Environment and Community: Are We Ready to Change the Way we Live? was the title of the last in a series of ecumenical Lenten evenings held jointly by three parishes in south Dublin – The Church of the Holy Spirit, Ballyroan, The Church of the Annunciation, and Rathfarnham parish.
The first speaker was Alexander Bell, a Scottish journalist and author of Peak Water (Luath Press). “If you give someone good land and clean water, that’s everything,” he said. “Access to land and water are fundamental human rights.”
Bell said that we had not yet come to accept that water should be given that respect. “The more I look into it,” he said, “The more I believe that on a global level we have to find some way of putting value on it.”
He said the problem was that the water resources of the world were in places where people didn’t live. And that the rest of us live in places where water was running out.
Bell then “whizzed” through the history of water, including the “huge breakthrough” of early man developing irrigation. Since then a model of civilisation that was “very, very thirsty” had emerged, Dubai being an obvious modern-day example, having the highest per capita use of water in the world.
When the Colorado River didn’t flood 5000 years ago, cannibalism quickly became rife. If you couldn’t get people water, then civilisation broke down very quickly. These days the Colorado doesn’t make it to the Pacific Ocean for half the year. Other major rivers, including the Nile, the Ganges and the Yangtze, also fail to reach the sea for some months each year.
Bell said that if you didn’t have a lot of rain the only place to get water was underground. Our supermarkets were stocked with food grown in Africa – produce that was grown with water mined from aquifers (an aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock or unconsolidated materials – gravel, sand, silt, or clay – from which groundwater can be usefully extracted using a water well). Water in Kenya was now about 50 metres below ground. “We are denying people that basic right by sucking up their water and taking it for granted,” said Bell.
He predicted that within our lifetime we would see populations move in order to live near accessible water. “We are not running out of water,” Bell concluded. “Water is in places which are not accessible. And where water is, we are using it at a rate that is unsustainable.”
The second speaker, Suzie Cahn, a transition towns initiator, said that we were “coming to the limit of our resources”, in particular peak oil. She liked the wisdom of native Americans, who believed in “earth care, people care and fair share”.
Much of her 20s was spent involved in environmental protesting. She then “lost hope for a while” as she recognised the enormity of the challenge. A mid-life crisis some years later led to her seeking out people who were trying to “find a new way”. After six months working voluntarily on organic farms overseas with her husband and four children, the family returned to Ireland three years ago and set up their own organic farm – Carraig Dúlra – in Co Wicklow.
There Cahn and her husband, Mike, run courses on organic farming, sustainable and traditional skills and bee-keeping as well as a junior naturalist programme, family events, a Grow It Yourself group and a craft circle. “Our farm is a place where people can reconnect with nature,” she says. “We let people of all ages experience that connection to nature. It is partly about re-skilling; we have a firm belief that we will need those skills again.”
Cahn also helped set up 15 community gardens in Wicklow. She said she was “just at the point of getting a little tired” when she came across the transition town movement. She said transition towns were inspired by permaculture – the idea of permanent agriculture inspired by nature. “After all, nature is cleverer than us,” she said.
The transition town movement started in Kinsale when a group of people decided that they couldn’t take on the woes of the whole world, but that they could start “visioning a positive future” for their own locality. Rob Hopkins, one of the initiators and author of The Transition Towns Handbook, later moved to Totnes, Devon where the idea of a transition town was also adopted. Now there are 300 transition towns in the UK, 2000 world-wide and a rapidly increasing number in Ireland.
As a transition town initiator, Cahn sees her role as being one of a catalyst in communities, encouraging conversations about the future and posing the question, ‘How do we wean ourselves off our addictions?’
She would like to see communities produce a vision for their future. “It should read like a tourist brochure of the future we want to live in. That’s my hope,” says Cahn. See http://transitiontownsireland.ning.com/ and www.dulra.org.