New documentary highlights plight of Lee and dwindling salmon stocks 

Cork Film Festival will show a new documentary next Sunday that makes an impassioned plea for a species’ survival and a river’s future, Jack Power reports

THE past can be such a beguiling, seductive place because we can be selective about what we remember. Or, if we were more honest, we can imagine things as we wish they might have been. We can cherry pick, using those helpful, non-judgemental rose-tinted glasses, imagining that the sun shone more brightly and more often; that the milk was creamier; that the summer mackerel were more abundant and far bigger and that Ringey was truly The Greatest. We might even convince ourselves that we lived, if not in peace, then in something closer to harmony with the natural world around us than we do today.

Even if that was the case the almost incomprehensible explosion in human population, needs and expectations means our relationship with the natural world is today at best fractious, more often than not it is dysfunctional, culminating in the catastrophe promised by climate change. The human population graph runs parallel to the graph showing the relentless, often irreversible, destruction of species and habitat. This break-up is described in startling terms by the provocative Canadian author Naomi Klein (www.naomiklein.org) in her current book This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, and even if you find her arguments, or the way she frames this survival issue, hard to accept the core of her thesis seems incontrovertible.