Irish Examiner view: Maintaining our humanity in the era of smartphone wars

Emergency services personnel work to extinguish a fire following a Russian attack in Brovary, near Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday. Picture: Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP

It is often proclaimed that Vietnam was the first ‘television war’, and that the impact of scenes of carnage and mass destruction broadcast daily into the homes of peace-loving people around the world — and in particular the living rooms of American citizens worried about their boys — would render future conflicts unsustainable.

In part, this was due to an astonishing rate of growth in the ownership of television sets. The number of US households which possessed a TV at the start of the Korean War in 1950 was 9%. By the mid 1960s, it was 93%.

Military strategists and generals drew the conclusion from wall-to-wall coverage of the South East Asian conflict that it sapped morale and the public’s will to fight. This overlooked the fact that the French, who had preceded the US in the conflict in Indochina, were defeated by the forces of Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap without the burden of an all-seeing media.

Nevertheless, wartime planners determined that they would not make this mistake again, and correspondents found themselves marshalled, and often trammelled, by becoming ‘embedded’ with the fighting forces, a pattern which has largely prevailed through the Falklands War, the first and second Iraq wars, and the conflict in Afghanistan.

The conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine will come to be known as the first smartphone wars, with much of the information circulating on social media unmediated by the intervention of any trained or accredited journalist. To a large extent, this is inevitable. Foreign and Israeli journalists have been banned from independent entry into Gaza since the IDF launched its 2023 offensive following the October 7 terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas, a policy which has been validated by the supreme court in Jerusalem.

Journalists and commentators with agencies, traditional publications, and broadcast organisations are left to rely on local reporters or sources with whom they are separated by distance.

There is, as yet, no opportunity for them to fulfil the maxim of what Siegfried Sassoon regarded as the responsibility of a writer in the First World War: “That which I have seen I will declare.”

Those fountainheads of information from the warzone which can be regarded as reliable, even if received second- and third-hand, have suffered a terrifying rate of attrition, with some 200 fatalities making this the most dangerous conflict for journalists in history.

In Ukraine, restrictions on reporters are not quite so extensive because Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government is further up the moral high ground than the aggressors from the Kremlin and knows that it requires continuing support from European democracies for a war that seems to be without end, and which may become worse.

Even so, while Moscow and Kyiv batter each other’s energy and power infrastructure as winter approaches, there are around 50 zones where reporters cannot go.

The next move from Russia may provide the greatest challenge to the West since the invasion of February 2022.

If it is correct, and it usually is, that truth is the first casualty of war, we should reflect for a moment on the 90th birthday of the great chronicler of 20th- and 21st-century conflict, the photographer Don McCullin.

McCullin has captured battle scenes across the world for more than five decades.

One of his last photoshoots took him to Palmyra, the World Heritage site northeast of Damascus, much of which was destroyed during the Syrian civil war and Isis invasion.

McCullin captured some of the defining images of wartime from the 1960s onward. But he sells more copies of his images of bucolic landscapes than of destruction. He is a surviving witness to some of the world’s great cruelties. Such people are needed. We will hear more of them in the short years ahead.

Dolly's back where she belongs

Just a few days ago, we were being urged to “pray for Dolly” while artificial intelligence — proving once again what a contradictory term that is — was churning out an image of the country music star looking close to death.

In a video, Dolly Parton has declared: “I’m not dead yet”, and added: “Everybody thinks that I am sicker than I am. Do I look sick to you? I’m working hard here!"

Rumours began to circulate about the 79-year-old from Tennessee after she postponed a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas — her first for 30 years — because of “health challenges”. Then fears were fanned after her sister, Freida, asked her millions of fans to “pray for Dolly”.

It transpires that the singer, who lost her husband of 60 years in March, has been suffering problems with kidney stones — a painful condition which is becoming more and more prevalent in Ireland.

Happily, the Queen of Country, who is also noted for her relentless championing of the cause of children’s literacy, is back on her feet and probably working longer than the nine-to-five routine with which she is indelibly associated.

Time for us all to fight for nature

The world can be fairly, if crudely, divided into two types of people. Those who like to throw things away, and those who like to keep stuff, certain in their knowledge that — one day, perhaps sometime soon — it will turn out to be useful.

Champions of the first school have their own figurehead, the Japanese presenter and writer Marie Kondo, whose book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up became a cult bestseller around the globe.

Marie, 41 yesterday, starts the process of tidying up by “quickly and completely” discarding whatever doesn’t spark joy. There can be a near religious fervour because her method is rooted in Shinto, a faith with around 100m followers.

Then there are those who might argue it is not always obvious when something will “spark joy”. It has to be preserved, perhaps to gestate, and provide a hedge against the future. Another name for people like this might be hoarders. A suitable adjective could be “indecisive”.

At first sight, a collection of dusty handwritten inventories covering the 47 years from 1884 to 1931 might justify a richly deserved journey to the bin. “You haven’t looked at these for nearly a century”, might run the argument, “time to get rid”.

Happily, those of us who believe in preservation, the natural archivists, librarians, and collectors of this world, can point to an example in our favour. While workers at Switzerland’s agricultural research institute in Bern were preparing their buildings for a major, no doubt Kondo-style, renovation, they stumbled across 19th-century lists by two botanists, Friedrich Stebler and Carl Schröter, who were investigating the productivity of different meadow types.

They were almost thrown away. “Fortunately, a colleague there realised that they do not belong in the wastepaper basket, but that this is a treasure for research,” says Jürgen Dengler.

Their escape from destruction has enabled a unique time-lapse study of biodiversity. For two years, researchers have criss-crossed the cantons carrying a red frame measuring 30cm x 30cm. At 277 different sites, they have placed the frame in the grass, as their predecessors did more than 100 years ago, and counted every single plant species within it. The result is a snapshot of the changes that have been wrought since farming was transformed by the mass use of fertiliser and machinery.

“The loss of biodiversity since then was massive,” says Professor Dengler. The research, published in Global Change Biology, found that across Switzerland, the average number of plant species on agricultural grassland has fallen by 26% over the last century. Overall, 117 species were found to be less common than in the original count, and just six were found more often. Land use, far more than climate change, was the main driver.

Coinciding with these results, a major conference opened yesterday in Abu Dhabi with a stark warning that nearly two thirds of all bird species are in decline globally, much of it caused by deforestation.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature said this percentage had increased from 44% in just nine years. As one leading expert put it: “The fates of birds and trees are intertwined: Trees depend on birds for regeneration and birds depend on trees for survival.” The keynote opening address was called Nature is everyone’s business: Mobilising Capital for Biodiversity and Resilience. But it is not just money which must be mobilised. Human spirit and determination must be rallied also.

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