The Living and the Dead: Tales of Loss and Rebirth from Irish Nature
The enormity of the climate and ecological crisis can lead to a state of bewilderment. Why is our society not mobilising with greater urgency to stave off what is undoubtedly the greatest existential crisis to face humanity? Why is Ireland, a small, wealthy country with a healthy democracy, struggling so badly to deal with its environmental problems?
As someone who has worked in this field for many years I have grappled with these questions, lurching wildly from sober analysis one day to pulling my hair out in desperation the next. I'm not the only one it seems; a survey of Irish people published this year as part of the Climate Conversations poll, found that "frustration was the main feeling reported".
Someone else who will have sympathy with this state of mind is John Gibbons, a journalist and Kilkenny native who has become one of Ireland's leading environmental communicators. Those familiar with his writings and media appearances will know he is scarcely a dispassionate reporter of facts and events, but someone who has displayed a valiant eagerness to grab a spoon when faced with a pot in desperate need of stirring. Gibbons has now penned an explosive book, The Lie of the Land, which is subtitled A Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis, but it is much more than that.
The Lie of the Land takes us to an inflection point in the climate crisis, to 2007, when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its fourth assessment report, changed its tone from one of halfhearted concern to unequivocal urgency in the face of rising global temperatures and ballooning rates of greenhouse gas emissions.
It's a period that coincided with the economic crash in Ireland and the beginning of what Gibbons describes as a "lost decade" for the country, where meaningful changes could have seen an orderly transition to a healthier, low-carbon and nature-rich society while protecting us from the harms caused by a collapsing climate system.
Instead, what we got was a co-ordinated, well-funded and politically backed programme of denialism, misinformation and brazen greenwashing, setting the public interest to one side in the pursuit of profits and self-interest. Gibbons is naming names.
There are the car-park owners and business interest groups that tried (and thankfully failed) to prevent small changes to traffic flow in Dublin in order to reduce congestion. There are the fossil-fuel interests that offer fig leaves of sustainability with "biofuel-ready" fossil-gas burners in their gasping attempts to maintain business as usual. There are the airline operators that spin us yarns about "efficient" jet fuel and aircraft while boosting plans for massive expansion of air traffic and all the emissions that will bring.
Then there's the failure of the media to provide consistent and accurate reporting, mostly through ignoring or underplaying the issues, but also for platforming outright denialists, retired guns-for-hire and industry-backed media performers. In 2020, climate accounted for less than 1 per cent of media coverage. It is small wonder that Ireland's role in the climate and biodiversity crisis is sometimes poorly understood by the public.
The Lie of the Land saves its big guns for agriculture and the welding of publicly funded State agencies to the commercial interests of the livestock industry and its broad base of political cheerleaders. And rightly so: agriculture is the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the State, the number one source of pollution in our polluted waterways and the number one driver of biodiversity loss on land and in freshwater.
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Livestock interests have enjoyed disproportionate representation on the boards of Teagasc and An Bord Bia; even today neither has representation from the environmental sector. The chief of Bord Bia boasted that the Food Wise 2025 agri-expansion plan that would see pollution spiral out of control after the lifting of dairy quotas in 2015 was "industry-owned". Gibbons chronicles how Fine Gael TD Simon Coveney went from champion of stricter environmental targets while in opposition to "an aggressive and proactive advocate" for agricultural intensification (in Coveney's own words) and deriding efforts from the European Commission to reduce emissions as making "no sense to me on any level".
At this critical time in Ireland's economic and environmental trajectory, Coveney could have set a course of agricultural development alongside stringent environmental controls. Instead, he will be remembered for his assertion that "I will not allow a situation where the potential for growth and expansion in agri-food will be compromised by the setting of emissions limits."
Gibbons details what he describes at the "ultra-cosy relationship between farm leaders and the State" and is particularly scathing of their role in this crisis. He charts the vitriol heaped upon An Taisce, a charity, in challenging a plan by Glanbia, a dairy processor, and Dutch cheesemaker Royal A-ware for a giant cheese factory in Co Kilkenny in 2022 on the grounds that it was incompatible with legally-binding climate and environmental goals.
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Jackie Cahill, then a Fianna Fáil TD who chaired the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine (and former president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association), denounced the move as "a revolting act of treason". An Taisce lost their case and there was a clamour from their opponents for the defunding of the NGO sector (amounting to €1.8 million in 2021, a third of the annual remuneration of Glanbia's managing director in 2023, notes Gibbons).
The Lie of the Land is much more than a roasting of those who have sought to deny or delay action on climate and the environment, though it is that. Gibbons points out many successes, such as the halving of emissions from individual homes between 2005 and 2022 and the impressive ramping up of electricity generation from onshore wind and solar. He nods to the thousands of homeowners who have invested in solar panels and heat pumps, the welcome improvement in media coverage as well as those who have largely stood their ground in defending the science, such as the State's Environmental Protection Agency, often in the face of great political and industry pressure.
Nor is Gibbons short on solutions; he wants to see air travel properly taxed (something that might end the absurd situation that makes a train between Kerry and Dublin more expensive than flying) as well as, more controversially, rationing plane travel. He wants a department of food security to shift toward plant-based food production as well as massive investment in clean energy, public transport and home retrofits.
Gibbons gives us an anecdote in The Lie of the Land about how in 2008 his wife made him a birthday gift of a framed letter to The Irish Times from Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary describing him as an "eco loonie" which, although lighthearted, gives an insight into how the very many people who have sounded the climate alarm across the world in recent decades have been dismissed and maligned. Elsewhere, Gibbons admits that the journey "bruises you deeply".
The Lie of the Land is not like other books on this topic. There is no hopeful ending, only a range of outcomes that go from bad to worse. For all that, Gibbons's book is personal, engaging and, if short on hope, it goes all in on urgency.
For anyone in any doubt about what is at stake, Positive Tipping Points: How to Fix the Climate Crisis by Tim Lenton lays out the latest science in all its terrifying detail.
The tipping points of the title point to a little-appreciated characteristic of environmental change which is that dramatic shifts are not always linear but can quickly jolt from one set of conditions to another. Lenton is a scientist at the University of Exeter and builds a solid argument using the carefully calibrated language of his profession.
He describes a tipping point as rather like leaning back on your chair; lean back a little and when you let go you will return to an upright position, lean back too much and you will end up sprawled on the floor. Returning to where you were before is hard. Whether a return is even possible will depend on the condition of you and the chair. The analogy is not hard to follow.
As Earth has warmed from the burning of fossil fuels combined with the destruction of ecosystems, we have entered a phase with a growing number of potential tipping points that threaten to leave humanity sprawling on its back. These include the melting of ice sheets, glaciers and permafrost, dieback of Boreal and Amazon forests and the death of coral reefs. Any of these would have catastrophic consequences but the big one is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc), which would turn off the conveyor of warm air to northern Europe, plunging us into a climate more like northern Canada. Any could happen quickly and would be irreversible.
Lenton notes, however, that tipping points can also apply to our societies and he spends considerable time picking through the drivers of adoption of new technologies, for instance electric cars in Norway (now far outnumbering those run on petrol or diesel); the adoption of renewables in Denmark (now half of their electricity generation); and the dramatic collapse in price of solar panels, once dismissed by economists and energy analysts as something we'd be waiting much longer to see. Along with a hoped-for tipping point in hydrogen-based fuels to power steel making, shipping and aviation, this could see a reduction by three-quarters of all greenhouse gas emissions.
These are hard but harder again is the tipping point that will see a shift to a plant-based diet, something Lenton says is "key to stopping nature loss and eliminating the final quarter of greenhouse gases".
What is notable from Lenton's analysis is the critical role played by governments in developing policies that steer us towards these positive tipping points, as opposed to leaving it purely in the hands of market forces. In the EU, for instance, livestock gets four times the subsidy of plant products.
The book has less to say on how to reach these vital political tipping points but will leave the reader at least assured that a pathway out of the environmental crisis exists. Whether we take it remains to be seen.