Sir, – As an environmental NGO of long standing, advocating for our natural and built heritage since 1948, An Taisce welcomes the expanded Irish Times coverage of environmental issues, just in time for the pivotal COP21 climate change summit in Paris next month (Paddy Woodworth, "New environmental coverage in the Irish Times", October 31st).
However, we disagree that the focus of the “green” constituency to date has too often been too negative and too narrow. An Taisce, for example, runs many wide-ranging positive initiatives, such as the world-leading Green Schools programme, the Blue Flag, the National Spring Clean and regular nature walks which encourage citizens, particularly children, educators and communities to engage positively with nature.
Rather, the message of environmental groups has too often been persistently portrayed as negative within the mainstream media as it inconveniently challenges the “business as usual” economic orthodoxy of growth without limits on a finite planet. Our recent successful court case in quashing the continued operation of Bord na Móna’s Edenderry power plant is a useful case in point, where a story about the destruction of our natural bogs, the disastrous policy of burning peat and transitioning to a post-fossil fuel future became widely reported as a story about short-term job losses.
Lest we be in any doubt, two decades of sugar-coating environmental issues through the mantra of “sustainable development” has not slowed the unrelenting accelerating pace of anthropogenic climate change and global species extinction. Evoking a greater citizen engagement with the wonders of nature will prove a fruitless task unless we can also simultaneously politically reorient ourselves toward a positive future, a truer form of progress, which takes full account of the uneconomic costs of growth. – Yours, etc,
JOHN HARNETT,
Chairman,
An Taisce,
The Tailors’ Hall,
Back Lane,
Dublin 8.