seventy percent of global pharmaceutical output.[v]
These multinationals have helped the Irish state to adopt an increasingly intensive, highly specialized monoculture agricultural system, geared towards the export market.
Traditionally, farmers have gone along with this because of the developmental rhetoric and of course, generous EU subsidies.
Also crucial to manufacturing consent has been the educational apparatus of Teagasc, the state research centre for agriculture. Teagasc uses science selectively to the end of export intensification.
Connected to the revolving door between chemical and pharmaceutical multinationals located in Ireland, Teagasc and other state educational institutions have effectively locked farmers into an unsustainable, high-input agricultural model, based on the latest bio-technological ‘fixes’ formulated by the agri-chemical industry.
The end result is scientistic rather than scientific, meaning science is adopted in a cosmetic manner, to provide technical short-term fixes within a strictly liberalised market paradigm.
A truly scientific approach, which is essential in the face of irreversible climate change, requires rigorous philosophical as well as technical inquiry, taking into account all of the parts involved in a system and their effects. This is a thorny path to embark upon, especially when multinational interests are threatened.
Irish state education, and Teagasc in particular, indoctrinates a free market ideology into young people. This includes the Law of Comparative Advantage, which involves specialization in one industry over others, for the purposes of international trade. This is the central tenet of the state’s agricultural policies, and the cornerstone of Teagasc’s educational institutions.
The Law of Comparative Advantage has long been subjected to criticism from other schools of thought such as Development Economics: most notably the Singer-Prebisch thesis, which demonstrates that the terms of trade between countries producing primary products deteriorates over time, relative to countries producing manufactured goods.
Notably, this economic ‘Law’, was formulated by British Economist David Ricardo in 1817, when the Spanish colonies in the Americas were in the process of becoming independent republics. Spain’s loss was Britain’s opportunity, as ‘free’ trade doctrines became the rationale for unequal exchange between the global North and the global South, then as now, keeping wealth flows disproportionately northwards.
Now in the former British colony of Ireland the main farmers’ lobby, the IFA, maintains the consensus around globally traded commodities, successfully convincing many smaller farmers that their interests are joined to large scale beef and dairy producers.
Yet many farmers are discovering that they have given away too much autonomy to the IFA and their political patrons in Fine Gael. Some small farmers broke away from the IFA to form the Beef Plan Movement, which challenged export monopolies from 2018, but the Movement seems to have dissipated.
Now some disillusioned farmers are beginning to see the EU’s CAP as the source of their problems, and are calling for an ‘Eirexit’.[vii] However, while free trade agreements in the EU and other consumer markets are a vehicle for the current model, the driver has long been the Irish State.
Source of the Problem
With many farmers now in grave financial difficulties, it has become apparent that the source of our agricultural difficulties lies in international free trade arrangements, European or otherwise, being used by the State and accepted without question by farmers’ lobbies in the name of ‘progress’.
There was nothing inevitable about European integration pushing Ireland so far past its ecological carrying capacity in terms of agriculture: it came from the Irish state’s pursuit of European integration and other free trade arrangements.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the Irish State pushed to clear wildlife from farms, even if the financial incentives came from EU grants. It is the Irish State which continues to push for export intensification through its Food Harvest 2020 and Foodwise 2025 schemes, seeking markets far beyond the EU. Ireland is now the second largest exporter of infant formula in the world, its largest market being China.[viii]
A food system that is so integrated into global market chains has brought increased levels of monoculture specialisation in beef and dairy, severely diminishing the diversity of food produced[ix], and depending not only on chemical inputs ,which pollute our environment and destroy biodiversity, but also on imported animal feedstuffs.
The dairy industry has grown by 27%[x] in just five years and continues to expand, far exceeding the carrying capacity of the grassland it relies on. Due to homogenization, the supply chain of pretty much all Irish butter and non-organic dairy produce contains on palm kernels, and genetically modified, Roundup-Ready soya and corn.
This amounts to an appropriation of land, labour and water resources from the global South, causing deforestation in tropical rainforests, erosion of topsoil which takes thousands of years to form; as well leading to the extinction of animal and plant species.
The successive crises that these policies have led to in Ireland have been misrepresented as ‘fodder’ crises. They are in fact over-intensification crises, arising from destructive free trade policies which have pushed the island of Ireland past its agricultural carrying capacity.
These are a reoccurring themes in Irish history. The difference between today’s and the crises of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is that Ireland is no longer bottom of the economic hierarchy in the global economic system. As a result, the environmental burden can be externalised to peripheral parts of the world, especially through feed imports.
Inside Ireland’s largest milking machine. Henry Clarke (wikicommons).
A New Way Forward
The progress of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture from the 1940s is beginning to unravel. Short term bio-engineering fixes are spiralling out of control. A continuous stream of newly engineered GM crops – which can withstand higher concentrations of agri-chemicals – are being rolled out in response to new herbicide resistance in weeds which make the existing chemical concentration of previous GM varieties ineffective. The result is higher doses of chemicals in our food chain and mass extinction of pollinating insects and soil microorganisms.
The limits and consequences of the industrial model of agriculture is now evident from a food security standpoint as well as in terms of the environment. The science behind our agriculture needs to involve a whole systems approach that takes into account all of the ecological consequences of globalized food production, and which places soil conservation and renewal at its core.
At present, this is missing entirely from Teagasc’s educational apparatus as the current food production model is not circular, but extractive: heavily dependent on imported inputs which cause deforestation, topsoil degradation and extinction of species in other parts of the world, as well as wreaking havoc on biodiversity and water quality within Ireland.
In the wake of Covid-19, a future roadmap is in the hands of whoever dares to seize the moment. The epidemic has occurred in the wake of years of environmental campaigning and the farm to fork strategy[xi], which has been pushed through at European level. This reflects a growing recognition of the limitations of the global industrial food model at the highest levels of political power.
This crisis of international capitalism is a real opportunity for small producers to adopt more localized regenerative agricultural systems, which are embedded in community and work with natural ecosystems instead of attempting to dominate them. In these kinds of systems, farmers and communities of farmers produce foodstuffs suitable to their bio-regions, sequestering carbon in the soil.
These kinds of systems generate their own inputs, freeing farmers from the clutches of the agri-chemical industry. In this kind of scenario, farmers produce a healthy diversity of food for their communities, instead of monoculture commodities for cargo ships.
In order to achieve this, however, we require a complete overhaul of deep-seated beliefs about farming which have been perpetuated by state propaganda, the educational apparatus, and the media.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization now recognises agri-ecology as the way forward for developing food security in the face of climate change. We must fight State policies which prevent a regenerative agriculture. Not only is this achievable, it is essential.
[iv] Chris Arsenault, ‘Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues’, Scientific American, December 5th, 2014, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/.
[v] Robert Allen, No Global: The people of Ireland versus the multinationals, Pluto Press, Dublin, 2004, p.4
[viii] Stephen Cadogan, ‘ The origin is green — China is now Ireland’s second most important market for dairy exports’, Irish Examiner, November 15th, 2018, https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/farming/the-origin-is-green-china-is-now-irelands-second-most-important-market-for-dairy-exports-885402.html
[xi] Untitled, ‘Farm 2 Fork and Biodiversity Strategies Hold Firm on Real Targets’, Arc2020, May 20th, 2020, https://www.arc2020.eu/farm-2-fork-and-biodiversity-strategies-hold-firm-on-real-targets/
‘We are alive in a time of worst-case scenarios. The world we have inherited seems exhausted, destined for an absolute and final unravelling’. So begins Mark O’Connell’s journey into our ever-darkening future.
There are, he notes darkly, fascists in the streets and in the palaces, while around us ‘the weather has gone uncanny, volatile, malevolent’. The last remaining truth, O’Connell proposes, ‘is the supreme fiction of money, and we are up to our necks in a rising sludge of decomposing facts. For those who wish to read them, and for those who do not, the cryptic but insistent signs of apocalypse are all around’.
The faint splattering sound that reechoes throughout ‘Notes from an Apocalypse’ is that of the shit hitting the metaphorical fan.
‘Listen. Attune your ear to the general discord, and you will hear the cracking of the ice caps, the rising of the waters, the sinister whisper of the near future. Is it not a terrible time to be having children, and therefore, in the end, to be alive?’, O’Connell muses.
Familiar Journey
The journey is a familiar one, in every sense. My mind flows back to early 2003, my first-born still an infant then, her future an unknown country. Out of the fog of broken sleep and newfound joys and terrors, I began, for the first time in my adult life, to look into the future. Not days and weeks, but years and decades.
What I found staring back was every bit as chilling as O’Connell’s more recent epiphany, and it has, to a lesser or greater degree, haunted my waking hours every day since then. As he points out, once you’ve become a parent, ‘whether it happens by choice or by chance, is that it is one of only very few events in life that are entirely irreversible. Once you’re in, existentially speaking, you’re in’.
This being the case, the next question effectively writes itself: How are we supposed to live, ‘given the distinct possibility that our species, our civilization, might already be doomed?’ While he may have lost hope, O’Connell certainly hasn’t lost his dark sense of humour, describing the curious feeling of being sick to death of the end of days. ‘I’m sick, in particular, of climate change. Is it possible to be terrified and bored at the same time?’, he wonders aloud.
Back in the good old days of the Cold War, the spectre of global annihilation was never far away. And while the risks were all-too-real, in reality it was always a binary proposition: either we would have a total nuclear war or nothing at all would happen. And, with luck, cooler heads would prevail and catastrophe would be avoided.
O’Connell notes that we civilians were pleasantly blameless, either way, mere bystanders ‘whose role was limited to cowering in terror, maybe holding the occasional placard, partaking here and there in a chant if called upon to do so’. In classical eschatology, the apocalypse, whether religious or secular, would be delivered in a blinding thunderbolt, ‘a sudden intercession of divine or technological power’.
The very real doom that encircles us is altogether more banal, more insidious and one in which we are both helpless bystanders and active, albeit unwitting, participants. To be alive today, to live in a prosperous modern society is to be an integral part of the very linear system of consumption, expansion and disposal that is fast destroying the natural world and the very basis for our current prosperity and all future prospects for every generation that succeeds us.
Image: Daniele Idini
Footprint
O’Connell acknowledges the thin irony that his own gloomy travelogue entailed vast emissions of the very carbon that is burning down the world. ‘My footprint is as broad and deep and indelible as my guilt… I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak. That is the prophesy of this book’.
That ‘Notes from an Apocalypse’ should be published in the midst of the first global pandemic of the Internet Age seems grimly apposite, life in imitation of art as the confident certainties of our world unravel in unpredictable, non-linear ways.
O’Connell vividly describes his growing obsession with the imminent collapse of civilisation. He sees himself as being obsessed with the future, ‘an obsession that manifested as an inability to conceive of there being any kind of future at all…my journalistic objectivity, a fragile edifice to begin with, was under considerable strain’, he adds.
Many people seek to escape their demons. In this trade, that’s not so easy. ‘It is both a privilege and a curse of being a writer that throwing yourself into your work so often involves immersing yourself deeper into the exact anxieties and obsessions other people throw themselves into their work to avoid’.
The book, O’Connell accepts, probably was initially conceived as a form of therapy, though he admits to what he calls a more perverse motivation: ‘I was anxious about the apocalyptic tenor of our time, it is true, but I was also intrigued. These were dark days, no question, but they were also interesting ones: wildly and inexorably interesting. I was drawn toward the thing that frightened me, the thing that threatened to tear everything apart, myself included’.
This gave him the impetus to embark on a series of what he describes as perverse pilgrimages ‘to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present’. Nor is the overtly religious framing accidental. ‘If I could be said to have had a faith in those days, it was anxiety—the faith in the uncertainty and darkness of the future’.
O’Connell’s research took him into many dark places; he describes being unable to click on links in his computer’s browser ‘for fear that what I gained in knowledge I would lose in sanity—my online existence was saturated in a sense of end-time urgency’.
In other circumstances you could reasonably infer that the author was in reality experiencing what is for all intents clinical depression, the key difference being that the auguries of catastrophe which he was consulting are not the product of his fevered imagination, but are a painfully accurate reflection of the world as it stands.
‘Preppers’
Avoiding the sensible options of pouring his energies into what might be seen as more constructive channels, O’Connell ‘set out towards the darkness itself’. And where better to start than with the weird US sub-culture called ‘preppers’. This group consists almost exclusively of middle aged and older white males with an unnatural interest in dried food, assault rifles and racism.
O’Connell is merciless in his depiction: ‘as a group, preppers were involved in the ongoing maintenance of a shared escapist fantasy about the return to an imagined version of the American frontier—to an ideal of the rugged and self-reliant white man, providing for himself and his family, surviving against the odds in a hostile wilderness’.
In seeking to rekindle some imaginary frontier spirit, what preppers are in fact doing, he adds, is ‘creating the necessary conditions for a return to the cleansing violence of the nation’s colonial past … In fact, you couldn’t even properly call it crypto-fascism: it was really just good old-fashioned original-style fascism’. The National Geographic’s TV channel ran a series for three years called Doomsday Preppers; O’Connell gorged on many hours of it on YouTube as part of his research. While ostensibly about gearing up for post-apocalyptic survival, he believes the show ‘is in fact a reality TV psychodrama about masculinity in crisis’.
Preppers, he concludes, ‘are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies. The collapse of civilization means a return to modes of masculinity our culture no longer has much use for’.
While disagreeing with them in almost every regard, O’Connell admits to relating to the ‘distributed matrix of unease from which the certainty of collapse grew. I, too, with my pessimism, my intimate imagination of the world’s unravelling, had driven my own wife, if not to despair itself, then to somewhere in its vast and crumbling exurbs’.
I can certainly attest to the strain that burdening yourself with documenting the slow, agonising death of the world imposes both on you as an individual and on your long-suffering spouse and family.
O’Connell’s perverse pilgrimage takes him to the wilds of South Dakota where, for a price, you can buy a bunker with all the mod cons. This bug-out fantasy is being marketed and sold with the characteristic exuberance of the U.S. real estate industry. ‘This was a new entry into the apocalyptic imaginary: bankers and hedge-fund managers, tanned and relaxed, taking the collapse of civilization as an opportunity to spend some time on the links, while a heavily armed private police force roamed the perimeters in search of intruders. All of this was a logical extension of the gated community. It was a logical extension of capitalism itself’.
At its cold heart, this amounts to the haves battening down the hatches against the have-nots, unequal to the bitter end. Unlike the old anti-nuclear war slogan, it appears that all men will not in fact be cremated equal. And nowhere is this inequality more apparent than in New Zealand, now the world’s favourite end-of-the-world bolthole for the excessively rich.
‘Everyone was always saying these days that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Everyone was always saying it, in my view, because it was obviously true’, O’Connell continues. ‘The perception, paranoid or otherwise, that billionaires were preparing for a coming collapse seemed a literal manifestation of this axiom. Those who were saved, in the end, would be those who could afford the premium of salvation’.
Image: Daniele Idini
Backup Planet
Next, O’Connell tagged along with the space colonisation enthusiasts, most notably oddball billionaire Elon Musk, who described Mars as our ‘backup planet…just in case something goes wrong with Earth’. Similar to doomsday preppers with their bags of dried food, ‘Mars colonisation is apocalyptic scenario as escapist fantasy’.
What he describes as a narrative of exit is, O’Connell argues, fundamentally male, a yearning for escape ‘as a means towards the nobility of self-determination’. The world, our world, urgently needs attention, care, rehabilitation, yet the ultra-rich techno-fantasists are instead writing it off, dreaming of new empty spaces to subjugate, to colonise, to shape in their image, without state or societal oversight, a darkly Utopian fantasy played out on the blank canvas of the cosmos.
‘The politics of exit are pursued, according to cultural critic Sarah Sharma at the expense of a politics of care. ‘Care, she writes, is that which responds to the uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency and the contingency of life, the mutual precariousness of the human condition’. To repudiate the Earth is to reject the imperative of care.
It goes without saying that the escapist daydreams of the wealthy elites envisage salvation only for the tiny handful; the mass of humanity will, it seems, be consigned to burn, fight and starve amid the smouldering wreckage of a plundered biosphere that has been asset-stripped to the bone.
The intuition that many of the global 0.001 percenters actually seriously believe this stuff makes sense of a circle I have long struggled to square: how can tycoons and titans so blithely ignore the ever-encroaching ecological consequences of the profitable destruction they are orchestrating? Surely they too have kids, they must ultimately breathe the same air and drink the same water as the rest of us? Well, apparently not.
The colonial mindset that saw groups of determined Europeans and later, Americans, set out to conquer, subdue and enslave every country on Earth they encountered that was incapable of fighting them off is alive and well, and the age of gunboat colonialism has been replaced by the more subtle but equally effective economic colonialism.
East India Company
Today, as before, ultra-cheap goods, minerals and raw materials flood out of the global South through trade channels controlled by powerful transnational corporations whose monopolies are operated every bit as ruthlessly as the East India Company, which enjoyed a royal charter giving it permission to ‘wage war’ and, at its peak, had its own army numbering 260,000 troops, twice the size of the then British army.
The rape, pillage and plunder of the Earth has as a project been underway in earnest for centuries, but it is those of us alive in the 21st century and without tickets to Mars, who are about to reap the whirlwind.
As O’Connell notes, capitalism, ‘which exists and thrives through expansion of its own frontiers, through a relentless force of deterritorialization, is running out of frontiers; running out of boundaries to obliterate, nature to exploit’. The legacy of what he terms its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap resources is a ‘devastated planet that soon may be unliveable for vast numbers of its inhabitants’.
Just quite how soon and for just how many was to become clearer even as I was reading ‘Notes from an Apocalypse’. It came in the publication of a new peer-reviewed study using data from UN population projections and a 3ºC global warming scenario in line with current scientific projections.
While we think of ourselves as a highly adaptable species, filling niches from the high Arctic to the tropical jungles, in reality, most human populations are concentrated into narrow ‘climate bands’ in areas where the average surface temperature is in the range of 11–15ºC.
An average global surface temperature rise of 3ºC in the coming decades would leave some three billion people in areas with average temperatures as hot as the Sahara desert is today. Wide tracts of India, Australia, Africa, South America and the Middle East will, in just a matter of decades, be essentially uninhabitable for humans and most animals.
Consider the impact of 2-3 million refugees fleeing the aftermath of conflict in the Middle East and how the impact of these desperate migrants strained the EU almost to breaking point. Now, multiply that not by 100, but by 1,000 and suddenly the idea of escaping to establish a colony on a barren neighbouring planet no longer seems quite so insane.
Back on planet Earth, the Arctic is burning. ‘That there were wildfires in the Arctic Circle felt like the most important fact in the world. This was a thing we should never not be thinking about, talking about… the subtext of every news headline now, of every push notification, was that we were completely and irrevocably fucked’.
Image: Daniele Idini
An Island Apart?
O’Connell, who is Dublin-based, recalls sharing office space with an ecologist, who told him people often ask her how Ireland will fare with climate change. Overall, and relative to so many other countries, actually pretty well, is the short, but entirely incomplete answer.
‘What would it even mean, after all, to be fine in the context of a drowning world, a world on fire? We were a small island, with nine hundred miles of coastline and an army that would by itself be effectively useless against any kind of invasion. We would be relying, she said, on the goodwill of other countries whose people were starving, drowning, burning. We would not be fine’.
O’Connell’s meditation returns time and again to his own son, from whom he feels he is keeping a secret. ‘Just as I want him to continue believing in Santa Claus for as long as possible, I want to defer the knowledge that he has been born into a dying world. I want to ward it off like a malediction’.
He outlines the complex denialism both he and his wife engage in to shelter their son and his newly born sister from true knowledge of the world as it is. ‘There are times when it seems that we are protecting him, and protecting ourselves, from a much deeper and more troubling truth: that the world is no place for a child, no place to have taken an innocent person against their will’.
O’Connell strikes a universal chord by observing that becoming a parent means having a radically increased stake in the future. Being responsible for a person who must live in the place and time normally inhabited only by your deepest fears means ‘I no longer feel the definitive force of pessimism as a philosophy…life no longer seems to afford me the luxury of submitting to the comfort of despair’.
In what may be a rich irony, O’Connell professes to having lost his taste for cosmic nihilism: ‘Lately I have been glad to be alive in this time, if only because there is no other time in which it’s possible to be alive’.
While it might seem glib in the extreme to be seeking out teachable moments from the imminent collapse of the biosphere and the extirpation of our species among countless others, what does perhaps emerge from his journey is a deeper, visceral understanding of what it truly means to have been alive in the first place.
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O’Connell, Granta, London, 2020.
Fifty years ago today, more than twenty million people took to the streets in towns and cities across the U.S. in what was and remains the largest environmental protest in history. On that evening’s news, CBS anchor, Walter Cronkite intoned: “a unique day in American history is ending, a day set aside for a nationwide outpouring of mankind seeking its own survival”.
Cronkite went on to describe Earth Day as an effort at “saving lives from the deadly by-products of that bounty – the fouled skies, the filthy waters, the littered Earth”. One in 10 of the then entire population of America took some part in Earth Day, with bipartisan support across the political spectrum, as well as from both urban and rural areas.
While it harnessed the momentum of the protest and social movements of the late 1960s, such as the anti-war, civil rights and women’s movements, the enduring effect of Earth Day was to be at a political and policy level: by the end of 1970, the (Republican) Nixon administration, bowing to the public mood and with the 1972 presidential election in mind, sanctioned the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, as well as passing a raft of highly significant environmental laws and regulations.
Notable among these were the National Environmental Education Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and, crucially, the Clean Air Act. In 1972, the U.S. Congress also passed the Clean Water Act, and in 1973, the Endangered Species Act became law. In the years that followed, a raft of other federal laws and regulations were enacted.
Given the vast influence of the U.S., these regulations in turn were widely emulated around the world and have had profound and enduring impacts on water and air pollution in particular in many parts of the so-called developed world, including Ireland.
William_Ruckelshaus being sworn in as the first EPA Administrator under President Richard Nixon.
Hyper-partisan politics
Viewed through the political prism of today’s deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan U.S. politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time when people, irrespective of their politics, religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they breathed and the water that their children drank was a good idea.
Fifty years later, the ideologically toxic Trump regime is busily dismantling large chunks of the progressive regulatory framework that the actions of the U.S. environmental movement ushered into being in 1970. Most sane people think it’s probably a bad idea to allow high levels of mercury, a potent and irreversible neurotoxin, to be released into the air from coal-burning plants.
Yet regulations limiting mercury emissions from coal-burning are currently being scrapped by Trump. So are rules blocking leaking and venting of hydrofluorocarbons from large air conditioning and refrigeration systems. These chemicals are highly potent greenhouse gases and, according to a 2015 NASA study, are also contributing to global ozone depletion.
People’s Climate March, Washington DC, 2017.
Criminal enterprise
A devastating list of 95 of the major recent assaults by the Trump administration on environmental regulations was compiled by the New York Times late last year. Anyone still labouring under the impression that this is anything other than a family-run criminal enterprise, abetted by some of the most corrupt politicians/grifters in the long and often deeply corrupt history of U.S. politics, should take some time to review this list.
But the key point remains: the original Earth Day was the foundation event for the modern environmental movement, and affected enduring changes in public and political attitudes towards pollution in particular, especially where the evidence of its deleterious effects were impossible to conceal.
Air and water quality in the developed world improved markedly from the 1970s onwards, partially arising from Earth Day legacy, but also due to the offshoring of much of the West’s highly polluting heavy industries, which had triggered the crisis.
So, wealthy countries began to de-industrialise, not by consuming less and living more modestly, but by shifting the axis of production – and pollution – over the horizon, to poorer countries where environmental standards were mostly non-existent and where politicians and public officials could far more easily be paid to look the other way, and desperate workers would accept a pittance to work in conditions dangerous to their own health and damaging to the communities where they lived.
Global warming
Ivan Pellacani (wikicommons)
Another crucial element missing entirely from the original Earth Day was any consideration of global warming. While the concept was well understood within the scientific community by then, it had zero traction in the wider public, and much of the scientific establishment treated it more as an academic conundrum about what could possibly happen at some date several decades hence.
In 1970, global carbon dioxide (CO2) levels stood at 325 parts per million (ppm), having risen from 316ppm when systematic scientific measurements began in 1958. The highest pre-industrial CO2 levels had stood at 280ppm, so the atmosphere in 1970 was already carrying 15% more CO2 than before the industrial revolution.
This matters enormously, as the trace gas, CO2 is the atmosphere’s key chemical thermostat. Dial it up, and temperature rise, almost in lock-step. What about in the fifty years since then? Today, global CO2 levels stand at around 416ppm, which means it has risen by over a quarter in just five decades.
This is likely the most rapid shift in atmospheric chemistry in Earth history. The last time there were CO2 levels this high was in the Pliocene, an era from 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. Then, sea levels were 20 metres higher than today, and trees grew at the South Pole, and overall global temperatures were 3-4ºC higher than today.
This unprecedented spike in atmospheric CO2 levels since 1970 will continue to impact temperatures on this planet for centuries into the future. Already, it has led to a rise in the average global surface temperature by just over 1ºC versus pre-industrial. This is the largest single temperature shift since the end of the last Ice Age.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the red line for dangerous and irreversible changes to the Earth’s climate system lies at around 1.5ºC, which is already perilously close to today’s levels. The IPCC advises that every effort must be made to decarbonise the global economy to avoid such a scenario.
Based on today’s level of emissions, the global ‘carbon budget’ for +1.5ºC will have been exhausted by 2030. Even the economic downturn arising from the coronavirus pandemic (estimated to see a 5% cut in emissions this year) may only slow this process down by a matter of months.
To avoid breaching the +1.5ºC danger line by 2030, global emissions will need to have fallen by a staggering 60% by then. Nothing short of a global political, economic, social and cultural revolution could effect such a profound transition in such a tight timeframe. In reality, our current economic model, coronavirus notwithstanding, sees emissions actually accelerating at the time we need to be hitting the brakes and bracing for impact.
Anthropocene
Under threat: Mountain Gorillas.
However dramatic the rise in global emissions and temperatures have been in the last five decades, this almost pales into insignificance when measured against the toll humanity has taken on the natural world over this period. We have eradicated almost two thirds of all the wild mammals, birds, fish and reptiles in just 50 years.
The last time a global mass die-off on this scale occurred was some 66 million years ago, in the wake of the asteroid impact that led to the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. Many scientists have already designated the current era as the Anthropocene, the era of human impacts, and state that the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth history is already well underway.
Researchers used the term ‘biological annihilation’ to describe the nature and extent of what they termed the ‘frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation’. It should be borne in mind that while this carnage ultimately threatens humanity, it has already laid waste to hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary progress and, in the process, brutally simplified countless once-complex ecosystems.
“The situation has become so bad it would not be ethical not to use strong language”, said Prof Gerardo Ceballos of the National University in Mexico, commenting on the major study published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Today, over three quarters of the entire world’s land surface has been ‘significantly altered’ by human actions, with tens of millions of hectares of forests razed and cleared for agriculture. The hunting of wildlife for food is another force accelerating extinctions, with at least 300 species of mammals facing near-term extinctions as a direct result of the bushmeat trade.
At sea, the anarchy is even worse. Over 90% of the world’s large predatory fish, from sharks to tuna, marlin and swordfish, are already gone, with many species now on the brink of extinction. Studies project that as soon as 2048, the world’s oceans will essentially have been emptied of fish.
The vast fishing fleets that scour the oceans have the capacity to catch-and-destroy fish far more quickly than species can breed. Further, ocean acidification as a result of global warming is accelerating, while surface water temperatures are rising quickly, further disrupting marine life.
On top of this, tens of millions of tons of plastic waste is ending up in the world’s oceans every year, then slowly degrading from polymers into near-microscopic monomers, trillions of which are now contaminating the base of the entire marine food chain, as these pollutants are being inadvertently ingested by marine creatures from krill to sea birds. One estimate states that there will be more plastic in the world’s oceans by 2050 than fish.
‘We are stealing the future’
It hasn’t all been one-way traffic. As nature has waned, the human footprint has expanded inexorably. Since 1970, the global population has more than doubled, from 3.7 billion to over 7.8 billion today. In 1970, the total gross domestic product (GDP) of the world economy was around $23.8 trillion (in 2011 values) but by 2019, this had quadrupled, to almost $90 trillion.
Californian environmentalist and author Paul Hawken’s description of the predatory nature and mindset associated with the cult of endless economic expansion has never been bettered: “we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP”.
While the original Earth Day was inspired by people’s experience of ecological degradation they could see and even smell all around them, and while it achieved some notable successes as detailed earlier, its ultimate legacy is one of acute failure.
We humans proved unable (or unwilling) to extend our empathy to other species, to nature itself, and to act unselfishly on behalf of people in other places, or indeed of all future generations. This did not of course happen by accident.
Neo-liberal thought
Generations of neo-liberal thought have helped inure humanity against the pain of the natural world and the suffering of others, both humans and fellow sentient animals, while shielding the billionaire predators, who have profiteered from this ruin, which is the consequences of their actions and inactions.
Our species achieved spectacular evolutionary success not just by brute force and violence, but primarily by our ability to cooperate, and the strength and complexity of our social structures. These have been worn threadbare by decades of atomised consumerism.
This too did not happen by accident. Fifteen years before the inaugural Earth Day, US economist, Victor Lebow laid out the template for the brave new world of expansion and consumption in 1955: “our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
The Consumer Age is now at an end; replaced, I would posit, by the Age of Consequences. As the industrial revolution began in earnest in the early 19th century, poet William Wordsworth, perhaps sensing the fatal shift then underway in humanity’s relationship with nature, wrote presciently:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune
Featuring image by Daniele Idini / Cassandra Voices
In the grip of serious illness anyone but an obtuse contrarian seeks medical assistance. As the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe, doctors are performing heroics, often at grave risks to their own health. Enhanced screening, testing and emergency treatment facilities, along with developing a vaccine, are now paramount considerations; but we cannot ignore our underlying fragilities.
Exclusive focus on the Holy Grail of an elusive cure disregards how the virus is exploiting poverty in wealthy countries, flawed public health policies and destructive environmental practices. At least we may still soften the blow of this outbreak, and reduce the harm and incidence of future episodes. With all changed – changed utterly – returning to business-as-usual is inconceivable.
Despite what we hear from the Trump administration,[i] there are no specific medicines available to prevent or treat the new coronavirus Covid-19.[ii] The best estimate is that a year-and-a-half is the minimum time required to develop a reliable vaccine, which would actually set a record.[iii] Remarkably, a British-Italian partnership claims it will have one ready as soon as this September, but the challenge of manufacturing, distributing and mass-immunization – including the thorny issue of consent – on an unprecedented global scale, remain.[iv] The options are comprehensively laid out by medicinal chemist Derek Lowe.[v]
The dangers posed by this outbreak, and future ones that nature will throw at us, require a thorough reappraisal of public health priorities. Medical systems in advanced Western countries – especially those dominated by the private sector – tend to prioritise treatment of the symptoms of the main non-contagious diseases. We ‘live’ with cancer and heart disease as opposed to addressing multifarious lifestyle causes, which the virus is now preying on.
As Boris Johnson’s predicament underlines, anyone is susceptible to Covid-19, but chances of exposure – without recklessly ignoring medical advice – are often determined by social class, which intersects with lower life expectancy already.
"I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everyone."
Boris Johnson says he has not refused to shake hands with people during the #COVID19 outbreak.
In responding to the pandemic any nation is likely to be only as strong as its weakest links. The co-existence of extremes of poverty and wealth in societies such as the United Kingdom and U.S. poses particular dangers.
We must awaken to the environmental origins of viral diseases. What Julio Vincent Gambuto[vi] has described as this ‘Great Pause’ should bring a more harmonious relationship with nature, and other animals, as we negotiate with this and even greater environmental dangers.
When choosing between alternatives, we should ask ourselves not only how to overcome the immediate threat, but also what kind of world we will inhabit once the storm passes. Yes, the storm will pass, humankind will survive, most of us will still be alive — but we will inhabit a different world.[vii]
In confronting this pandemic we face a choice between top-down, authoritarian control – seen vividly in China – where basic liberties have been all-but extinguished. The alternative is a state that trusts in the collective education and responsibility of citizens – civil society – a rather extreme experiment in which is unfolding in Sweden.
There may indeed be periods when a state-imposed lockdown is justified to avert a calamity – as in Italy at the height of its surge – but we must remain vigilant to the seepage of emergency powers into ordinary usage when this crisis lifts and only countenance measures that are proportionate to risk.
Already, authoritarian regimes, such as Viktor Orban’s in Hungary,[viii] are undermining democratic institutions. Alas, the ‘Fourth Estate’ of journalism has been greatly diminished by job losses in the age of the Internet and reliance on commercial advertising, which has opened the door to regressive but digitally-savvy far-right Populism.[ix]
Social Gradient
“Nickelsville” homeless encampment, Seattle, Joe Mabel (wikicommons).
At this stage much of our knowledge of Covid-19 is provisional, but early research from the WHO in China found 78%-85% of contagions occurred in clusters within family groups.[x] Armed with knowledge of how the disease spreads and sufficient resources, affluent families around the world are taking care of elders and other vulnerable people.
However, as Charles M. Blow put it: ‘Social Distancing is a Privilege’. He reported on how incidences are highly intersected with race (which aligns with poverty in the United States), citing surveys from Milwaukee and Chicago where victims were 81 and 70 per cent African-American respectively.[xi]
Myriad factors link poverty to the contagion including: the number of residents per household; the space afforded to each occupant; the extent of inter-generational co-habitation; exposure to pollution; besides other health indicators, such as obesity. Particularly vulnerable categories include individuals squeezed into homeless shelters, or those living in crowded facilities accommodating refugees and asylum seekers; also older generations inadequately protected in residential care homes across Europe.[xii]
Notably, countries that bore the brunt of austerity policies since the Financial Crash from 2007 such as Italy, Spain, and the U.K. are now experiencing higher mortalities tolls than others, such as Germany or Denmark, where living standards were maintained.
Sweden
Swedish Social Democratic Party in Vasaparken, Stockholm in 2013, Image: Frankie Fouganthin (wikicommons)
Unlike almost every other European country the Swedish government did not mandate the closure of schools, pubs and restaurants. As the pandemic raged this seems to have been flawed, but it is worth exploring why a true catastrophe has not unfolded, as we’ve seen in Italy, Spain, France, the U.S. and the U.K.. Indeed the trajectory of new cases appears to be flattening as we enter mid-April.[xiii]
Sweden’s mortality count per capita (which is equivalent to Ireland’s whose government has generally been lauded for its response[xiv]) is four times higher than that in neighbouring Norway’s and twice Denmark’s,[xv] both of which swiftly closed their borders, schools, pubs and other businesses, and imposed lockdowns. But the divergence may, in part, be explained by recent under-investment in healthcare. The country had the second lowest number of critical beds in Europe after Portugal prior to the crisis, with only 5 beds for every 100,000 inhabitants.[xvi] Moreover, we are yet to measure the health benefits of avoiding draconian measures.
Cultural factors such as the absence of kissing and hugging as conventional greetings and sparse habitation are relevant, but it appears that Sweden’s mostly uninterrupted social democratic history throughout the twentieth century,[xvii] including free university education, insulates its population from the worst ravages.
In contrast, English-speaking countries such as the United States and Britain (predicted to experience the worst outbreak in Europe[xxi]) have avoided intervention in the housing market, except at the very bottom of the social scale. But the ensuing ‘Financialization of Daily Life’[xxii] has been accompanied by the stripping away of welfare entitlements, bringing widespread homelessness and reliance on food banks. The current pandemic has been aggravated by political leaders so wedded to commercial priorities they seemed prepared to sacrifice the sick and the old.[xxiii]
Obesity
Image: Tibor Végh (wikicommons)
The damage wrought by free market ideologies may run deeper in terms of human health if we accept a link with another global pandemic: obesity. This condition is strongly associated with many of the pre-existing health problems that place a person at greater risk of death from Covid-19 infections, including hypertension and diabetes.[xxiv]
The onset of the obesity pandemic, now afflicting nearly two billion people around the globe,[xxv] has been linked to numerous developments, including the invention of high fructose corn syrup in 1967, as well as over-reliance on the motor car. But the arrival of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan into power in the 1980s is a generally overlooked factor.
As Avner Offer asserted: ‘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 1970s, and the market-liberal regimes that carried out economic and social programmes in the main English-speaking countries, and elsewhere.
With regard to the U.K., where obesity rates have almost tripled since 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to power, he claims obesogenic conditions were already in place by the 1970s: car-use and television-watching were well established, and food was already cheap and plentiful; but that Thatcherism acted as a catalyst.
Heightened stress levels especially fuelled by employment uncertainties 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.’[xxvi]
The 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 scale, stressed out and living in crowded accommodation in so-called ‘food desserts’, lacking access to nutritious foodstuffs.
Public v Private Health
It is a misconception that increasing health expenditure in any Western society, above a certain level, will lead to a rise in life expectancy. In fact, there are rapidly diminishing returns on investment. Moreover, many treatments arrive with significant health warnings, and leave many of us susceptible to Covid-19.
Primary care, especially maternity services, paediatrics (including selective use of antibiotics and vaccination), and emergency treatment facilities, certainly minimises premature deaths. But countries in thrall to privatised healthcare tend to focus spending on medications, and other costly treatments, as opposed to preventive strategies. Thus the United States, which spends almost 18% of its GDP on healthcare (the highest level per capita in the world)[xxvii], has among the lowest life expectancies among advanced countries.[xxviii]
Rather than addressing the environmental and lifestyle triggers of the diseases of cancer and heart disease that are the leading causes of mortality (and morbidity), the United States supports a vast pharmaceutical industry that thrives off ill-health, just as its Military Industrial Complex profits from perpetual warfare.
The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served. This inverse care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced. The market distribution of medical care is a primitive and historically outdated social form, and any return to it would further exaggerate the maldistribution of medical resources.
In other words, efficiency declines as expenditure increases, and the more privatised the health market the worse the outcomes.
Cancer and Heart Disease
Disconcertingly, Siddhartha Mukherjee characterises the history of cancer research as, ‘intensely competitive’, and featuring, ‘a grim, nearly athletic, determination.’[xxxi] Patient welfare, as opposed to survival, is often not to the fore, as experts compete for the next breakthrough in extending life, or finding an ever-elusive cure.
Apart from successfully discouraging smoking, we see insufficient focus and investment by national governments on preventive strategies, particularly in terms of nutrition, which often threaten vested interests. Confronting a virus that can often prove fatal for those on prolonged treatment courses should shift priorities.
These foodstuffs, along with saturated animals fats and refined sugars, are also linked to heart disease, the other big killer in Western societies. The Harvard School of Public Health recommend a Mediterranean diet including: ‘high intake of olive oil, nuts, vegetables, fruits, and cereals; moderate intake of fish and poultry; low intake of dairy products, red meat, processed meats, and sweets; and wine in moderation, consumed with meals.’[xxxiii]
Urban planning should also inculcate more daily exercise by encouraging cycling and walking as opposed to motor car dominance. At least Covid-19 gives us a vision of how tranquil cities can be if motor cars are restricted.
Antibiotic Overuse
Another longstanding issue related to this pandemic is persistent overuse of antibiotics in most Western countries, as Covid-19 patients in hospitals are now at great risk of succumbing to infection by bacterial opportunists.[xxxiv]
Indirectly also, the welfare of a person’s microbiome, the collective term for the bacteria with which we enjoy a symbiotic relationship, is critical to overall health. Fundamental to the understanding of our complex relationship with the bacteria with which we coexist is the concept of amphibiosis: ‘the condition in which two life-forms create relationships that are either symbiotic or parasitic, depending on the context.’
Over the last seventy years we have progressively weakening this crucial organ, upsetting our cohabitants. Martin Blaser links bacterial impoverishment to the onset of a host of modern plagues including obesity, diabetes, heart-burn and GORD, asthma, a host of allergies, IBS and even autism.
According to Blaser the main source of the microbiome’s decline has been the invention in 1942 and subsequent over-use of antibiotics, which he likens to the development of the atom bomb. Apart from generally weakening our immune system, over-use in humans and in animal agriculture has given rise to superbugs such as MRSA that already kill thousands each year.
Antibiotics have saved millions of lives, and many surgical procedures are too dangerous to consider without them. However, over-use by doctors and dentists has surged in most Western countries to the extent that often the average twenty year old has taken almost twenty courses. Indeed, a 2016 study found that over 30% of antibiotics prescribed in the U.S. are unnecessary.[xxxv]
Generally, the fault does not lie with individual doctors. Besides patients demanding medication, they reflexively prescribe for sore throats to avoid occasionally fatal rheumatic fever, which typically occurs two or three weeks after an untreated strep infection and can be fatal. These infections are mainly viral and do not respond to antibiotics, but problematically a sore throat may already have been colonised by a strain of bacteria that is not causing the disease.
Today most bacterial infections are treated with broad-spectrum antibiotics. Martin Blaser asserts that: ‘Until doctors can readily distinguish viral from bacterial throat infections, they will always follow the safer course.’ He continues: ‘It is not profitable for companies to go to the trouble and enormous expense of developing new antibiotics.’[xxxvi]
Targeted antibiotics are only applicable in a small number of cases, and make little sense where companies are concerned with the bottom line, as opposed to the overall health of the patient, and society. A genuinely public healthcare system dictating research priorities would surely address this problem, and help confront Covid-19 and other respiratory diseases.
Another problem lies with the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. Just as in humans, untreatable bacterial infections are emerging in farm animals and these are passing the species barrier into human populations. Often farmers utilise antibiotics not to treat disease but in order for these animals to grow more quickly. The practice of using sub-therapeutic doses is now banned in the EU but the law is difficult to enforce.
Blaser also connects over-use to the obesity pandemic as antibiotics also cause weight gain in humans. This is borne out by studies showing obese individuals to have far less of a range of bacterial strains compared to individuals of normal weight. An NHS study the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children showed that children who received antibiotics in the first six months of life were likely to have a higher body mass index.[xxxvii]
Air Quality
As in most crises, there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic as we witness huge improvements in air quality all across the world.
In 2008, the European Environment Agency warned that air pollution causes almost 500,000 premature deaths in Europe every year, with most of the twenty-eight EU states failing to meet air quality targets.
In 2015, about 422,000 people died prematurely in European countries from exposure to harmful levels of fine particle matter (PM2.5). These particles are too small to see or smell but cause or aggravate heart disease, asthma and lung cancer.
The report also attributed 79,000 premature deaths to the toxic gas nitrogen dioxide (NO2) – related to vehicles and central boilers. Ground-level ozone (O3) is also killing an estimated 17,700 people, prematurely, across European nations.
The main sources of air pollution are: fuel-consuming forms of transport; energy production and distribution; commercial and institutional buildings, and homes; industry agriculture, and waste management.[xxxviii]
Air pollution has been linked to elevated mortalities in hot spots such as New York and Lombardy, where the Alps are visible from Milan as never before.[xxxix] This Great Pause allows us to reflect on the necessity of much of what we produce in our economies.
Spillover
Concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), Unionville, Missouri, United States, owned by Smithfield Foods.
In 1994 Laurie Garrett warned the world:
While the human race battles itself, fighting over ever more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, homo sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords the microbes few opportunities.[xl]
The origins of most of the contagious diseases we confront lie in our relationship with other animals. As David Quames puts it: ‘ecological disturbance causes disease to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.’ He warned that human activities are causing the disintegration of ‘natural ecosystems at a cataclysmic rate.’[xli]
Correctly, a huge amount of attention has been focused on China’s so-called wet markets of captured or dead wildlife, as the probable location of a zoonotic incident that engendered the novel virus (involving bats and the rare pangolin as a reservoir host).
Previously, a southern Chinese appetite for wild animals was conflated with a period of sustained economic growth in the 1990s, and termed ’the Era of Wild Flavor.’ Businessmen would reportedly gather at one of the province’s many ‘Wild Flavor’ restaurants to feast on a great variety of animals, some of which were reputed to make consumers fan rong or ‘prosperous.’[xlii]
David Quames describes the scene at the markets:
The catfish the crabs, and eels churned slowly in aerated tanks. The bullfrogs huddled darkly in scrums. It was grim to be reminded how we doom animals with our appetite for flesh, but this place seemed no more odd or morbid than a meat market anywhere.[xliii]
He goes on to warn that the risks are not limited to exotic meat markets, and that factory and livestock farms around the world present dangers: ‘It’s almost impossible to screen your pigs, cows, chicken, ducks, sheep, and goats for a virus of any sort until you have identified that virus (or at least a close relative), and we have only begun trying. He adds: ‘tomorrow’s virus pandemic may be no more than a “blip on the productivity output” of some livestock industry today.’[xliv]
Cow fields are not a timeless and harmless rural idyll: ‘A trillion pounds of cows, fattening in feedlots and grazing on landscapes that formerly supported wild herbivores, are just another form of human impact. They are a proxy for our appetites and we are hungry.’[xlv]
Perhaps it is no coincidence that carnivorous is an anagram of coronavirus.
Little State, Big Government
Fictitious map from George Orwell’s novel 1984.
The finger must come off the pause button soon. Whether we develop a vaccine or not, we cannot indefinitely endure life as contestants on a dystopian game show. For many of us restraints on natural inclinations – including so-called ‘social distancing’ – have been traumatic. Extended lockdowns will be impossible to enforce without a descent into a barbarity of petty betrayals and transhumance; while the Chinese approach of tracking movements through smart phones – adopted in other countries too[xlvi] – is deeply sinister.
As in Sweden, civil society can adjust behavioural norms to resist this virus and others to follow, and ensure governments respond meaningfully to even more pressing challenges, such as climate change and the Sixth Extinction. We may have to accept health passports at border checkpoints for a time, but within countries, we should expect freedom to roam, interact and trade.
At this juncture we need a Little State, which does not impinge on basic liberties and privacy, but a Big Government – as in Sweden too – working to ensure conditions for human flourishing including: healthy nourishment, clean air and water, a roof over one’s head, as well as education and basic healthcare.
Anyone resistant to government intervention might consider John Rawls’s justification of a redistribution of wealth by allusion to a hypothetical rational agent, ‘situated behind a veil of ignorance.’[xlvii] This fictional character cannot know the situation he will be born into, and must decide the kind of society he would favour. If the family you are born into is a lottery, any rational person surely favours an equitable distribution of wealth.
At least we confront the prospect of another financial meltdown with an enhanced awareness of the financial clout of governments in a period of crisis. The public purse is deeper than has been acknowledged. Governments control the distribution and value ascribed to money, a measurement tool for the exchange of goods and services.
In terms of public health we can reduce the use of antibiotics and other unnecessary drugs; promote exercise and combat sedentarism; curb pollution; and highlight the danger of over-consumption of unhealthy foodstuffs.
It would be tragic if this pandemic led to the demonization and eradication of animals that could harbour suspect viruses, as opposed to leading to the permanent closure of the wet markets and hopefully factory farming too. Quite apart from the morality of this, we are dealing with highly complex ecosystems. Any measure could have unintended, dire consequences.
As the U.N.’s Sustainability Goals[xlviii] reminds us, biodiversity is essential for human flourishing. The limits of natural capital must be taken into account if economic activity is to remain sustainable, which is especially important for feeding populations. The pandemic highlights crucial interdependencies, and the catastrophic consequences of another outbreak means that the burden to adapt is shared by us all.
[i] David Smith, ‘Trump sows confusion with claim coronavirus drug will be ready soon’, The Guardian, March 19th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/19/coronavirus-drug-trump-confusion-malaria-treatment-readiness
[ii] WHO, ‘Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public: Myth busters’ https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/myth-busters
[iv] Untitled, ‘Coronavirus: Vaccine could be ready as early as September, according to scientist’ Sky News, April 12th, 2020, https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-vaccine-could-be-ready-as-early-as-september-according-to-scientist-11971804
[v] Derek Lowe, ‘Coronavirus Vaccine Prospects’ In the Pipeline, April 15th, 2020 https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/
[vi] Julio Vincent Gambuto, ‘Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting*’, Medium April 10th, 2020, https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0
[vii] ‘Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus’ March 20th, 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75?fbclid=IwAR2am6cP4xQoG17fnKTsCeJdteQJRNwE_D6YkUkkZL25gD7AQN4CW8AOFck
[viii] Yasmen Serhan, ‘The EU Watches as Hungary Kills Democracy’, April 2nd, 2020, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/04/europe-hungary-viktor-orban-coronavirus-covid19-democracy/609313/
[ix] Frank Armstrong, ‘Democracy in Decay: Steve Bannon & Jordan Peterson’, January 17th, 2020, Cassandra Voices, https://cassandravoices.com/current-affairs/global/democracy-in-decay-steve-bannon-and-jordan-peterson/
[x] WHO, ‘Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)’, February, 2020, https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf
[xii] Robert Booth, ‘Half of coronavirus deaths happen in care homes, data from EU suggests’, The Guardian, April 13th, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/half-of-coronavirus-deaths-happen-in-care-homes-data-from-eu-suggests
[xiv] Frank Armstrong, ‘Ireland’s Response to the Coronavirus’, Cassandra Voices, March 28th, 2020, https://cassandravoices.com/current-affairs/irelands-response-to-the-coronavirus-pandemic/
[xv] Niclas Rolander, ‘Swedish Virus Deaths top 1000 fueling criticism over strategy’ Bloomberg, April 14th, 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-14/swedish-virus-deaths-top-1-000-fueling-criticism-over-strategy
[xvi] A. Rhodes, P. Ferdinande, H. Flaatten, B. Guidet, P. G. Metnitz & R. P. Moreno, ‘The variability of critical care bed numbers in Europe’, Intensive Care Medicine volume 38, pages1647–1653(2012), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00134-012-2627-8
[xvii] Untitled, ‘Before Sweden Was Social-Democratic, An interview with Erik Bengtsson’, Jacobin Magazine, September, 2019, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/sweden-social-democracy-erik-bengtsson
[xx] Simon Johnson, ‘Sweden grapples with housing market reform as risks mount’, Reuters, December 18th, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/sweden-economy-housing/sweden-grapples-with-housing-market-reform-as-risks-mount-idUSL8N28L43A
[xxi] Rowena Mason, ‘UK could have Europe’s worst coronavirus death rate, says adviser’, April 12th, 2020, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/uk-could-have-europes-worst-coronavirus-death-rate-says-pandemic-expert
[xxii] Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, http://tupress.temple.edu/book/3182
[xxiii] Chris Smyth, ‘No 10 denies Dominic Cummings would have let elderly die’, March 23rd, 2020, The Times, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-denies-dominic-cummings-would-have-let-elderly-die-qsl760jr9
[xxiv] Jeffrey Kluger, ‘The True Impact of Underlying Health Conditions on Coronavirus Severity’, April 1st, 2020, Time Magazine, https://time.com/5813711/coronavirus-underlying-conditions/
[xxv] WHO, ‘Obesity and overweight’ March 3rd, 2020, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight
[xxvi] Frank Armstrong, ‘The Unbearable Heaviness of Human Beings’, October 7th, 2020, The London Magazine, https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/article/the-unbearable-heaviness-of-human-beings-2/
[xxvii] Irene Papanicolas, Liana R. Woskie, and Ashish Jha ‘Health Care Spending in the United States and Other High-Income Countries’, Commonwealth Fund, March 13th, 2018,
[xxix] Vanessa McMains, ‘Johns Hopkins study suggests medical errors are third-leading cause of death in U.S.’, John Hopkins University, May 3rd, 2016, https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death/
[xxx] Julian Tudor Hart, ‘The Inverse Care Law’, The Lancet, February 27th, 1971, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(71)92410-X/fulltext
[xxxi] Frank Armstrong, ‘Cancer – A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves’ Cassandra Voices, September 7th, 2019, https://cassandravoices.com/uncategorized/cancer-a-distorted-version-of-our-normal-selves/
[xxxii] Untitled, ‘Q&A on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat’, WHO October 26th, 2015 https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-on-the-carcinogenicity-of-the-consumption-of-red-meat-and-processed-meat
[xxxiii] ‘Preventing Heart Disease’, The Nutrition Source, Harvard School of Public Health, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/disease-prevention/cardiovascular-disease/preventing-cvd/
[xxxiv] Claas Kirchhelle, Adam Roberts, Andrew C. Singer, ‘Antibiotic Resistance Could Lead to More COVID-19 Deaths’, Scientific American, April 1st, 2020, 2020https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/antibiotic-resistance-could-lead-to-more-covid-19-deaths/
[xxxv] Center for Disease Control and Protection, ‘CDC: 1 in 3 antibiotic prescriptions unnecessary’ https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2016/p0503-unnecessary-prescriptions.html
[xxxvi] Martin Blaser, Missing Microbe: How Killing Bacteria Creates Modern Plagues, One World, London 2014 pp.64-78.
[xxxvii] L. Trasande, J Blustein, M Liu, E Corwin, LM Cox, and MJ Blaser, ‘Infant antibiotic exposures and early-life body mass’ August 21st, 2012,
[xxxviii] Untitled, ‘Air pollution: Half a million early deaths in Europe despite progress’, BBC, October 29th, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46017339
[xxxix] Damian Carrington, ‘Air pollution linked to far higher Covid-19 death rates, study finds’ April 7th, 2020, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/07/air-pollution-linked-to-far-higher-covid-19-death-rates-study-finds?fbclid=IwAR0HF2B0LT8aNLWigzRzEhui_w1_gfndwFPP2Xfe4nvu0r2ujY78Hy56RXM
[xl] Richard Horton, ‘Coronavirus is the greatest global science policy failure in a generation’, April 7th, 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/09/deadly-virus-britain-failed-prepare-mers-sars-ebola-coronavirus
[xli] David Quames, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, Bodley Head, London, 2012, p.23
[xlii] Cheryl Miller, ‘The Red Plague’, The New Atlantis, Winter, 2007, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-red-plague
[xlvi] Zac Doffman, ‘COVID-19 Phone Location Tracking: Yes, It’s Happening Now—Here’s What You Should Know’, Forbes, April 7th, 2020 https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/27/covid-19-phone-location-tracking-its-moving-fast-this-is-whats-happening-now/#1b7e565e11d3
[xlvii] Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/
[xlviii] UN Sustainability Goals, https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/biodiversity/
The great English chemist James Lovelock conceived the Gaia (Gr. ‘goddess of earth’) Hypothesis in 1972, later developing this alongside American microbiologist Lynns Margulis. Later still, Lovelock, aged eighty-seven, was awarded the prestigious Wolston medal by the Geological Society of London for his pioneering concept.
Now firmly embedded in the zeitgeist, the Gaia Hypothesis posits that unknown forces, popularly conflated with the idea of Mother Earth, nurture our planet’s physical environment to sustain life. To draw on another famous scientific analogy, it might be said that Gaia maintains ‘just rightness’ (i.e. ‘the goldilocks theory’) through righteous homeostasis.
As Gaia approaches her golden jubilee, however – and James Lovelock edges toward his one-hundred-and-first birthday – the evidence mounts against faith in the concept of perpetual renewal; her resilience and raison d’être has been weakened after millennia of selfless resolve .[i] The precipice lies before us.
Gaia has tolerated humanity’s repeated abuses, but only in recent geological time has her mood turned conspicuously (and literally) stormy.
There are, nonetheless, grounds for hope. As Gaia’s health fades, Greta Thunberg’s rage burns ever more brightly. There is an existential ecosystem crisis to be called out, and Greta has risen to the challenge.
A strange energy reverberates whenever this Swedish teenager speaks publicly. Her unflinching delivery is as riveting as a tense drama; her conviction is that of a seasoned stateswoman, with deliciously scathing rhetoric unleashed in staccato rhythm.
Intriguingly, the voice retains the appeal of naivety. Significantly, despite and indeed because of this innocence, the overall effect can be intoxicating to grownups who thought they had lost hope.
‘Futile Nobility’
Greta’s fury has burned a hole in the establishment’s defences. The fire she started has been stoked by public sentiment. A paradigm shift in environmental attitudes is now apparent, but worryingly certain world leaders have adopted a bizarre form of stoicism in the face of Greta’s resuscitation of Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’.
Against this backdrop, scientists’ noble pursuit of rigorous data to prove what may seem obvious can seem futile.
For instance, in the recent Special Report on Climate Change and Lands, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), embodying the spirit of righteous scientific detachment, claim only ‘high (but notably not ‘very high’) confidence’ in the (surely self-evident) statement that ‘sustainable land management can contribute to reducing the negative impacts of multiple stressors, including climate change, on ecosystems and societies.’[ii]
There are other examples of such reticence. In the midst of the Sixth Extinction, following on from a century-long campaign of insecticide, a team of UK entomologists published a paper calling for more data on insect declines, state:
we respectfully suggest that accounts of the demise of insects may be slightly exaggerated. Bad things are happening—we agree—but this is not the whole story. We call for hard‐nosed, balanced, and numerical analysis of the changes taking place, and for calm and even‐handed interpretation of the changes, rather than rushing headlong into the hyperbole of impending apocalypse.[iii]
Selling Copy
Political leaders such as the POTUS Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a.k.a ‘Trump of the Tropics’, who recently mocked his latest nickname ‘Capitão Motoserra’ (Captain Chainsaw),[iv] provide a jarring contrast to valiant scientific rigour. Sadly but no longer surprisingly, these leaders frustrate efforts to slow anthropogenic ecosystem decay. Sadder still, we are increasingly desensitized to the toxic brew of xenophobia and climate denial.
Whilst posing less risk to the environment than ignorance at world leader tier, the disregard of the most bombastic commentariat is equally galling. Cue journalistic tropes of Alpen-crunching tree embracers, guffawing reference to Ireland’s ecological anti-hero, the Kerry slug, and glib ‘kill the whales, save the plankton’ slogans.
Purveyors of such sensationalist hyperbole do so to sell copy. The shock-jock Jeremy Clarkson wincingly entreats Greta, with misogynistic undertones ‘to be a good girl, shut up, and [don’t] go out in a skirt that short.’[v]
Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed ‘obnoxious, loud, and frequently fired ,’[vi] U.S. Republican journalist Michael Graham is another exploiting an angry white male anti-environmental constituency to garner a following.
For his part, the POTUS has also sparred with the Swedish child activist, in characteristically unbecoming fashion, mockingly referring to this ‘very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.’[vii]
What fun would ensue if the IPCC were to invite Thunberg, Trump, and a band of other incendiary speakers to a public climate debate. The Canadian clinical psychologist and global media star Jordan Peterson could provide ruthless post-match psychoanalysis to provide car crash television on a stratospheric level.
I suspect Thunberg might decline the opportunity as a matter of principle stressing the irrelevance of idle words.
Yet it seems we need Greta to stimulate our senses, deadened as we are by a constant stream of ever-worsening statistics. As an example, take these statements of fact: ‘Nature declines are at rates unprecedented in human history;’[viii] an area of primary tropical rain forest the size of Belgium was lost in 2018,[ix] and these losses exceed those from 2017 when an area the size of a football pitch was lost every second.[x] Is it just me, or do these harbingers come off sounding oddly banal?
Here in Ireland, 85% of habitats, protected under EU Habitat Directives, are in ‘unfavourable status.’[xi] Curlew numbers – whose reverberating cry was once a soundtrack to Ireland’s uplands – have declined by 96% since the late 1980’s,[xii] and may go extinct within five to ten years. Such statements sting and depress, but many of us seem desensitized by over-stimulation in a mediated age.
Eco-thinkers
‘Ms.’ Thunberg, as she is sometimes addressed with mocking respect by her dissenters, is inarguably an ecological ‘thought leader.’ That term seems to have been first used to describe American philosopher and early ‘eco-thinker,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was said to have ‘the wizard-power of a thought leader.’
As we face down the ecosystem crisis, we need more environmental thought leaders to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Lovelock, E.O Wilson, and Dublin’s own Frank Mitchell.
We need effective eco-communicators to recruit followers to the environmental movement. These new recruits could heal the fatigue in long-term activists – labelled as outré or leftfield by the establishment – jaded by the inaction of policymakers.
With environmentalism mainstreaming, new voices can dynamise and nourish environmental stewardship on the heretofore disinterested fringes.
Hearteningly, in May 2019, Dáil Eireann became the second legislative assembly on the planet (after the House of Commons in the U.K.) to declare a Biodiversity and Climate Emergency. After decades of numbing stasis, law-makers in this State with the power to instigate change seen to have committed to radical environmental objectives through Ireland’s Climate Action Plan,[xiii] and Ireland’s (third) National Biodiversity Action Plan.[xiv] Let’s wait and see whether long-term institutional failures can be overcome.
As a career ecologist, I care as deeply for slimy moss, and eels as for doe-eyed dolphins or deer. All are a part of the web of life; even the wasps we love to hate play their part as aphid predators. Yet committing my life’s work to conservation has done little to allay a sense of powerlessness to bring about meaningful changes.
And yet – with rumination over my own more unsustainable habits a favourite past time – I see that we can all do more on an individual level, becoming, like Greta, the change we want to see in the world.
Whoever stated: ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ happened upon a problem and solution to the current biodiversity and environmental crisis.
For the sake of Mother Gaia we must substitute kinesis for stasis. The power of one is the collective potential of all. Wizard- (and perhaps also witch-) powered thought leaders are at the ready.
[ii] IPCC, ‘Climate Change and Land’, August 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/
[iii] Chris Thomas, T. Jones and Sue Hartley, ‘“Insectageddon”: A call for more robust data and rigorous analyses’, Global Change Biology, March, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331456611_Insectageddon_A_call_for_more_robust_data_and_rigorous_analyses
[iv] Tom Phillips, ‘Bolsonaro rejects ‘Captain Chainsaw’ label as data shows deforestation ‘exploded’’ August 7th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/07/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-exploded-july-data
[vii] Kate Lyons, ‘Donald Trump tweet appears to mock Greta Thunberg and UN speech’, September 24th, Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/donald-trump-tweet-appears-to-mock-greta-thunberg-and-un-speech-1.4028590
[viii] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), ‘Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’’ May, 2019. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/
[ix] Niklas Magnusson, ‘Deforestation Wipes Out an Area the Size of Belgium’, April 25th, 2019, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/how-bad-is-deforestation-two-connecticuts-were-lost-last-year
[x] Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez and Cath Levett, ‘One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals’, 27th of June, 2018, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals
[xi] NPWS (2019). The Status of EU Protected Habitats and Species in Ireland. Volume 1: Summary Overview. Unpublished NPWS report
[xii] Unpublished data from Allan Lauder (2017) cited in O’Donoghue, B.G. (2019). Curlew Conservation Programme Annual Report 2018. National Parks & Wildlife Service, Killarney O’Donoghue
Few among the crowds walking down Thomas Street will know there is a hidden garden in the heart of the Liberties. In the past this site served as a car park, and a popular place to shoot up. Later it was bought up and fenced off. Shops and houses, however, had back door access and it became an unofficial dumping ground.
I first came across it in the spring of 2014, and met Tony Lowth the Guerrilla-Composter of Dublin City. By that time it had become a garden space, using a No-Dig method, with Tony’s stashed compost.
I was unemployed at that time and straight away I was hooked on the project. The students from nearby NCAD wanted to grow vegetables, Tony wanted to make compost and I was just looking for my place in the world (and some fresh vegetables).
Located in the city centre, there was an abundance of organic waste from some surprising sources. We were bringing in coffee grinds, horse manure, garden and vegetable waste. Tony went to Dublin’s Victorian fruit and vegetable market almost every morning, and came back with a van full of discarded vegetables. The main challenge was to scale the hill leading up to the garden: everything was pushed up on a wheelbarrow.
The right location for the heaps was selected by Tony, and we just layered the materials to achieve the perfect carbon to nitrogen ratio. The rest of the work was done by nature. First with bacteria and microbes starting the bio-digestion process.
A pile of compost pile literally cooks. The heat kills the pathogens which could be dangerous for human health. The remaining work is done by earthworms, which rapidly multiply as they munch trough the organic waste. Their saliva and intestines further reduces the pathogens. As the worms digests the organic materials it consumes, it refines them. Nutrients, including minerals and trace elements, are reduced to their most usable form. The castings have a neutral pH of 7.0.
Bit-by-bit the site was cleaned and converted into a very productive garden where events and workshops were held, with many volunteers coming and going. At a certain stage we simply ran out of space, and started to build heaps against a big pile of construction rubble which had been dumped on the site over the years. We kept going and our heap became the symbol of the garden, the Compost Hill.
Lots of hard work went into the garden, and with all the compost on site, we had created probably the most fertile patch in all of Dublin city. The garden was becoming a pilot social and enterprise project showing what can be made of vacant plots around the city. That was until relations began to sour between Tony and the College.
Without warning, locks appeared on the gate not long afterwards, and the famous hill diminished as the compost creatures were no longer fed. Access was restricted to one day per week at midday for designated people with access to the space. We had to sign in at the college reception and take a key. Restrictions were eventually eased, but without Tony managing the works and bringing volunteers and workers the garden became wild again.
Nature with its amazing productivity made the most of the rich compost and covered all the beds with lush growth. We tried to keep up with the weeds, but with limited time this became very hard.
The compost hill and the garden is now covered with weeds of a size you would not see elsewhere. If you look closely you can still harvest lots of vegetables and if you look really closely you will find amazing biodiversity.
The city centre site is now worth millions of euros, but not for its environmental importance but because developers are willing to pay that amount for space to build more student accommodation, or a hotel.
Fortunately, some teachers in the College recognise this as one of the last green places in the Liberties and also as a great opportunity for the College to facilitate students to learn about nature management and farming. Perhaps in the time the garden will became a unique art and ecology outdoor studio.
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Martin Obst works as a project engineer, in the middle of a new boom in Irish construction. As an escape from the corporate world, he and his wife-to-be are building a perma-culture garden and planting native woodland on the west coast of Ireland, close to his favourite surf breaks.
Following a global trend since the arrival of the Internet, mainstream Irish media, including the so-called ‘paper of record’ the Irish Times, is increasingly required to sell itself. The days of someone reading a daily newspapers cover-to-cover are fading into nostalgic memories. Now editors feel obliged to dangle click-bait, and even fake news, often through social media feeds, with content increasingly accessed on smartphones.
The result is diminished intellectual content, with greater emphasis on sports, titillating lifestyle stories, and consumer surveys. Moreover, advertising paymasters, generally multinational companies, often appear insulated from probing investigations; in Ireland’s case leading to a reliance on foreign-owned publications to break stories.
Journalism should not be placed on a pedestal, or equated with a secular priesthood: any writer has conflicts of interest, biases and personal foibles. Nor are business people bereft of ethical considerations. The point is about how the interests of the public informant and salesperson are balanced across a media spectrum, and the danger inherent to any democracy when media is run on a purely commercial basis, identifying its interests with other businesses. This now appears to be the case with the three main Irish players: the national broadcaster RTÉ, Independent News and Media and the Irish Times newspaper (which last year purchased the only other indigenous national daily, the Irish Examiner).
It is also apparent that the current Irish government’s ‘pro-business’ policies align with the interests of leading providers. This brings broadly sympathetic coverage, evident especially in the uncritical ‘reporting’ of strategic leaks, and publication of generally flattering images of leading politicians, especially media-conscious Taoiseach Varadkar.
The close relationship between mainstream Irish media and the government came into sharp focus last year when unmarked government advertorials appeared across indigenous print media.[i] This now has serious implications for reporting on the environment, including man-made climate change and the Extinction Crisis.
Climate Inaction
On June 16th the Irish government launched a Climate Action Plan that gained essentially positive press coverage, emphasising how seriously the government was taking the issue. For example, the headline in the Irish Times the following day read: ‘Climate action plan promises ‘radical’ change.’
Environmental NGOs, however, reacted very differently to the Plan. An Taisce said it fell ‘well short of the kind of radical, transformational document our recently declared national ‘climate and biodiversity emergency’ warrants.’[ii]
Friends of the Earth offered a more favourable assessment describing the machinery for delivery as ‘the biggest innovation in Irish climate policy in 20 years.’ They cautioned, however, that the ‘plan gets us to the starting line on climate action. It will take consistent political leadership to ensure it is implemented on time…’[iii]
Elsewhere, The Environmental Pillar, a coalition of over thirty national environment groups, lambasted a ‘general lack of clarity, ambition and urgency in the new Climate Action Plan to Tackle Climate Breakdown’, or reverse biodiversity decline.[iv]
Finally, the Irish Wildlife Trust in its press release bluntly stated: ‘There is no indication that the government is willing to rethink agricultural expansion plans which are as odds with environment goals.’[v]
Importantly, agriculture (essentially livestock agriculture) and transport (mostly of the private motor car variety) are projected to remain the main sources of Irish greenhouse gas emissions (currently combining to comprise over 50% of the total – rising both in absolute terms and proportionately. See table below).
Climate Deception
The Plan does little to address the Irish population’s disproportionate contribution to a climate change (the third highest per capita in the EU[vi]) that is already giving rise to extreme weather events close to our shores, and increasing frequency of storms here too. It also all but ignores a potentially irreversible Extinction Crisis facing the natural world, including in Ireland.
Since then the government has blocked the passage of a cross-party Climate Emergency Bill, using a previously arcane and potentially unconstitutional ‘money messages’ parliamentary procedure. The Bill would have denied any further licences being granted for the purpose of oil or gas exploration in the country. This is certainly not evidence of the kind of “consistent political leadership” sought by Friends of the Earth, who, on reflection, more recently acknowledged that the ‘actual measures in the Plan don’t add up to bringing Irish emissions down far enough fast enough.’[vii]
In essence, the Irish Times, among others,[viii] helped generate positivity in the Plan’s wake. This is apparent in the opening paragraph to an editorial the following day:
The appropriately broad scope of the Government’s Climate Action Plan must be acknowledged. A scan of the plan’s headings shows that this administration, however belatedly, has fully grasped that global heating is negatively impacting every aspect of our life and that a plethora of policies and behaviours require urgent changes.[ix]
Over the following days, opinion writers debated aspects of the plan, but none, it seems, was permitted to excoriate it.
The greenwashing is best illustrated by a photograph featuring the following day in the Irish Times of the full Cabinet of Ministers arriving in the Phoenix Park to launch the Plan on an electric bus.[x] Yet this is one of just 13 State-owned electric vehicles among 6,573 listed, and came after the National Transport Authority recently announced the purchase of a further 200 diesel buses,[xi] for use nationwide. In Dublin nitrogen dioxide levels from diesel engines are already in breach of EU standards in a range of locations,[xii] seriously imperilling human health.
The EPA’s recent emissions’ projections[xiii] make for stark reading:
Mt CO2 eq
2017
2020
2025
2030
Growth 2018-2030
Agriculture
20.21
20.32
20.66
20.85
3.2%
Transport
12.00
12.68
12.48
11.86
-1.2%
Energy Industries
11.74
11.95
13.66
8.62
-26.5%
Residential
5.74
6.42
5.66
4.55
-20.7%
Manufacturing Combustion
4.66
3.86
3.70
3.44
-26.2%
Industrial Processes
2.23
2.39
2.67
3.01
34.6%
Commercial and Public Services
1.97
1.31
1.15
0.97
-50.9%
F-Gases
1.23
0.98
0.90
0.78
-35.9%
Waste
0.93
0.58
0.49
0.44
-52.2%
TOTAL
60.74
60.53
61.43
54.55
-10.2%
The highest-emitting sector, agriculture, is predicted to increase its share to almost forty-per-cent of the total by 2030, while emissions from transport flatline. There is no evidence that the government’s Plan will alter these trajectories.
Climate Opportunism
In fact, climate change is being sold as an opportunity to roll out a fleet of electric cars, especially once the implementation of Bus Connects – really a road-widening exercise – ensures Dublin becomes even more of a U.S.-style motor-city.
Foreign manufacture of electric vehicles externalises environmental and human impacts, including the mining of cobalt in Congo for lithium batteries.[xiv]
Considering the success of the Luas, light rail seems a superior option to develop in our urban areas than noisy, uncomfortable and polluting buses. With a comparable population to Dublin, Prague has an extensive tram network offering a rapid, regular and comfortable service.
A sensible climate action plan for urban areas could offer scope for a new generation of electric vehicles, including electric bikes, scooters and vehicles for the elderly – perhaps even involving state assistance to manufacturing enterprises. The motor car, as currently conceived, is not simply a major polluter, it is also unnecessarily large and poses serious dangers to other road users, as well as leading to social atomisation.
Moreover, as long as fossil fuels generate electric power (under the Plan coal-burning Moneypoint power station is to be phased out in 2025,[xv] conveniently beyond the lifespan of this or the next government), electric vehicles could actually generate higher emissions than diesel equivalents, as one German study shows.[xvi]
Another lacuna to the Plan is a failure to discuss reducing air travel between Dublin-London, accounting for 15,000 flights per annum, making it the busiest air corridor in Europe.[xvii] This might involve improving ferry services out of Dublin and, at the very least, providing a rail service from the Dublin city centre to the Port. It could even involve cooperating with the U.K. government to achieve improvements in the rail service out of Holyhead, potentially making sail-rail journey times competitive with air travel alternative.[xviii]
Furthermore, the tired argument about maintaining the status quo in agriculture, the worst-offending sector, to the benefit of a narrowing elite, and underpinned by billions in subsidies, is based on a common misconception that Irish livestock ‘production’ diminishes impacts from livestock agriculture occurring elsewhere.
This is the ‘our coal smokes less than their coal’ argument. In fact, recent analysis by An Taisce of U.N. figures[xix] shows Irish agricultural products to be responsible for among the highest emissions in Europe. Any plan purporting to diminish Ireland’s contribution to climate change is a waste of paper without proposals for radical reform of Irish agriculture. Emphasis, and subsidies, should shift to the cultivation of fruit and vegetables for the home market thereby reducing fossil fuel dependency, increasing employment and potentially raising the nation’s health.
The so-called ‘Paper of Record’
The Irish Times should not be considered a ‘paper of record’, or an unbiased conduit of ‘facts’, as it advertises itself. Although managed as a trust, a significant salary overhang and investments extraneous to news-gathering and commentary, including www.myhome.ie, have seen it develop into what is an overwhelmingly commercial concern. This approach may be a necessity for the survival of a medium-sized newspaper in the digital era, but it has important, generally unacknowledged, consequences for Irish democracy.
It should be emphasised that many Irish Times journalists display diligence and integrity, and stories are still broken, but since Paul O’Neill became editor in 2017, the paper has become noticeably more business-friendly, and deferential to the current government.
One leading columnist, Stephen Collins, is particularly partisan in his support for the dominant economic consensus of steady growth and rising rents administered by a political duopoly.[xx] Left-wing analysis of Irish politics and society is only given an intermittent platform, especially since Vincent Brown’s retirement, and with Fintan O’Toole mainly devoted to international commentary.
Notably, Dan Flinter, chairman of the Irish Times Trust since 2013, holds a range of external directorships, where potential conflicts of interest could arise. For example, he is a non-executive director of Dairygold Co-Op, and chairman of its Remuneration Committee and a member of the Acquisitions and Investments Committee.[xxi] Ongoing expansion of the dairy sector since the lifting of EU milk quotas in 2015 has been the leading cause of the agricultural sector’s (and the country’s) rising emissions.
A worldwide environmental crisis is upon us, and many, particularly young, Irish people are focused on the country’s global responsibilities. Meaningfully addressing the gathering storm – in Ireland’s case by shifting agricultural priorities (and subsidies) away from livestock production and phasing out the motor car in urban areas – would work, however, to the detriment of vested interests that advertise heavily in Irish media.[xxii] Such an approach would also be anathema to the dominant paradigm of economic growth-without-end, oblivious to environmental impact.
The government’s Climate Action Plan seems to have been designed to assuage the justifiable fears, and desire for real action, among wide sections of the population, but it is really a greenwashing exercise, as the responses of leading environmental NGOs show.
Unforgivably, the Irish Times misrepresented the Plan as a ‘radical’ document, despite its obvious deficiencies. This is a betrayal of a loyal readership, and honourable journalists working there. Irish democracy is being undermined by an institution which many of us grew up believing was one of its cornerstones, on an issue of crucial global importance.
[xiii] ‘EPA’S GREENHOUSE GAS PROJECTIONS SHOW THAT IRELAND HAS MORE TO DO TO MEET ITS 2030 TARGETS’, Environmental Protection Agency, June 6th, 2019. https://www.epa.ie/mobile/news/name,66072,en.html?fbclid=IwAR3cGLpPKV9k4fTIVE8EMCJ_DPqG4bK_Ked5xWObMD5pzt_j63_wGQK7R24 accessed 9/6/19.
[xxii] As regards the motor car industry, see Stephen Court, ‘Drivetime’, Cassandra Voices, 31st of May, 2018. ‘http://cassandravoices.com/environment/drive-time-the-irish-medias-message/
Recent Local and European elections witnessed an electoral Green Tide, especially in Dublin, where Ciaran Cuffe topped the European poll. But this week Dubliners are contending with a Brown Tide, of shit, after overspill from the Ringsend Wastewater Plant.
It is far from an isolated example of this government’s environmental negligence. What makes it all the more nauseating is the doublespeak emanating from many Fine Gael politicians, who claim to care, including the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Hard decisions are avoided and basic infrastructure is creaking, or non-existent, undermining the nation’s health. Planning for the future is long on glossy PR brochures but short on substantive action.
Creaking infrastructure.
Here are five obvious signs:
1. Milking for all it’s worth: the Environmental Protection Agency recently projected a steady increase in national emissions, emanating in particular from the agricultural sector. By 2030 they estimate almost forty per cent of the national total will emanate from that sector.[i] This is the product of long-standing government policy. The Harvest 2020 plan, published in 2010, and driven by Simon Coveney as Minister for Agriculture from 2011, set ambitious targets for increasing dairy production, which have made Ireland the world’s second leading exporter of controversial infant milk powder into the Chinese market.[ii]
2. Drilling Begins: The May elections showed Irish people are awakening to the need for climate action. Conveniently, two days after the poll, the Department of Climate Action granted consent for an exploratory oil and gas well off the Kerry coast.[iii] It begs the question as to whether the Department understands its remit to be the acceleration of climate change, as opposed to the opposite.
3. Traffic Fumes: It is over a decade since the European Union’s environmental body described ‘Dublin as a ‘worst case scenario‘ for ‘unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl.’[iv] Little or nothing has been done in the interim to counter what is an unusually car-dependent city. Moreover, a recent survey found Dublin to be one of the slowest cities to drive through in all of Europe[v]; all these cars, including those with diesel engines that continue to be sold, are diminishing air quality, with air pollution levels regularly breaching healthy standards set out by the WHO.[vi]
Seapoint, Dublin, 9th of June, 2019.
4. Swimming Ban: Thousands of Dubliners depend on a daily swim for their mental health and wellbeing. Last week it was revealed that partially treated sewage had leaked into Dublin Bay, creating a substantial health risk to bathers. The treatment facility was built in 2005 to accommodate a population of 1.64 million people, but now handles wastewater from approximately 1.9 million. As a result, the facility is constantly overloaded, tarnishing one of the city’s greatest assets in Dublin Bay.[vii]
5. Greenwashing: Senior Fine Gael politicians have long specialised in saying one thing on the environment, while doing precisely the opposite. Leo Varadkar, for example, claimed he supported the school strike for climate,[viii] oblivious, or attempting to undermine, how these young adults were, in fact protesting against the negligent policies of his government. In terms of agriculture, the Irish Wildlife Trust’s Padraic Fogarty recently wrote about the government’s propaganda that ‘it would be wrong to think that Origin Green was merely ineffective – it is much worse than that. It is, in fact, a greater threat than all these insidious pressures precisely because its marketing is so effective.’[ix]
The idea of home is a recurring Irish preoccupation – níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.[i] This can be traced to a history of Famine dispossession, and a subsequent Land War. The Irish Constitution still commits the State to supporting women as home-makers.[ii]
It perhaps explains the vehemence of recent criticism, from across the political spectrum, directed at the Fingal Battalion Direct Action for protesting outside private residences of government ministers Simon Harris, Richard Bruton and Paschal Donohoe, as well as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Social Democrat councillor Gary Gannon condemned the campaign as ‘entirely wrong’[iii]; while the Irish Times also weighed in, likening the protests to interventions at hospitals and medical clinics by anti-abortion groups.[iv]
While in the UK the sight of politicians’ homes being besieged by an intrusive media or angry protestors is a familiar one, in Ireland we expect restraint and even civility around the domestic space of public representatives.
That the Fingal group styles itself a ‘Battalion’ also conveys paramilitarism and a form of mob rule. Political protest, however, is always considered ugly by those in power, and an absolute ban on any form would set a dangerous precedent. What if the mob is actually in power?
Before the last Italian election a crowd, holding candles, gathered outside the Milan residence of Silvio Berlusconi, as a member of the Five Star Movement read out an indictment against the disgraced former prime minister, revealing his links to the real mob, or mafia.[v] It was a powerful democratic statement: calling a billionaire politician to account outside his home.
In order for a campaign on the margins to gain public attention a degree of civil disobedience is often required. That was certainly the case with the NAMA to Nature project in 2012.[vi] Ghost estates around the country appeared as a testament to folly and greed, making the public overwhelmingly receptive to what was a trespass on private property to heal the landscape by planting trees.
But since the Crash we have seen a steady reassertion of the rights of property-owners. This often works to the detriment of marginalised citizens, and can imperil the habitats of species under threat of extinction. Travellers also defy a widespread devotion to private ownership, making them a convenient target for unscrupulous politicians.
The government’s housing policy is failing at a fundamental level the ten thousand homeless citizens.[vii] An entrenched sympathy with landlords was set out by Eoghan Murphy in a speech to the Dáil last December:
We have to be very careful in interfering more than we are at the moment. We have to make sure that we are not placing extra burdens on these small landlords. And we have to make sure that we are not prohibiting someone from selling a property that they own when they might need to sell that property for perfectly legitimate reasons in their own lives. They may not have the money to re-compensate the person living in the property at that point.[viii]
Above all the government has failed to build the houses necessary to alleviate the Housing Crisis, at a time of when the states coffers are bulging. Taoiseach Varadkar’s oft-stated ideological opposition to socialism seems an obvious reason.
Upholding property holders rights extends to giving farmers free reign to do as they wish on their land. Last month Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Josepha Madigan signed off on an order extending the burning season of uplands, the habitats of hen harriers and skylarks, among other wildlife.
Anne Marie Hourihane in the The Times Irish edition provided a scathing assessment of the Minister’s response:
At the weekend Josepha Madigan, the heritage minister, suggested that we address Ireland’s plummeting bird population by installing bird feeders in our gardens. Unfortunately, skylarks and hen harriers are not known for their attendance at bird tables, preferring to nest in uplands. Maybe the proposed bird feeders are intended as a diversionary tactic for the birds that will be nesting in the hedgerows in August. For example, your local yellowhammer — if you have one, as the yellowhammer is already on our danger list — might leave his hedgerow to get a slap-up feed at some well-appointed bird table, then fly back to his hedgerow, where he’ll say: “Hey, man, where’s my gaff? Also, the wife and kids . . .” It’s going to be a great craic.
Hourihane also highlighted an extension to the period for cutting hedgerows, which, she wrote, ‘contain so much wildlife, so many insects — including bees — so many small mammals, that they are a permanent wildlife programme all on their own. Now we will be allowed to cut them in August.’[ix]
Madigan’s response revealed either naivete, or a disregard for vulnerable species. Yet this runs contrary to the common good of preserving wildlife, potentially infringing what may, at a later time, be found to be in breach of any native species right, ‘to be, to habitat, and to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community’, as argued previously.
Leo Varadkar’s committed to an ‘extensive investment programme’ in the arts[x] during the Fine Gael leadership election, yet many artists and musicians struggle to afford a accommidation in Ireland. This is especially the case in Dublin, soon to be the EU’s most expensive city for rental accommodation.[xi] The plight of musicians is particularly difficult given how digital technology has decimated potential earnings from CD sales.
Songwriter David Kitt, who grew up in Madigan’s Dublin South constituency, where his father Tom Kitt was actually a Fianna Fail T.D., last year announced he was unable to afford accommodation in the capital, bemoaning how, ‘Dublin’s heart and soul is being ripped out and sold to the highest bidder.’[xii]
Furthermore, a recent letter signed by 407 members of the Irish theatre community claimed the direction the Abbey theatre is taking is causing ‘devastation among our ranks’, and pointing out there would not be a single Irish-based actor involved in any productions between September 2018 and February 2019.[xiii]
The Abbey, founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, is the national theatre of Ireland. The staging of J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in 1907 there brought riots over an unfavourable portrayal of Irishness. A lack of indigenous theatrical productions today prevents similar interrogations of contemporary Irish culture, while forcing many thespians into exile.
True art and literature, as George Steiner argues, is ‘always, a critique’, involving ‘a value judgment of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.’[xiv]
We have also learnt of funding being denied by Irish embassies abroad to Irish artistic endeavours that fail to cast the country in a favourable light.
The reliance of artists on patronage develops worrying dynamics. Will the anointed elite continue to pose the difficult questions essential to great works if funding is jeopardised? The major concern, however, is that Dublin, in particular, is being denuded of the vitality and originality of a vibrant artistic community, compelled to make their homes elsewhere.
Rare birds and feckless artists are forms of endangered wild life that do not fit comfortably into a society dominated by the interests of land owners. Those who invade the domestic spaces of politicians are roundly condemned, but can Ireland offer the sanctity of a home for all its species?
[i] Lit. ‘There’s no hearth like your own hearth’, or ‘there’s no place like home’.
[ii] Article 41.2.1: ‘In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’
[v] ‘Alessandro Di Battista sotto la villa di Berlusconi, legge la sentenza Dell’Utri (COMPLETO)’ Youtube, February 9th 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRpXvuxP28k, accessed 12/3/19.
It was exciting to meet the enthusiasm at the inaugural meeting of Talamh Beo, a grassroots organisation of farmers, growers and land-based workers on the island of Ireland. It aims to ensure a living landscape, where people and ecosystems thrive together.
Inspiration comes from the Landworkers’ Alliance (UK), which in the five years of its existence has become a voice for small food producers, farmers, growers and land-based workers (which also includes beekeepers, herbalists, foresters and flower farmers).
What we do at grassroots level in Ireland is of the utmost important as we confront a potential climate catastrophe, which we need to acknowledge as individuals and communities. No matter who we are in society, and what class we belong to, we all eat three times a day, and should be nourishing ourselves with good food, from a ground that is well taken care of.
We can farm in a far more sustainable way, beginning with our own gardens, and make conscientious food choices, avoiding plastic waste, and supporting local farmers.
This is crucial to our health and wellbeing, ‘Let the food be your medicine’, as Hippocrates put it; or as Darina Allen said on her ‘Foodture’ podcast: ‘Do your best to source chemical-free organic food, it’s really worth the investment … the less you spend on food the more you spend on medical care.’
If you think you can’t afford better food, consider where you now invest your money: how often do you go to the hairdresser, or drink a pint or choose to drive somewhere? There are priorities we have in terms of our time and money.
It is always a good time to start thinking about growing some of your own vegetables!
Ideally you should begin by building up soil nutrients from November onwards, but if you are starting now and feel you have missed the boat, don’t worry. We are adopting a No-dig method in our garden, which can begin at any time of the year. In this respect our inspiration is the legendary Charles Dowding, whose website and Instagram page offers plenty of excellent free advice.
If your space is limited you can use raised beds made from timber. Even a small concrete yard offers sufficient space. This type of raised bed is ideal for older people who might wish to avoid bending over.
The main ingredient of growing is good compost, which you can source from local farmers, and elsewhere. To start a bed we recommend gathering lots of cardboard, and spreading it straight onto the ground. Then spread a 10cm layer of compost over this. Beds should be approximately 1m wide, allowing 30cm for pathways between each one. Wood chips give a neat appearance to the pathways, and suppress weeds.
While your new beds are settling down, start propagating your favourite vegetable varieties in pots and trays of fine seed compost on your windowsills inside. You don’t generally need a rich compost to germinate seeds; heat and moisture are sufficient. You can multi-sow and do successional sowing to have a continuous supply of fresh ingredients throughout the year.
Those wishing to start an organic farming business, or a just develop partial self-sufficiency, should access networks of independent Irish growing organisations. We highly recommend linking up with an experienced farmer in your area to build a good relationship, and learn where the food you eat is coming from.
The Organic Growers of Ireland has created a Small Growers Network to help growers who have completed formal training or an internship with them. It is essentially a participatory network that is open to anyone who feels it would be useful. You don’t need much experience to be part of it; what you do need is the enthusiasm required to build up your strength on the farm.
The Network offers a forum for small farmers to highlight the specific needs of their holdings. It is organised by Jason Horner, founder of the OGI, and monthly meetings are happening in Cloughjordan, with farm walks providing different discussion topics, led by established organic growers.
Becoming a supporter of Irish Seedsavers helped us get involved in seed sharing and gave us access to workshops and events (including brilliant talks from Mary Raynolds). Apple-tasting days were a highlight. Seed saving is useful to anyone with an interest in biodiversity, increasing the variety of vegetables, and helping bees to pollinate by reducing monoculture.
The Flower Farmers of Ireland also promote the cultivation, marketing, sale and use of Irish-grown cut-flowers and foliage, and support and act as an advocate for growers.
We believe the Land belongs to us all. That is why we need to restore natural ecosystems, and put power back into the hands of small-scale producers. At the moment production is dominated by multinational supermarkets, which leads to waste and inequalities. It is time to get up and grow, or at least choose honestly grown local food.
If you think you can’t afford better food, consider where you now invest your money: how often do you go to the hairdresser, or drink a pint or choose to drive somewhere? There are priorities we have in terms of our time and money.