Serious Fun.

At Keating's, Kilbaha, Co Clare.

When the electricity in the cottage where we are staying went down this morning, (it is entirely dependent on electricity) - my reaction was to go outside, find some wood and light a fire, and to revel in the opportunity to introduce two little grandchildren to the delights of frying bangers and brewing coffee the outdoor way. My plan was quickly shot down on multiple fronts - the danger of fire, children burning themselves and getting grubby, blackening stones, pans etc. What with the wonders of modern communication, we were soon out of the fix and in another house, where the electricity still worked, having a splendid breakfast. That was all very satisfactory; I make my little point above not to say that I had the better idea, but just as a plea to keep my approach alive as an option, and furthermore the notion that breakdown can after all be a splendid opportunity for fun.

As it happens, some of my very best boyhood memories are of the blissful Sunday hours that I used to spend with a few mates - officially a ‘patrol’ in the Boy Scouts - frying up on a fire in the woods at Worth, in the Sussex Weald. We were under the apparently minimal supervision of the Scoutmaster, Fr Michael Smith, and were provided in due process with the necessary gear and goodies, including matches and a hatchet; having been trained up to such self-sufficiency in the Cubs, we were left to get on with it. Couldn’t happen these days, of course!

The contemporary mind boggles at the very idea of letting 11 year-olds loose in such a way, in those lovely wild woods of oak and silver birch and what-not. Anyway the last time I was there, they had mostly been cut down and replaced by ghastly ranks of sitka spruce. So much in Nature has been similarly degraded in the years since my boyhood; but I say also that by and large her beauty still remains, and there is no inevitability about going on to destroy the rest. Perhaps indeed we have the means to appreciate and enjoy Nature, and to care for her, on a wider scale than ever before.

Cliffs white with guano from nesting auks on the cliffs of Loop Head.

However, I read in the Irish Times today (30/5/18) two stories that are evidently related to each other: the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is warning about ‘renewed signs of overheating’  in the Irish economy, and the Environmental Protection Agency warning about Ireland ‘being locked in a trend of rising carbon emissions’ on account of ‘strong economic growth and increasing fossil fuel consumption.’  ‘Ireland has committed to a legally binding EU target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20% (on 2005 levels) by 2020, but, at best, will only achieve a 1% reduction by then’. This clearly carries the implication that our present course as a society is not sustainable; is in fact a bubble that the next spike in oil prices or whatnot will pop; and the next pop may well be a lot worse than the last one, because there is not the same wriggle room any more. But there is nothing inevitable about it; there is always the possibility that we will take it into our thick collective head to change course!

Where do we go from here? I still find myself sometimes having to argue the toss about climate change with apparently reasonable and intelligent people. I would have thought that the science is well established, but also that even if it weren’t, and what we are being threatened with were only a possibility, we had still better act to avoid that possibility. I go on to point to separate evidence chains such a ocean acidification, also the facts that the environmental mayhem and economic imbalances generated by fossil fuel industries would be much better avoided, that much of the money we pay for fuel ends up financing weapons of war, and anyway that we have no right to expend those precious resources, built up over millennia, at any faster rate than we absolutely have to.

Some people remain unconvinced. There are undoubtedly vested interests at play, but there is something else too: some kind of visceral opposition to the very idea of taking the environmental crisis seriously. Perhaps it is because people understandably find it very difficult to handle the kind of pessimism that tends to be associated with it, and I can sympathise with that. After all environmentalists frequently associate the crisis with over-population. As the father of nine children, I reply that in Europe at least the problem is quite the reverse; there are too few babies. I

At Cristiona's wedding.

do allow that we have too many cars. We need to reorganize ourselves so that we are not so dependent on them, and on burning fossil fuels one way or another.

We need to slow down and find out how to enjoy life again, but actually we do also need a thriving population and economy to drive the required revolution, and what’s more, it is no use leaving it to governments and huge corporations to make the running. Their priorities are all too often different to ours. But is there an alternative? This very machine that I am typing on proves that there is; at least its Linux operating system does so. This has been developed on the basis of the cooperation of individuals, working not (at least directly) for profit, but for the love and fun of the thing; and it is the best operating system in the world. Yes, they will find ways of turning a euro, pound or dollar out of their work, and especially out of the contacts, skills and reputation which they build up in the course of it; but that is a very different proposition to that of some overblown corporation with its copyrights intent on making astronomical profits.

It is in this spirit of serious fun that I am having a final crack at turning words into action, in my own field of experience, namely that of sailing craft of one kind or another. The hull of the ‘Anna M’ will soon be sound again; but there it is, empty. I am trying to refit with an electric drive, deriving its electricity from the wind (via the propellor when the boat is sailing with sufficient power) and the sun(via solar panels), supplemented it is true sometimes by shore power. Let’s hope that too is increasingly derived from decentralised and renewable sources, in a similar though more sophisticated way than lighting a fire to cook breakfast in the garden! More about the electric drive as things progress….