Future of the environment desperately needs a new storyline

A late sunrise slides up from behind a cloudbank over Dublin’s spires and office blocks and sets the few remaining golden leaves on the silver birches dancing; its beams pick up the antlers of a dozen stags along the woodland edge, resting amicably together after a long autumn’s fighting and rutting.

A skein of brent geese stretches out in a ragged vee, low over the trees. They are commuting between the scattered remnants of our great coastal salt marshes and our burgeoning city sportsfields, adapting rapidly to the world our species is remaking so fast, and so recklessly.

The Phoenix Park on a December morning is a place of full of magic, right in the middle of the capital. Nature doesn't sleep in winter, if we keep our senses awake. Yet every venture into the natural world in our era may be fraught with anxieties.

For example, I can’t help wondering whether our culture is slowly turning the brent geese, whose migration links us directly to wild Arctic landscapes, into domesticated suburbanites.

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Then, as I cycle on across the Fifteen Acres, I find another source of stress: I am running out of puff on level ground. Advancing age? Okay, that’s a factor, if you insist, but there’s a more immediate problem. I am all wrapped up for winter, with layers of fleeces, gloves, scarf and woolly hat. It slowly dawns on me that I have overheated drastically. In December? Yes, it’s 14 degrees at 10am. I have to shed all upper layers but my shirt to regain my energy. So why the anxiety? There have always been freak warm spells in winter, haven’t there? Yes, but the past year is already likely to be the hottest on record.

So the unseasonal clamminess triggers a sharp, angry pang about our failure to tackle climate change, at home and abroad – about the Taoiseach’s shameful double-speak at the Paris UNFCCC conference exactly a year ago, for instance.

He told the delegates inside the hall that Ireland was "serious" and "determined to play its part" in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Moments later, he told Irish journalists outside that Ireland would do no such thing, but would demand exemptions for rising emissions created by his Government's agricultural policy. (http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ editorial/the-irish-times-view-rhetoric-must-give-way-to-action-in-push-for-cop21-deal-on-climate-change-1.2454571 ).

That memory triggers other thoughts: who could have imagined then, on this very morning's news, that US president-elect Donald Trump had, among many other terrifying decisions, just nominated a fossil-fuel advocate to head up the US Environmental Protection Agency?

Who could have guessed, indeed, that the song line ringing most tellingly in our heads, after Leonard Cohen gracefully checked out, would not be Hallelujah, but his chilling prophecy, "I have seen the future, baby, and it's murder"?

Or who imagined, a year ago, that Britain, a country whose people have spearheaded so remarkably successful campaigns for nature, would opt for Brexit, thus threatening many cross-border environmental standards and programmes?

It would be folly, for anyone who knows that the environment is our common home, not to pay attention to such anxieties; they are rooted in grim and dangerous realities. But it would be equally foolish to give them all our focus, because they are not the full story, or the only stories, on the environment. Moreover, they may not be the stories that will create most momentum for better environmental management.

Looking back over the many projects and individuals we have featured on this Environment page over the past year, one common thread links them, again and again. It is summed up by author and activist Tony Juniper whom we interviewed in August (http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/ driving-the-economy-underwater-1.2793711):

“We desperately need a new storyline,” Juniper says. The dominant story about the environment in our societies at present, he believes, is that “the protection of nature is harmful to people and the economy”. He argues that the opposite is true, that unless we attend to health of our environment, our economies cannot survive.

The dominant story in the environmental movement has also often been problematic, tending to focus on disabling narratives of impending catastrophe and on a polarising opposition between enlightened environmental activists, evil corporate forces and a supposedly ignorant populace. That narrative has fostered too much reliance on top-down regulation and much too little engagement with the communities directly affected by those regulations when they hit the ground.

It has misinformed our futile and heart-breaking battles over turf-cutting and inadvertently given Brexit, Trumpism and other right-wing populist movements some of their energy. This is changing though and new narratives are being forged. We have reported on them on this page:

Environmental campaigners are joining forces with trade unionists in Europe to protect fossil fuel workers during the transition to a low-carbon economy. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/can-we-save-jobs-as-we-mind-the-planet-1.2655092;

Ecologists are talking to economists, and vice versa, about how make our nations, corporations and agri-businesses fully accountable for actions which damage the environmental fabric that sustains all our lives and to reward those who enhance that fabric;

We have looked at initiatives by seedsavers, social scientists, farmers, community activists, educationalists, architects, bog restorationists, foresters and one young schoolboy to deepen our understanding of, and delight in, the natural world. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/the-bog-boy-of-girley-1.2549868l;

Further afield, we reported on the implications of new international targets for forest restoration, and on a very significant agreement in marine conservation. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/antarctica-s-ocean-colour-scene-now-under-international-protection-1.2878264.

And, as he has done for many, many years before this page was established, Michael Viney has continued to offer his peerless insights into all aspects of the natural world, rooted in his home on Mayo's Atlantic edge but extending to the stars, in his Another Life column. Meanwhile, his wife Ethna keeps us focused on readers' nature observations through her Eye on Nature, through which you can offer your images, your questions and your insights.

At this solstice season, we wish our readers the many pleasures of exploring nature over the holidays. And if there are times when some these winter pleasures are hard to savour, in the face of an icy gale or a blizzard of bad news from Trump Tower, always remember that, to adapt the catchphrase from a popular TV narrative of human folly in another era, Spring is Coming.

Meanwhile, if the environment could ask for Christmas presents, its wish-list might read like this:

1. Donald Trump gets stuck in a lift with David Attenborough and is persuaded that the science on climate change is sound and compelling. When the Potus-elect gets out, he deselects Scott Pruitt as director of the EPA, and nominates Bill McKibben instead.

2. The human species realises that its recent addiction to buying more and more stuff is a form of dementia, does not bring happiness and is leading us towards extinction. We buy experiences and services instead, human wellbeing soars and nature rebounds.

3. The Department of Agriculture and the IFA agree to reduce our national herd to curb greenhouse gas emissions; to diversify quality cereal, vegetable, fruit and native woodland production. They extend the principles of the Burren Farming for Conservation programme across the nation, rewarding farmers for enhancing our natural heritage. Agricultural incomes rise (well, the lower ones do), our landscapes blossom, quality tourism booms.

4. The National Parks and Wildlife Service is given the resources and authority to do its job properly. Politicians who continue to undermine conservation legislation lose their seats.

5. Local communities are genuinely with us at every stage of every conservation project. Conservation becomes part of what we are.