‘Saving our Planet’ was the title of a recent project for secondary schools sponsored by Three Rock Churches’ Environment Group, an off-shoot of Eco Congregation Ireland in South Dublin.
An evening event was held on 25th April in Dundrum Methodist Church to thank all the entrants and to give their families and friends an opportunity to hear the winning essays.
Irish Times journalist Sylvia Thompson spoke of the high level of interest, commitment and enthusiasm displayed by the students who took part and how she had had such a difficult time deciding between two very different works. In the end she had been forced to award a joint first prize to Sarah Kelly of Our Lady’s Grove, Goatstown, for her futuristic short story* and Nathan Walshe and Glenn Byrne of Wesley College Dublin for their witty, informative and “listener-friendly” essay.**The winners read their work to a most receptive audience and were then awarded vouchers, courtesy of Dundrum Town Centre, Movies @ Dundrum and a local benefactor. Runners-up, a group of pupils from St Columba’s College, were all set to show their powerpoint presentation, had they been winners. The participating schools were also each given a small cheque for environmental resources.
The event was introduced by Owen Lemass, chair of TRCEG, and was also addressed by Dean Eaton, Environment Officer for Dun Laoghaoire-Rathdown County Council, who congratulated all participants for their commitment and interest and reminded all present of the support the council could offer in environmental awareness and practice.
*Sarah Kelly’s short story, Saving Our Planet, which is set in the year 2112, begins as follows:
“Close the door! Close the door!” I hear the desperate shouts of a neighbour, the bang of the overhead door, and we are all plunged into darkness. All thirty of us are silent, we know exactly what’s to come. But even still we shudder as the first gust from the hurricane batters our sanctuary.
When the winds stop, with a weary sigh, we exit our hut of darkness. When my eyes adjust to the light, I look around at the wasteland that used to be my home. Rubble and rocks cover the vibrant green grass. Abandoned cars lie in trees and uprooted trees lie in cars. Our world has been turned upside down. Books lie forgotten on the side of the road. No readers anymore. Beside them, deflated footballs and tennis rackets.
Election posters from years ago still flutter, like butterflies in the air. They serve as a constant reminder of the past. The things that were so important to us. Those same things are now meaningless.
There are people all around me, emerging from their hurricane shelters. They help each other to their feet, everyone looks after each other nowadays. The human race is pulling together. As the planet dies, we work as one. But is it too late? As we finally stop wars and fighting amongst each other, we will be destroyed by a greater force.
Strange as it may seem, the scenes around are beautiful. It’s nice to see everyone working together. Almost everything man-made is destroyed, civilisations have fallen. It’s like we have travelled back through time. This is what we had at the start. It’s nice, but we all know it’s the calm before the storm.”
**The opening paragraphs of Nathan Walshe and Glenn Byrne’s essay, “How To Save The Planet – A Guide Book” are:
“Treat the earth well; we have not inherited it from our parents, but borrowed it from our children.”
These are the words of an ancient Kenyan proverb, which is as true today as it was all those years ago. We have known this simple truth for centuries, and yet sometimes it can seem as though we take the planet for granted. Whether it be the environment, the people or the ecology, we are bleeding society dry with our continued consumerism and self-centered attitude. The earth, though it may seem large, reassuring and unbreakable, is more like a fragile china vase, and frankly, we humans are like a bull in a china shop.
In this essay we intend to explore the ways in which we are destroying our planet, and how it has got to this stage. We will then consider ways to combat these issues. We hope to underline the importance of caring for our planet, and explore new, different ways of doing so. We know that there is no point crying over spilt milk, we don’t want to wallow in the past and apportion blame; we want to look at ways to engineer effective change, and to ensure its effectiveness moving into the future.
We feel it is important to look at the issue on a global scale. We know we can use organizations like the United Nations and other international bodies to initiate and enforce change at a global level, change that will make a difference. We feel sure that the days of half-hearted efforts made only as a political ploy must be over, and that we now need new, innovative ways to tackle issues like climate change, poaching, poverty, and all of the things that affect our planet at an environmental, ecological, and social level.
Background
The earth has been around for 4’600’000’000 years. It’s survived numerous ice-ages, more asteroid impacts than you’ve had hot dinners, and until about 200 years ago, it was doing quite nicely, thank you very much. Then we had a little blip called the industrial revolution, and everything started going downhill. One of the things humanity seems to have become completely adept at in recent years (that is, the last two centuries) is ignorance and destruction. We have found new ways to farm, to forage, to mine, to live, to fight, and to do all manner of things we could never have done before, and for what? A brief spell of comfort and ease for the few, a lifetime of extreme poverty for many, and a mindless and inexcusable cycle of destruction for the planet we so proudly call home.
It all began around the latter half of the eighteenth century. People began experimenting with steam. This was perfectly fine; the machinery they created made life an awful lot easier. They were also using water as a source, which is not at all harmful. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, things had gone from good, to foreboding, to bad, to worse, and were approaching much much worse with alarming speed. Factories and locomotives were using coal at horrifying quantities, belching out harmful gasses into the atmosphere. This was the beginning of one of the major problems of our time, global warming. The greenhouse gas effect began with the smoke being emitted from factories around this time. Around 1905, the world’s annual output of coal was approaching 924’939’969 tons per year, so we can only imagine how many harmful gasses this was putting into our atmosphere.
We have now begun to use coal a lot less, but it’s almost as though we humans enjoy destroying our planet, as we haven’t stopped with the gasses. We just burn rarer, more valuable stuff. Although oil has been used for centuries, the first commercial oil drills cropped up around the mid nineteenth century, and the industry boomed in the twentieth century. Since then, oil has become the most traded commodity in the world, and our whole life style is now based around oil. Whether it be the car you drove to work this morning, the clothes you’re (hopefully) wearing right now, or the chair you’re sitting in, oil shapes our lives, and guess what? We’re running out.
But even that doesn’t seem to stop us Humans (if nothing else we must be commended for our tenacity), we’re still going! We still pump harmful gas into the atmosphere and then sit back and watch as it destroys our ocean habitats and floods our low-lying countries, kills of our animals and gives us all skin cancer.
As for the social aspect, well, it’s frankly shameful. The inequality between north and south is just appalling. While we in the affluent west shamelessly throw away a banana because it’s gotten a little bruised, someone in Africa is crawling in a rubbish dump to find one. Colonization, arbitrary division of land, war, racial segregation and discrimination, ethnic cleansing, corrupt governments, illegal arms trading, and many more factors have contributed to the appalling humanitarian situation we face today, so it seems if we can’t actually destroy the planet itself, we are pretty darned determined to destroy the people on it.
Organisations like the United Nations have done a lot to change this area, and we are beginning to see that while destroying the planet we live on may seem like a fun idea, destroying the people on it as well, is really not an option. We are beginning to pull out of the downward spiral we have been in for the past few centuries when it comes to the humanitarian crisis, and it seems that what President John F Kennedy said, seems finally to be sinking in, “We prefer world law, in the age of self-determination, to world war in the age of mass extermination.”
With this issue, it’s not enough to have a recycling bin and to look like we’re doing something by scowling at the person ahead of you who just dropped a crisp packet on the ground and then walking on past anyway. We need effective change, if there’s anything the last few decades have taught us, it’s that empty words are just that, empty, we need to find new, more effective ways than the ones we’ve used (or perhaps more correctly failed to use) in the past.”