Archives

Feral  George Monbiot Allen Lane, 2013 €14.99 Book review by Roy Johnston In this charming and inspiring book George Monbiot, environmental polymath and Guardian proselytiser, shows how, by restoring and rewilding our damaged ecosystems on land and at sea, we can bring wonder – “enchantment” – back into our lives. This book is an unusual combination of bedside reading; George goes feral, with disaster warnings and many reference sources. It thus effectively sucks in the neophyte as much as the activists who read his brilliant Guardian columns, many of which are reprinted by Village, often centring on climate change. In the first five chapters he outlines his experience with wild life in Brazil, Wales, east Africa, England and elsewhere, on land and sea, then in chapter six he homes in on the need to encourage the replacement of mountain pasture by forestry with native species, managing it without clear-felling. This ideally should reproduce the original post-ice-age ecology, which supported a rich species-mix, before its replacement by pasture mono-culture, which tends if abandoned to revert to heather. It does not appear that many others in this country (apart from articles in Village and by Michael Viney in the Irish Times) have picked up on this. Perhaps the reduction in pressure from sheep grazing over the last twenty years has reduced the imperative. Hill forestry it seems has been culturally forgotten in both Ireland and Britain, though some understanding remains in continental Europe and ecologists increasingly emphasise its value. It is being re-created in Wales and Scotland by a handful of pioneers, and Monbiot explores their experience, and looks at the positive influence of wildlife such as the wolf, boar, beaver, linx in sustaining diversity of life. As usual Monbiot writes both effectively and lyrically. Monbiot wants wolves reintroduced, for example, because “wolves are fascinating … because they feel to me like the shadow that flits between systole and diastole, because they are the necessary monsters of the mind”. He celebrates a process known as trophic cascades: predators at the top keep an ecosystem healthy via such means as reducing the number of herbivores, thus providing carrion for animals further down the food chain. Eliminating a top predator does not mean more food for humans. For example, fishermen once believed they could enlarge their catches by reducing the numbers of animals such as whales and seals, leaving more fish for human consumption. In fact, the opposite occurred, because you cannot remove one piece of an ecosystem without creating catastrophic knock-on effects. Almost everywhere, except Britain and Ireland, large charismatic species are returning. Wolves have spread across most of Europe. Between 1927 and 1993, the wolf was extinct in France. Now, helped only by the restraint of people who might otherwise have killed them, there are over 200 wolves there, in at least twenty packs, he notes. His key message is the need to conserve the complex wild ecologies associated with native forestry, especially in the mountains. He also exposes the need to reconstruct the current complex agricultural subsidy regime in the EU, if re-foresting is to be achieved politically. Monbiot doesn’t just want to return nature to its state of a hundred years ago. He believes we can reintroduce extinct species of animals and flowers, and then allow nature to run its course to bring back diversity. The implication for Ireland is that re-foresting the mountain pastures enables the heavy mountain rainfall to be retained, so that it does not immediately rush down the mountain streams to cause floods in the main rivers. This aspect of global warming, generated by the rising seas has already hit us severely. Dredging the rivers is not the right response; we must re-forest the mountains. Those who depend on mountain sheep for their livelihood need not worry, provided the State supports them in helping with the transition to becoming instead managers of energy supply in the form of wood chips and firewood from restored mountain forest. Indeed one of the differences between Ireland and Britain is that because the sheep industry was never as intensive in Ireland it was reduced in the 1990s following EU rulings on over-grazing and related changes to headage payments. The Rural Environment Protection Scheme provided generous cash payments to farmers who agreed to reduce sheep numbers on the hills. Sheep numbers more than doubled from 3.3 million in 1980 to 8.8 million in 1991 but had reduced to 3.5m by 2011 . In the UK there are over 11 million. Over-grazing of Irish uplands peaked twenty years ago. •   Dr Roy H W Johnston is a scientific consultant with an interest in techno-economic analysis. He wrote  a weekly science column in the Irish Times in the 1970s.

By Shirley Clerkin Living on the border defines and determines. You are on one side or the other. You go over it. You go back again, developing an intense and intimate relationship with its nuances and grey areas. The border is the edge and the beginning, like two silk scarves with rolled French seams lying end to end, but also a place of buffering, transition and, because of that, cultural richness. Little details that ornament south or north – the road surface, the metric miles, the Slán Abhaile’s, narrate the government policies that have accumulated a different finish to the countryside and towns. If you dropped me on either side, I believe I would know which I was on eyes-shut, because I am of the border. It is in me.  It is a unified place, not a line, unified by its edginess and the distinction of experiencing  many perspectives. People interrogate you about it – your experience of “living along the border”. It becomes an exotic thing because it is deemed to be by peace-builders, social scientists and historians. Peace-funding and other EU cohesion monies are available for storytelling projects that allow you to get it off your chest, but only while a person “from the other side” gets it off his or her chest too. It is an ailment to be overcome, like a bad cough. But, what if border belonging made you a better problem-solver because of the unique experience, like Kilkenny makes better hurlers because of the unique heritage and self-belief of that place and people. Like Cork people, being so far away, and having such a rich and sophisticated hinterland, never lose the run of themselves. The ingenuity of many home-grown companies, particularly in engineering, on the border is unreplicated anywhere else on the island for example.  Problem-solving is also about co-operation and collaboration, behaviours that have been hard-wired into many, for reasons of necessity and because of initiatives to bring trans-border standards into line with each other by public authorities.  But also because those woolly sounding “storytelling projects” are much more than a hug from a warm jumper. It is not easy: cooperating is challenging, but it can be learned through doing. We need to encourage and teach these types of behaviour to force a change in how we manage our resources and how we challenge climate change and biodiversity loss. Because we in effect need to cooperate with future generations as well as with each other.  ‘Time Lapse’ from Lodovico Einauidi’s new album evokes a moving through the seasons, beaten out on the piano and other percussion – sparse, noisy, busy, constantly rhythmic but with increasing franticness.  It sounds like years ticking past, generations flickering briefly like-time lapse photographs from birth to death in a glimpse – generation upon generation – each dependent on the earth left by those who went before. Ecologically. I sometimes wonder if there would be a change if photographs were available of our ancestors. Would our sense of time shrink to see the real transference between generations, past and future? Would we become real geologists, and understand human time as just a pinhead in the history of the earth, and would this help us co-operate to protect our nature, our DNA’s future? Why people are willing, or unwilling, to make present-day sacrifices for future generations is the topic of a recent study called ‘Cooperating With The Future,’ from researchers at Harvard and Yale. They tested the conditions under which co-operation with future generations can occur in a game, the Intergenerational Goods Game (IGG). Oliver Hauser et al. developed this laboratory model of co-operation that differs from previous games in which selfishness creates social-efficiency losses for group members. Instead, selfishness negatively affects subsequent groups. Experiments involving more than 2,000 people demonstrate that when decisions about resource extraction are made individually, the resource is rapidly depleted by defectors. But, when participants are forced to vote on how the resource should be exploited, it is exploited sustainably across generations. Voting allows a majority of co-operators to constrain a minority of defectors, and as all players receive the same amount after a vote, co-operators need not worry about losing out relative to others. To be honest, the study seems like a bit of common sense, not a great discovery as such, but perhaps the best ideas are already taken in the real world outside the lab. My eye was drawn to it because if its snazzy game-show name. Unfortunately without ever-cheerful Bruce Forsyth to declare “Didn’t they do well?” no matter how poorly the contestant performed, it will hardly precipitate any great changes in behaviour. Brucie was an encouraging and motivating host. We need him now to tell us to stop the belt conveying prizes to vested economic interests and to share the cuddly toys among ourselves and our children. Time is not what we think. And it is not, nor ever was, on our side. Like Einaudi’s composition, the metronome is relentless. •

By Sadhbh O’ Neill What do the recent news reports about the sale of Aer Lingus, an earthquake in Nepal and the collapse of the Greek economy all have in common? The answer is the importance of air travel for tourism, global connectivity and economic growth. The aviation industry as a whole contributes 2.6% of Irish GDP, and supports up to 40,000 jobs, in addition to contributing to taxes and indirect spending. In Nepal, where a recent earthquake has devastated the country’s infrastructure and killed over 8,000 people, the travel and tourism sector provides 3.2% of that country’s total employment. Leisure accounts for over 80% of the spending. And in Greece, that country’s economic crisis has brought a flood of tourists seeking good value and availing of cheap deals from the UK in particular. Tourism brings revenue of over €13bn to Greece annually and has seen a growth of over 30% in the past year alone. There is a problem, however. New (jet) airliner models in the first decade of the 21st Century were barely more efficient on a seat-mile basis than the latest propellor-powered airliners of the late 1950s. Carbon-dioxide emissions from aviation, while small at just 3% of global emissions, are growing faster than any other source. Globally, about 8.3 million people flew daily (3 billion occupied seats per year) in 2013, twice the total in 1999. U.S. airlines alone burned about 16.2 billion gallons of fuel during the twelve months between October 2013 and September 2014. They also originate from just a tiny fraction of the world population, which is dominated by affluent leisure travellers (that includes us, here in Ireland, flying once a year to Mediterranean holiday resorts). Dramatically, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change estimates that the warming effect of aircraft emissions is about 1.9 times that of carbon dioxide alone, due to the other gases produced by planes. (A higher figure of 2.7 was previously used, but a more conservative one of 1.9 is now preferred, and is the one commonly used). So when discussing aviation’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, we need to take cognisance of the peculiar status this sector enjoys in our economic framework and in our cultural attitudes to wealth and personal freedom. Let’s face it: flying is enormously environmentally costly but we in the first world perceive it to be a precious luxury, one that we are not prepared to forego. So that’s why it is ‘peculiar’, and we should be wary of falling for arguments that would allow aviation emissions growth to be offset against those of other sectors. So what should we do about CO2 emissions from aviation? Well the first thing to note is that these emissions are not currently regulated at all, except in the EU under the Emissions Trading Scheme. This measure gives airlines an emissions allowance as a percentage of the EU aviation market, over which the airlines must pay for emission rights. It cost Ryanair for instance €1.7m last year, but they received 70% of their emission rights free of charge. The cost per passenger in 2014 would only have been 2c per person, hardly a punitive tax. This mechanism only applies to flights originating and ending within the EU and the cost has largely been passed onto consumers with no effect on demand or CO2. While the EU effort is clearly a start, if the desire to hold global warming below 2°C is serious, it must be translated into an effective global effort to reduce emissions by at least 80% by 2050, and not the 50% reduction favoured by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). Under the Kyoto Protocol, responsibility for the design of an effective voluntary regime was left up to none other than the aforementioned ICAO so that airlines could figure out themselves how to square their actual emissions pathways with global expectations of limiting warming to 2°C. Given what we know about the inertia of energy systems and the incremental rate of technological advancement, policy-makers and the travelling public alike need to acknowledge an inevitable constraint on air travel. At some point, and as soon as possible, emissions need to peak and then decline to at least 80% below 2005 levels. And if we want to stick to the 2°C target we will have to peak straight away. Yes, that means no more growth at all. However, the aviation sector is still witnessing growth even in ‘mature’ markets such as the US, where emissions have increased by 64% in 20 years. The global projections to 2050 are for a rise in passenger/km of up to 500%. Just to put this into perspective, by 2010 emissions from aviation were of similar magnitude to those from the entire continents of either Africa or South America. Dublin Airport, for example, is planning and developing for a doubling of  passenger numbers from 2008 numbers to 30m annually by 2020 and for up to 40m by 2025. In 2014 the numbers rose to 22m, up 8% on 2013 due to the addition of 24 new routes and additional flights on 34 existing services, which followed the Government’s decision to drop the €3 a passenger air travel tax. Unlike other sectors, it is simply impossible to ‘decarbonise’ air travel. Technological ‘fixes’, including vaunted hydrogen and solar,  are simply less likely to be feasible than in other  sectors including other transport. The International Panel on Climate Change has said: “there would not appear to be any practical alternatives to kerosene-based fuels for commercial jet aircraft for the next several decades”. Adding an electric drive to the airplane’s nose wheel may improve fuel efficiency during ground handling. This addition would allow taxiing without use of the main engines. Other opportunities arise from the optimisation of airline timetables, route networks and flight frequencies to increase load factors. Technological ‘improvements’ can offer at best 1-2% per annum in fuel efficiencies, but it takes decades to replace entire carbon-profligate fleets, including current advance orders; and we don’t have