Local coalitions are forming in an effort to combat climate problems and the inevitable rise in food prices, but others consider them pointless, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
On a burning hot afternoon at the start of May, after a month in which west Cork's familiar green fields turned brown and parched with dusty soil, Jennifer Sleeman remarks: "A lot of people are beginning to say it: this is not right." Sleeman heads the environmental group Sustainable Clonakilty, one of a growing number of town-based initiatives seeking local answers to global climate problems.
At the end of April the Clonakilty group, founded at the end of last year, visited nearby Bandon, talking at a meeting organised by Dr Philip Michael, chair and co-founder of the Irish Doctors' Environmental Association, to set up a Bandon sustainability group.
Along the coast in Kinsale, the issue of a local response to climate change has gone yet farther with the adoption of a Transition Towns charter. Transition Towns is an international movement, a rallying cry for local authorities to convert from oil-based energy to alternatives.
The existence of three new environmental groups in such a small radius is not yet evidence of a nationwide pattern (though around Newbridge in Co Kildare, and in Cos Monaghan and Tipperary, the local lobby has also stirred) but it is becoming clear, especially with the involvement of the medical profession, that environmental concerns are stimulating action among people for whom activism would previously have been anathema.
FOOD IS CENTRALto local activism. "People don't yet realise how climate change and rising oil prices are going to affect our food," says Davie Philip of Cultivate, the Dublin-based environmental resource group, who points out that the energy embodied in food enters the equation at numerous points including: the production of farm machinery; food production; herbicides and pesticides derived from petrochemicals; packaging and transportation; and not forgetting our own role in driving to the supermarket and cooking.
The conclusion of food activists, in short, is that prices are going to rise inexorably and supply is going to be constrained by rising transport costs and climate change. Hence, Kinsale town council is already funding local community gardens.
In contrast, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published its Third Assessment Review of Climate Change in 2001, concluded that the current low-cost food regime we enjoy here in the EU would be stable over the next 25 years.
The same organisation, however, recently published its Fourth Assessment Review, in which, for the first time, it endorsed the idea that climate change is "unequivocal".
WHILE THE IPCC'Snew-found certainty made headlines, the detail in the report, published last month and largely overlooked in the international press, harbours the most worrying scientific conclusions.
The IPCC states that in Europe: "The great majority of organisms and ecosystems will have difficulties adapting to climate change." A sobering thought.
For Ireland, with its extensive coastline, the implications are "increased risk of inland flash floods, and more frequent coastal flooding and increased erosion (due to storminess and sea-level rise)" as well as a need to adapt to reduced fertility in the regions that supply us with food.
In Clonakilty, joint organiser Alison Wickham emphasises the very personal nature of climate change reversal. "We're not trying to say what other people should do about it. It's not what Government should do or farmers should do. Our message is what I can do. Even if it is one less trip to the supermarket, or gardening. People are waking up to what they are capable of."
Local sustainability dovetails naturally with the recent evolution of farmers' markets and Slow Food creating a sense that here is a natural coalition and a national movement, but there are dissenting voices. Graham Strouts, who lectures around the country on food sustainability, believes local action is promising but the scale is negligible.
"There has to be significant change soon, but local groups aren't necessarily doing more than a little gardening and installing a few solar panels," says Strouts. "What you need in a place such as Clonakilty is for 15-20 farmers to convert to market gardening."
Whatever local activists think or want, though, market forces are actually creating the opposite effect. The recently formed Horticulture Network Ireland (HNI) is on a mission to move Irish producers out of food, quoting high labour and energy costs as barriers to viable production.
"Our strategy is to encourage Irish food producers into the amenity end of the business, where they are higher values," says Aidan Campion of HNI, giving as examples decking and garden furniture. Will there be less Irish-produced food in future? "Absolutely," he says.
Though the coalescence of food consumer groups and grow-your-own activists has an undeniable charm, it seems that as awareness grows of the need to produce more food locally, our capacity to do so is actually in decline.
- The IPCC's report,Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability , is available at http://www.ipcc-wg2.org/
- Michael Viney is on leave