The days of protecting the environment for its own sake are drawing to a close; it’s increasingly about protecting us, writes James Nix, IEN Transport Policy co-ordinator.
Past environmentalism looked to conserve plants and wildlife. Think of the trees, the birds, the bees, and the seas. It was about being decent. Fair play for nature. Cycle, and save the polar bears. Suddenly, the goalposts moved. They shifted so fast the pitch is hard to recognise and the game is different. And the question is: just to ensure of our own welfare and lifestyles of relative comfort do we now need to put the environment first?
For some this question is radical – a complete turnabout. But not for climatologists. Over decades, as they watched the steady rise in average temperatures, the realisation dawned that environmental strife would lead to human strife. But these scientists had the comfort of time, the chance to take stock slowly.
The rest of us are forced to digest quickly, as the message is delivered sharply, with the concluding remarks of scientists condensed into headlines and by-lines. It can feel as if a foreign system is impinging suddenly upon us, forcing realisations we never contemplated we might have to accept.
No doubt there will continue to be a few voices well into the 2020s that will doubt whether man-made carbon emissions cause the earth’s protective layer to mimic a greenhouse, just as there were a handful of ‘experts’ into the 1980s who denied a conclusive link between cigarette smoking and cancer.
But the great majority of people are not implacable. And in the last 100 years the temperature has climbed .7 of a degree. Doing little or nothing for the next 10 or 15 years means that temperatures we’ll lose the capacity to stop temperatures increasing by 2 degrees, beyond which we cannot stop the planet getting too hot for humans to handle.
And that’s what brings immediacy to the argument.But it’s not true to say life will not go on. Life will go. But it will be without us. The winds will blow over sands over what were once inhabited and the world of small creature will plod on indifferent to previous millennia. And it will have happened on our watch – the people from 2008 to 2018 who did not, or could not convince. Today our task self preservation, and that makes the task of convincing a majority that little bit easier.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Irish Environmental Network or its member groups.
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