June on the River Suir

Many thanks to George Willoughby for this beautiful video
http://www.thurles.info/2010/06/20/river-suir-water-lilies-and-mute-swans/

June On The River Suir, Thurles, Co Tipperary, Ireland. from George Willoughby on Vimeo.

Tigers and Whales

It is hard to find words to describe the anger felt when reading about the continued slaughter of two of the most iconic species on the planet. There are apparently only about 1400 wild tigers left in India today. Between 1800 and 1950 something like 160,000 were shot by virile, trophy hunting big game hunters, with numbers reduced to around 40,000 by 1900, and by 1972 down to just 1,800. Hunting, felling of forest habitat for timber and encroachment of ever growing human populations into precious wild areas, brought this beautiful animal to extinction in some parts of India, as well as in Java and Sumatra.



The Indian government in the 1980’s stopped the export of tiger skins, but they still fetch €28,000 on the Tibetan black market, and the demand for tiger body parts for traditional Chinese medicine and aphrodisiacs has been met by the rise of poaching. To preserve the skin, trapped tigers were sometimes killed by the insertion of a red hot poker into the anus. Protection boosted numbers to about 4,000, but standards slipped, more habitat was lost and although tiger tourism boosted income for conservation, it created more problems with tourist vehicles disorienting and killing animals, and continued growth of human habitation to support the tourist trade. Two Indian tiger sanctuaries now have no tigers. At least 12 have been killed by poachers this year already. As numbers fall, so it gets harder to avoid in-breeding and genetic decline.



Now the Sunday Times has exposed the extent of whale hunting over the last few years, at a time when there was meant to be a moratorium. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered, and it seems as if the ban on hunting will be lifted, with certain wealthy whaling countries using dubious financial inducements (including offers to build valuable infrastructure) in third world countries to buy their vote to overturn the embargo.



Man claims to be rational, but it beats me how any sane person can justify or tolerate this sort of extermination of our fellow creatures. Of course species die out, but by natural processes over tens of thousands of years, not by the deliberate action of a deluded self-important branch of the great ape family who has decided over the course of a mere 5,000 years and 200 generations that we humans are more important than anything else. What we are dealing with is not human rationality, but human mass hysteria, and human alienation from the natural world which produced and nurtured our species. We no longer seem to know who or what we are.



There is an urgent need for us to think. Ideas matter. Human rationality requires thought, reflection and silence. Education needs to move on from teaching children how to find an appropriate role in human society, and to start to focus instead on understanding the place and nature of human society within the framework of the natural world.

Thank You!

Many thanks to the good citizens of Thurles who gave so generously to the Cabragh Wetlands Church Gate Collection at the end of May. The total raised was beyond our expectations, and remarkable given the current economic climate when so many of us are having to tighten our financial drawstrings. We take it to mean that the local community supports and appreciates what we are trying to do at Cabragh, and that environmental issues are steadily becoming more important in public debate and education.



This is just as well, because climate change science has taken a bit of a battering in the press in recent months. We are indebted to Nenagh-based Father Sean McDonagh, a prolific writer on environmental issues, for a recent e-mail containing his latest thoughts on the issue. He points out that in the last year global temperature has been the warmest on record, despite the obvious contradiction that China, Europe and North America had a very cold winter in 2009-2010 (our coldest in 47 years). He cites NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen (mentor of Al Gore), who reports that data from 6,300 monitoring stations around the world show that the mean surface temperature was 0.65 degrees Celsius warmer in the year April 2009-April 2010 than the period 1951 to 1980.



Those childishly petulant private e-mails at the University of East Anglia damaged the climate change cause, as did overly pessimistic UN reports that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by the middle of this century. But the glaciers are still melting away; if they survive a century longer than predicted, say to 2165, the message is still the same. The planet is warming; the science is overwhelming. Predictions about the precise rate of change will always be predictions, and thus subject to doubt and imprecision. As a result of a well-organized campaign by climate change sceptics, a growing number of people think that global warming is not happening. Remember that climate and weather are not the same thing. Weather is what hits us locally day after day, with wide ranging temperatures and varied rainfall. Climate is the long-term global trend, which is demonstrably and inexorably getting hotter.



The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association reports that the first four months of 2010 were the hottest ever recorded, with record temperatures in North Africa, Canada and South Asia. In India and Pakistan temperatures have reached 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit). On June 1st 2010 the mercury hit 53.7 Celsius in the Indus valley, the fourth highest ever recorded on Earth. In Baghdad there have been several days of over 50 degrees Celsius. People in northern India are dying from heat-related illnesses. Lake Tanganyika is at its hottest for 1500 years, threatening both fish stocks and the fishing industry on which many depend. You will not find many doubters about climate change in these parts of the world, nor in the Pacific Ocean, where they are watching rising levels remorselessly engulf their homes, and the evacuation of the Carteret Islands continues as the land is submerged.



Average ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean are at their highest since records began in 1880 and scientists predict a very active hurricane season with 8 to 14 expected, half “major storms”. We may yet see that Gulf oil landing on Irish coasts as it is washed into the Atlantic tidal streams. Raw oil pollution seems an apt punishment for a problem largely caused by our fossil fuel usage. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.



As Monday 21st of June will be the longest day of the year, there will be a celebration of the Summer Solstice at Cabragh Wetlands at 8.00pm.

Water and Toilets

There will be a great chance for you to fine-tune your composting skills this Saturday, 12th June, when a Home Composting Seminar will be presented in Holycross. The event will be lead by Aine Madigan, who is Education Officer for the Peat Council of Ireland. The event starts at 2.00pm, and will be in the Riverside Park, Holycross opposite the Old Abbey Inn. Following Aine’s presentation, local environmentalist and Tipperary Institute graduate, Joe Bourke, will give an overview of biodiversity.

I enjoyed the article in last week’s Star about the great work going on at the new Cabragh allotments, and in particular the launch of the new ladies’ powder room, or compost toilet to give it a more realistic name. Apparently some leading figures were asked recently on television what the most important technological advance was in the last couple of centuries, and the immediate reply was ….the flushing toilet. This was the invention of Thomas Crapper, and there’s no need to explain how his name has been immortalized. Imagine what life might be like if it were not for this simple device, so central to all our daily lives.

In a number of African counties (Uganda and Rwanda from memory) plastic bags are banned because they were being used as toilets and then flung away – locally known as flying toilets. This foul brew would lie on the ground without decomposing, the plastic stopping water and light getting through to the ground below, eventually killing off the fertility of large areas of ground as fetid, stinking, disease-infested swamps were created around human habitation. As human populations mushroom and urban areas sprawl without planning and essential infrastructure to get fresh water in and sewerage out, so there is a growing risk to human wellbeing and a threat to healthy habitats for biodiversity.

In The Humanure Handbook Joseph Jenkins makes the case for going back to composting toilets, exhaustively studying the benefits of composting rather than flushing our faeces down the loo. Water is such a precious resource. Over 95% of the Earth’s water is in the oceans; about 2.5% is fresh, and most of that is locked up as ice in Antarctica and the Arctic. About 1% of the planet’s fresh water is available for our use, which amounts to 0.01% of the world’s total water supply. And yet every day 40% of the water you and I use is simply flushed down the toilet.

What a waste of such a precious resource. Furthermore the majority of private sceptic tanks do not work properly, so that much flushed water resurfaces to contaminate ground water. Jenkins suggests that this is the biggest cause of groundwater pollution in the USA, and goes on to argue that it is possible to treat human faeces in a safe and healthy way. What has always been seen as a foul pollutant can be a resource to be cherished. Composted human waste can become a valuable fertilizer for growing more food.

I yield to none in giving thanks to Mr Crapper for his life’s work, but maybe it is time to move on to less wasteful systems of waste disposal and save more water. It takes 130 pints of water to make a pint of beer and several more to flush it away. We can do better than that.

Willow trees

At Cabragh Wetlands the mallard parents are doing their very best to keep their ducklings alive, but inevitably some predator has taken a few of the brood. The yellow flag iris is flowering, lilies are developing on the surface of the pond, tadpoles are getting ever-closer to maturity, and the welcome recent rain means that our walkways are in need of regular mowing to keep them open. Perhaps surprisingly the birds are getting quieter, but you can put this down to parental exhaustion after weeks of nest-building, egg-sitting and chick-feeding.

A stroll around those walkways will bring you to the small river from Killough Hill which feeds into Cabragh the pure water which has done so much to sustain the exceptional biodiversity of the wetland habitat. There are about 400 known species of willow, with more expected to be identified when the botanists manage to do systematic research in western China. Willows are widespread in the northern hemisphere, but very rare in the south (like oaks). Each region has developed its own subspecies, as populations of trees have evolved in relative isolation, and even for the experts identification is a real challenge. Nearly all willows have male and female as separate plants; they produce catkins and rely on the wind or insects for pollination. Seeds are tufted and float on the wind.

Few plants have been as widely used by man. Osiers (the thin twigs) have of course long been grown in wetland areas and used for basket-weaving, but also for boats like the coracle and for hurdles and walls, while larger timbers have been used in the building industry. Today it has great potential as a fuel, with many seeing it as an invaluable biomass to supply energy without worsening the problem of global warming. Willow bark also has traditional medical value; it is rich in salicin, which is the core molecule of salicylic acid, from which aspirin was developed. So from willow a painkiller and anti-inflammatory was developed, and is used today (but don’t take it without appropriate expert advice!) to reduce the risk of blood clotting and thrombosis.

With so many plants out there waiting to be researched, who knows what benefits have yet to be unearthed? All species matter.

The Burren

How nice to receive a letter from a Cabragh member who recently went on an outing to the Burren organised by Bird Watch Ireland. It was one of those lovely sunny Sundays in May and not only did they hear that rare visitor, the cuckoo, but they also saw it. A personal thrill was to come across a group of newts in a small pool. At first movement in the pond weed seemed to be caused by tadpoles, but slowly the newts ventured into clear water to feed on surface insects. What a delight it was to see a group of these beautiful creatures in a pristine habitat, simply getting on with their lives.

The number of habitats in the Burren is amazing, and they support an equally impressive variety of life. Our visitor became very aware that if we can but maintain the range of existing habitats, then the cycle of life will continue to flow quite naturally. Be it a flower, insect or bird, if there are suitable places to live, then they will find them and take occupation.

In conversation on the bus, a fellow traveller pointed out that while he has installed a solid fuel stove in his house, he tries to avoid burning turf. You would think that he laudably wanted to reduce his CO2 emissions, but he went on to explain that when the bog is stripped for turf cutting we destroy valuable habitat. There it is again. We don’t need to teach survival skills to the birds and the bees, but we should leave them a place to live.

This beautiful Earth of ours has worked out many difficulties over eons of time. It has created numerous communities of life which inter-connect and inter-depend in extraordinary ways. We too exist within this precious web, and are invited to play our part.

Come out to Cabragh Wetlands, where the walkways are drying out, the ducklings and young swans are enjoying their first dabblings in the ponds, the shimmering blue of the dragonflies can be seen darting over the water and in the reeds, and the summer snowflake will still be looking magnificent for a few more days in this wonderful spell of weather. We won’t claim to match the Burren, but there are many wonderful things to see right on the edge of Thurles