Colm O'Regan: 'Thanks to sustainability, weeds no longer depress me as a sign of neglect'

Sustainability’s a hard sell right now. Our impulse is just to be unsustainable for a while. We want run out into the streets shouting “WE’VE ENOUGH SUSTAINING. I WANT AN OUTDOOR HANGOVER. TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME A SUBSTANDARD POLLUTING THING. I JUST WANT TO FEEL ALIVE.”

But sustainability isn’t just a joyless sequence of “stop that” and “you can’t have that” and “this is wrong”.

Well actually there is a lot of “that’s wrong”. But wrongness is very important. It’s the only thing I can be sure I’m right about: I’m probably doing the wrong thing.

Some wrongs are obvious in hindsight. For years we burned our rubbish. My father would look at the weather forecast on a Friday night, see a damp morning in store for Saturday and announce ‘a great day for burning rubbish’. I yippeed. Piling on the prize-winning letters from the Reader’s Digest, roasting the bean tins, great wodges of plastic bags. Sending it all up into the boundless forgiving sky. Catharsis.

I was fully signed up to neat ditches and perfect lawns. I attacked dandelions for years. Round-upped them as recently as a couple of years ago. Kidding myself really.

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

There’s the wrongness from prejudice and simple bad PR. Poor wasps. Hated by so many. The w*nkers of the Hymenoptera order. Just swaggering around spoiling for a fight.

But it turns out wasps are really good for nature. Well of course they are. In fact everything in nature does a job. Except most of us but we have excellent PR. Speaking of which: Honeybees. A message went around our local WhatsApp group recently about bees. I know because I sent it. The gist was: LET'S HAVE MORE BEEHIVES!

I don’t know who hive-dwelling honeybees have doing their spin for them but I suspect they drive fast cars and have a big place on Madison Avenue. Because it turns out we’re sorted for domestic honeybees. They are basically flying cows. They are not wild, they hoover up the food and crowd out the other bees. Honestly, finding that out brought me out in hives.

But that’s fine. I was wrong. The impulse is good. The execution might be wrong. In preserving honey bees it started us thinking about pollinators in general.

For years I was making a bags of the green-bin sorting. Turns out you can’t make yourself feel better by putting the soft plastic in there. It clogs the machines.

This is not some exercise in self-flagellation. Where we prostrate ourselves at the altar and rent our fast-fashion cloaks in two.

Despite the wrongness and the stop-thatness, there are moments of joy in being sustainable. Weeds no longer depress me as a sign of neglect. The buddleia growing in the wall of an abandoned factory is, okay, not native, but butterflies love it
Wasps are still a pain the hole but now they’re like an annoying co-worker who is really good at his job and you just stay out of his way. I’ve planted trees for the first time in my life which is one of the most joyful things you can do. And then some scrote breaks your heart as they snap a branch but that’s Good Pain. I get a kick out of getting things mended, of giving stuff away second hand.

A man came to collect an old chair from us the same time we were throwing out carpet and he took that as well and I was so happy. Reader, I nearly married him.

The place is shagged and there are bigger forces than we individuals who can unshag it. But one step is being ok with being wrong. And realising that nothing makes you feel more alive than doing something about it.