When the Covid-19 pandemic caused oil stocks to plummet, the US President was accused of facilitating “corporate socialism” by proposing to bailout the fossil fuel industry at a cost of $20 billion. However, this was not an isolated incident, brought about in exceptional times. The ailing fossil fuel industry has long relied on public… Read more »
Introduction Over the past decade, climate breakdown has come to be recognised as the greatest threat to human rights. Climate change threatens the right to life, health, food, water, property, education, work, culture, adequate standard of living, means of subsistence, adequate/secure housing, self-determination and a healthy environment. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and… Read more »
Introduction In May 2015 Pope Francis published Laudato Si’, Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home. This work of two-hundred pages addresses many aspects of the complex challenge presented by the ecological crisis. Francis proposes that we adopt a personal and cultural attitude of “integral ecology” recognising that “everything is interconnected.” The issues… Read more »
In May 2015 Pope Francis published Laudato Si’, his Encyclical Letter on Caring for our Common Home. Five years on, his appeal to every person on this planet remains as relevant. “The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and… Read more »
As we go to press with this issue of Working Notes, we at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice are keenly aware of how the theme of “Integral Ecology” might appear distant from the pressing concerns of the pandemic. But appearances can deceive. While Pope Francis does not mention the risk of novel… Read more »
Jubilee Caribbean (JCaribbean) is a newly formed non-governmental organisation, born out of the bigger Jubilee Campaigns from the turn of the millennium – Drop the Debt, Jubilee 2000 and Jubilee Debt Campaign – based in Grenada, but hoping to reach out to the wider English-speaking Caribbean islands. Due to our debt situation here, in the… Read more »
Speeding Towards a New City There’s an old quip attributed to Henry Ford that no one was looking for the car to be invented; they just wanted faster horses. Even that is not true. What city-dwellers in the late 1800s had a problem with was manure. One early urban planner predicted that the biological waste… Read more »
Sadhbh O’Neill WHEN DOES A HARM BECOME A CRIME? Social media users will no doubt be familiar with the increasingly familiar campaigns by cyclists in Dublin to highlight illegal parking on cycle-lanes or dangerous driving. Despite being chided by the Garda traffic bureau, the campaigners share videos and photographs that highlight non-compliance with traffic regulations… Read more »
Thomas L. Muinzer INTRODUCTION Ireland stands at an important historical moment. We live in an era where the world is endeavouring at last to get to grips with what philosopher Noam Chomsky, recently deceased physicist Stephen Hawking, and many others have described as one of the greatest problems facing humanity, that is, anthropogenic (human driven)… Read more »
Sadhbh O’Neill Sadhbh O’Neill is a PhD candidate and Government of Ireland Scholar based at the School of Politics and International Relations, UCD. Introduction Climate policy falls into that strange category of things government does not want to do, but must do. There are no (or few) votes in it. Doing it properly entails more… Read more »
Catherine Devitt Introduction The September 2015 issue of Working Notes had as its main theme, ‘Caring for our Common Home’,1 exploring aspects of our relationship with the natural environment, while providing a strong moral argument for taking urgent action in response to threats to our environment, including those arising from climate change. Simply put, climate… Read more »
Catherine Devitt Introduction It’s going to impact the rest of my life; the kinds of decisions I can make, the kind of world can live in. It’s going to augment other social problems which we already have. Our lives are not going to look like our parents’ lives, because of climate change.1 The young adults… Read more »
Introduction The Report, Justice in the Global Economy, highlights the inter-relationship between environmental justice and economic justice. It points out that ‘the rate of extraction of natural resources cannot be sustained’ and warns that if consumption continues at the current pace ‘we face severe menaces to both ecological stability and human well-being’. It notes also… Read more »
Some of the younger activists at a recent United Nations Climate Conference sported tee shirts which read: ‘You have been negotiating about climate change since before I was born!’. Indeed, the seemingly intractable negotiations which began with the First Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Berlin in 1995 have been in essence a spectacular failure.
It is clear that in Laudato si’ Pope Francis has put forward a quite detailed account of what is required at the economic and political levels if there is to be an adequate response to the ecological problems of our world. His encyclical poses very serious challenges not only to governments but also to each one of us in our daily lives.
Natural resources – water, energy and fertile soil – are fundamental to our life on earth. Many environmentalists – for example, Tim Jackson1 – believe that at the heart of the environmental crisis we are experiencing, and which is manifesting itself in so many ways, lies over-consumption of the earth’s resources.
In this issue, we publish articles outlining the ecology work of a further six groups. The first article describes the work of the Presentation Sisters in Ireland. Following this, there are articles on four church communities (Carrigaline Union, Church of Ireland; Clonakilty Methodist Church; Fitzroy Presbyterian Church; Rathfarnham Quaker Meeting) which have received an ‘Eco-Congregation Ireland Award’, and on a fifth (Balally Catholic Parish) which is shortly to receive an Award.
Throughout Ireland, many individuals, families, schools, businesses, and voluntary groups are endeavouring to take action to protect and enhance the natural environment. In this section, initiatives by four Church groups are described.
Water is vital to all of life. All living creatures, including humans, need enough water, of sufficient quality, to survive and thrive. We in Ireland are fortunate: most of the time, our citizens have access to a clean, healthy, supply of water for drinking and sanitation. Around 768 million people, one tenth of the world’s population, do not have this.
Many Irish people will be familiar with the call of the Curlew, a wading bird that breeds in rushy pastures and upland bogs through the summer months. For generations, it has been a cherished and familiar bird of Ireland’s farmed and coastal landscapes. In 1990, Ireland still had a sizeable population of Curlew, at around 5,000 breeding pairs. Now, however, it is estimated that there may be fewer than 200 pairs left. Such has been the decline of the Curlew that its extinction as a breeding bird in Ireland now seems certain unless urgent action is taken. It has become one of two bird species nesting in Ireland that are globally threatened (the other is the Corncrake).
The outline of the Government’s proposed climate legislation (Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Bill 2013: Draft Heads) published in February 2013, was the subject of three full days of hearings by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment in July 2013.1 The Committee’s report to the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Phil Hogan TD, is due this autumn and the Government has promised to introduce its proposed legislation in the Dáil before the end of 2013.
The Nation State and Individual Self-interest A recent text dealing with the issue of climate politics coined the term ‘cancer of Westphalia’ to describe the current ailment of the international logjam in addressing what has been described as the greatest problem facing humanity in the twenty-first century.1 It is a rather strange evocation of the… Read more »
If the Dáil we elect at the forthcoming General Election lasts a full term, it will oversee the whole five-year period of Ireland’s commitment under the Kyoto Protocol (2008–2012). It will also cover the period during which the international negotiations to agree new and more challenging commitments to reduce our climate-changing pollution will be conducted.
Working Notes is a journal published by the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. The journal focuses on social, economic and theological analysis of Irish society. It has been produced since 1987.
