We can talk about climate change till the cows come home

There’s a lot in what the small Swedish girl said about school- goers walking to school rather than getting the parents to drive them there. It would save diesel, save global warming, and be good for their health.

On this theme, I noticed that some farmers at the Ploughing Championship were becoming a bit portly. It’s not port that’s doing it, I believe, but 99 icecreams and tractors.

At the tail end of the Sunday before last, my wife and I walked a north Cork route with panoramic views of green landscapes and large fields.

As the afternoon advanced, we saw herds of cattle being driven home to the milking sheds along old bohreens, sometimes as many as 200 cattle in a column. A tractor, or ATV farm buggy, followed, gently urging them along. They knew their way and seems comfortably willing.

Indeed, on such a beautiful evening, to leave their pastures with full stomachs and meander along their familiar lanes might well have been satisfying.

As we ambled, I remembered walking, as a small boy, with my uncle John as he drove the cows home on the farm outside Limerick, in Clare, where I was holidaying from my home in a big town in West Cork. When I mentioned it to my wife, she too remembered, as a young girl, walking the cattle home with her father.

Sadly absent, however, the other Sunday, was bee-hum and birdsong. We heard neither on our 90-minute walk in open country far from towns. I saw two birds, a chaffinch and a meadow pipit. I spotted a few carder bees but no humming honey bees or buzzing bumble bees.

I saw no butterflies.

Anyway, we all know that in the last 30 years the wildlife traditionally seen in the countryside has largely disappeared but it occurred to us, also, that we saw no farmers walking behind their herds and because it’s in the news, and rightly so, we thought of the girl’s resolve to walk to school to save the global warming side effects of daily travelling by car.

It is a fact that if the IFA could convince the good farmers of Ireland to walk their cattle there and back to the milking shed rather than herding them by tractor, the national reduction in carbon entering the environment daily would be significant in scale.

Farmers are, of course, busy in summer. Maybe they’re too busy to walk. But then, of course, the time involved is the same, when it comes to following the cattle. The whole operation moves at cow pace and the cows will not be rushed, their udders full of milk swilling gently as the line straggles along, each following the other’s tail.

However, then again, my farmer friends might argue that the time walking to the field to get them, and back to the yard after returning them, would be ‘wasted’.

Yes, but drive yourself to the pasture, park the vehicle and walk the cattle to the yard. Having returned them after the milking, hop back in the wagon and drive yourself home. You’ve saved juice and lost an ounce in the exercise.

I am grateful to Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl who has more overview than all those ‘fat’ cats (even if they’re thin, like our Taoiseach) who attended the UN conference and whom she roundly admonished with her words: “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Well said, girl! You hit the nail on the head!

No government is doing enough to stop the ongoing extinctions of which, before long, we ourselves may be part.

I’ve heard, for 30 years now, governments saying they will act responsibly; instead, they give us tax on plastic bags, ban plastic straws and paper cups and buy carbon credits.

It’s a disingenuous joke and it’s time we quit ourselves of these incompetents and empowered those who can get a real grip of the issue, the main issue, the accelerating extinction of this planet.

In the present regime, those who are already rich and would be richer, run the world and the governments which dare not impinge upon the rights of big business to make obscene profits no matter what the damage to all life on earth. Big business will always resist the quantum changes that must be made to stop climate breakdown.

Nobody takes the reins to halt the seemingly unstoppable march to Armageddon.

We desperately need a hero, a Colossus figure to lead us. God bless the Children’s Crusade; perhaps the children will wake us up and save us!