The environment - Pious talk at odds with behaviour

IT IS becoming evermore difficult to reconcile the great prominence and lip service given to environmental matters — especially all of the worrying predictions surrounding global warming, peak oil and the diminishing quality of our water supplies — and the reality of our day-to-day lives.

Yesterday former US vice-president Al Gore was named as the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for raising our awareness through his polemical film An Inconvenient Truth.

This disturbing film presents real challenges for all of us but how many of us have even considered enduring the mildest discomfort to reduce our impact on the environment?

Gore’s film was the subject of a British High Court ruling this week which identified nine scientific errors in it. The presiding judge said it should not be shown to schoolchildren without a health warning. Despite this caveat it is an exemplary reinforcement of a simple message: we are utterly dependent on a clean and sustainable environment and we are not facing up to this responsibility.

No matter what charges of hypocrisy and pomposity are being levelled at private-jet traveller Gore, it is certain that had he won the Battle of the Hanging Chads, in Florida in 2000, the incumbent at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would not have made An Inconvenient Truth. That, at least, is one reason to be grateful for the Bush presidency.

Earlier this week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warned that 57% of our groundwater contained either human or animal waste and that a third of the rivers we depend on for drinking water are polluted. The EPA also warned that we will not reach EU water quality standards by the agreed date of 2015 unless we move more quickly to confront the situation.

Local authorities’ sewage discharges, slurry and fertiliser run-offs from farms were identified as the main threats to the water supplies used by one-in-five houses in Ireland.

Nowhere is this saga of terrible neglect and indifference seen more poignantly than in the sorry story of Lough Corrib. In any other country it would be considered a national treasure and treated as such. The fact that the once-great limestone lake barely makes the top 10 list for phosphate or nitrate pollution must make you wonder what the others are like.

On the same day, Bord Fáilte warned that there is a growing gap between the image of Ireland presented to tourists and the reality they discover on arrival. The air-brushed images of a verdant and beautiful countryside are evermore difficult to equate with the widespread illegal dumping along the roads surrounding our towns and cities. The endless ribbon development and tremendous number of one-off houses built in virtually every second field — each with its own cesspit — present an added threat to our already jeopardised water supplies.

Add to this disconcerting vista the image of our Environment Minister John Gormley doing cartwheels to justify his current positions, which are so at variance with those the Greens advocated before they decided to support Fianna Fáil in coalition, and you have an entirely disheartening prospect.

It can no longer be that we don’t understand the consequences of our continued abuse of the environment. Can it be that the gene that has driven us to the top of the evolutionary tree is also so uncompromising that it will not allow us to modify our behaviour now that we have become too successful at exploiting nature? And that therein lies the genesis of our own destruction?