What will it take to make us act? - Climate alarm calls all around us

LATE last week the draft regulations controlling salmon angling were published. 

It is proposed that the Slaney will be closed for salmon angling in 2017 because stocks have hit an unsustainably low ebb. Tragically, this is the culmination of decades of official and private neglect. Though there are many reasons for this sorry conclusion, every last one of them man-made, this moratorium is as much another canary-in-the-mine alarm call — how many do we need? — as it is anything to do with salmon fishing on the Slaney.

Just last week the EPA published another instalment in this sorry saga when it warned that the great majority of rivers are badly polluted — primarily by agriculture or local authorities. Whether we like it or not these tales of destruction go far beyond anything to do with the number of fish in our rivers, especially on a day when the World Meteorological Organisation warned that 2016 is set to be the warmest on record. Confirming that we’re pretty close to lemmings jumping off a cliff, the organisation points out that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have occurred in the 21st century.

But it need not be this way, it need not be so very dispiriting. Research published by Oceana yesterday suggested that many EU fish catches could more than treble if fish stocks were used in a managed, sustainable way. Is the gene that got us to the top of the evolutionary tree so very powerful, so unadaptable, that it will drive us to our own destruction?