Environment

The Ballyphehane Togher Community Development Project (BTCDP) was accepted into the Community Development Programme in 1993. This was after two years of lobbying, letter writing and submissions. BTCDP recruited a Co-Ordinator and opened its first office, a two-room space over the doctor’s surgery in Pearse Square, in 1994. This year we are celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Two of the first actions of the project, in particular, created a legacy that has endured throughout the twenty years. The first group of management volunteers undertook a UCC night class in Social Studies. They campaigned for it to be delivered in their local college of Further education Scoil Stiofáin Naofa. That early group positioned the project ideologically, framing it in terms of development rather than service provision. They visited another Community Development Project in Galway, assisted by the Combat Poverty Agency, the support agency for the Community Development Programme at the time. This was an early declaration of intent. The project would work with local people to address local needs, but recognised that disadvantage was neither individual nor local and must also look outward to wider concerns and models. The Combat Poverty Agency was key to this perspective as an independent and reputable agency which commissioned research, drafted policy proposals and supported practise to combat disadvantage and exclusion. Those early volunteers had many reasons for giving their time to establish the project. There was a lack of early-years provision in the area and they held a knowledge from their own lives of generational educational disadvantage and wanted to change this as well as to provide opportunities for early school leavers. They had a desire to see children with disabilities integrated into local settings instead of steered toward special schooling or charities organised around a specific disability. Importantly, they wanted a different type of community organisation, that would be less hierarchical and more women-friendly in its structures and membership and that would draw its membership from beyond the ‘usual suspects’ locally. In our twenty years, all the Chairs of BTCDP have been women and there have been no statutory representatives nor elected representatives from any political party on the Board. The essence of community development, that local people alongside paid staff, whom they employed and directed, could make a positive intervention in their community, was attractive to those early volunteers. Their local knowledge could and would influence how and where the project operated, how it targeted resources and addressed needs. Over two decades the BTCDP has resourced children and families, youth initiatives, older people’s groups, people with a disability, refugees and asylum seekers, LGBT communities, and users of mental health services. A huge diversity of people has been supported to engage with the project and with public service allies. We have provided inclusive community childcare, community education, community arts initiatives and community health activities. These activites have harnessed local community energy and made links with statutory agencies. We have engaged with policy formation that affected people and communities experiencing exclusion, and have supported community participation in every major policy consultation impacting on disadvantaged communities. This has included the National Anti-Poverty Strategy and the Green and White papers on Adult and Community Education, and Community and Voluntary Activity. It is striking that while BTCDP celebrates our “Fiche Bliain ag Fás”, in the recent decade community development in Ireland has experienced anything but “fiche bliain faoi bhláth”. In fact, it can be argued that community development has withered under the onslaught of austerity. Perhaps the starkest outcome of this is that the Community Development Programme, which we were so proud to belong within, doesn’t exist anymore. That programme, which was acclaimed for engaging local people in devising local action to challenge and change circumstance in their own community, whether a geographical one or a community of interest, was an early casualty of austerity politics. The then Fianna Fáil/Green Government announced its intention in 2009 to incorporate all 180 Community Development Projects into the local City and County Partnership companies. This, effectively, stood down local communities as agents for their own development. The Fine Gael/ Labour Government has simply carried on that process. Pobal, the state agency now managing the Community Development Programme, has acknowledged that much local community involvement and capacity has been lost to the Programme. Despite this learning, Partnership companies are faced with amalgamation under local authority structures. They are now rehearsing the same arguments made about the Community Development Programme projects over four years ago. The Combat Poverty Agency has been subsumed into the Department of Social Protection. It lost its autonomy and its authority as an independent voice for community sector and civil society organising. The Equality Authority had its budget cut by 40% and is now being merged with the Irish Human Rights Commission. Finally, the Community Workers Co-op, which had supported so many community organisations, and contributed to policy formation around the concerns of these organisations, found itself out of government favour. This was due to its consistently strong challenges to Government policy. Its funding as a specialist support agency was withdrawn. Dismantling and diminishing these organisations has deprived the community sector of an essential architecture with which to interact and through which to impact on national policy. Brian Harvey’s 2011 research, ‘Downsizing the Community Sector’, focuses on this There has been a contraction within the community sector. “Downsizing the Community Sector”, research by Brian Harvey, details the reduction in funding and staffing since the economic crisis in 2008. It reports that the sector will have been diminished by 35% by the end of 2013. But this downsizing is not just of resources and people, although those are significant. There has also been a scaling back of community sector organisations’ vision and capacity to act. Reduced resources and the absence of the enabling scaffold has meant a significant contraction in focus and ambition. BTCDP worked hard, with others, to resist the amalgamation process with the That early group positioned the project ideologically, framing it BTCDP worked hard, with others,

Animal Oppression & Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism and Global Conflict   David A Nibert Columbia University Press, New York, 2013   Review by Frank Armstrong     Scholars have argued that the domestication of animals for food, labour, and tools of war has advanced the development of human society. But by comparing practices of animal exploitation for food and resources in different societies over time, David A Nibert reaches a strikingly different conclusion. He implores humanity to shift to a vegan, or plant-based diet. Nibert maintains: “The emergence and continued practice of capturing, controlling, and genetically manipulating other animals for human use violates the sanctity of life of the sentient beings involved”. He tees up a neologism, ‘domesecration’, and deploys it throughout the book, arguing that “their minds and bodies are desecrated to facilitate the exploitation: it can be said that they have been domesecrated”. ‘He traces an upsurge in human violence to the practice of stalking and killing animals which “began no earlier than ninety thousand years ago’ He traces an upsurge in human violence to the practice of stalking and killing animals which “began no earlier than ninety thousand years ago – and probably much later”, but fails to acknowledge that this was connected to the expansion of humanity into northern latitudes where edible plants were not available throughout the year, often making hunting a necessity for survival. His basic thesis is that ‘domesecration’ has generated conflict between human societies because the amount of land required for raising animals for human consumption is far greater than that required to grow crops for direct human consumption. He emphasises how “domesecrated” animals act as vectors for zoonotic diseases, and displace countless free-living animals. As an abolitionist he does not envision any possible way humans could exploit animals in symbiosis with one another and their environment. He begins his account in 1237 at Riazan near Moscow as the Golden Horde led by Batu Khan lays the city to siege. Nibert links the cruelty of those Mongols to their treatment of animals and shows their reliance on them as weapons of war and mobile sources of food. Conquest, in turn, was fuelled by a need for more grazing land. They terrorised Eastern Europe and China which saw its population drop from 123 million in 1200 to 65 million in 1393, laying waste societies engaged primarily in crop cultivation. As part of their general unneighbourliness, in all likelihood the Mongols introduced the zoonotic bubonic plague to Europe, leading to a reduction in its population of a half. ‘he does not envision any possible way humans could exploit animals in symbiosis with one another and their environment’ The effect of colonisation of the Americas on its indigenous people has been described by historian Alfred Crosby as the “greatest tragedy in the history of the human species”. Large numbers were displaced to make way for livestock from areas where they cultivated crops or hunted free-living animals; and, with few domesticated animals of their own, they were ravaged by zoonotic diseases, especially smallpox. Their numbers were reduced by two thirds. It would be wrong to idealise the lives of indigenous peoples in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. But it seems the virtual absence of domesticated animals curtailed warfare: “archaeological evidence suggests that pre-Columbian warfare was limited to small-scale raiding, sniping, and ambush”, and that the numbers of “deaths by violence were relatively low”. Hernán Cortes whose expedition led to the fall of the Aztec Empire in Mexico instantly foresaw the possibility of developing a cattle industry there. Livestock products, especially hides, were integral to the wealth accumulated by the conquistadores. Nibert contrasts the colonisation of the Americas with the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, territory unsuited to livestock production. He says this supports “the thesis that colonisation was much more likely to involve large-scale violence when invasions involved expanding ranching operations”. To expand livestock numbers was also the primary motivation for the encroachment of Europeans into North America. The West was won by cowboys who cruelly displaced, and often massacred, large numbers from nations such as the Creek, Choctaw, Chicksaw, and Cherokee. In North America the fates of the native population and free-roaming buffalo, vital to their way of life, were intertwined. In the early nineteenth century there were up to thirty million buffalo roaming North America, but by century’s end they had been hunted to virtual extinction to make way for livestock. Nibert recalls the often wanton violence that accompanied their annihilation. In one account train passengers made a ‘sport’ of it: “As they neared a herd, passengers flung open the windows of their cars, pointed their breechloaders, and fired at random into the frightened beasts”. With the West ‘won’, industrial slaughterhouses emerged, especially in Chicago. It was not pretty. Rudyard Kipling was horrorstruck by what he saw in the late 1880s and worried “about the effect of so mechanical a killing on the human soul”, though in his occasional jingoism and patronising espousal of whiteman’s burden he did not always apply stringency to the worth of human souls, or human life. Nibert notes the important role of English capital in the expansion of livestock production into the Western plains of America in the nineteenth century. He also explores the English colonisation of Ireland and emphasises how Irish salt beef was a critical factor in the “profitable sugar production in the Caribbean because it was an important source of food for enslaved labourers on Britain’s plantations”. ‘In Ireland, primarily because of the Great Famine, there was a shift in the nineteenth century from tillage to pasture leading to depopulation of the countryside’ In Ireland, primarily because of the Great Famine, there was a shift in the nineteenth century from tillage to pasture leading to depopulation of the countryside. He quotes James Connolly’s description of this in Labour in Irish History: “Where a hundred families had reaped a sustenance from their small farms, or by hiring out their labour to the owners of

Billionaires tend to be visionless climate-denying misanthropists