Gentle Decline 2/36: Links & Locality

Hello. This issue, written in part between hammering out HTML code for email newsletters and part in the confines of the A&S House at Cudgel War in the Barony of Aarnimetsä (and still between the HTML code, because time off is difficult for the self-employed), is a conglomerate of links and commentary.

[Gentle Decline is an occasional newsletter about climate crisis, and - more to the point - how to cope with it. All issues are free! You can support the newsletter via Patreon (where there’s sometimes further discussion about particular points), Ko-fi, or by buying some of the seriously classy merchandise, including the new Plant More Trees t-shirt.]

Positive Things

Nitrogen oxide emissions are decreasing in China (satellite measurement, not government-reported). Similarly, CO2 emissions there may have peaked in 2023. And bison (part of a re-wilding project) in Romania are increasing carbon capture.

Retreat, Don’t Rebuild

There’s a very interesting piece in Noema about the madness of rebuilding in disaster zones. This is one of the things which absolutely mystifies me about the medium-term approach of many people whose homes and businesses get flooded - they repair or rebuild to the way the place was, and then they don’t change anything. At an absolute minimum, you’d expect to see flood gates installed. You do see these in some places which get flooded repeatedly - Enniscorthy, in Wexford, and various parts of Cork come to mind - so the technology is out there. But in this case, the article is looking at people who are remaining in the flood zones, when they could move elsewhere.

Move elsewhere (“move inland”, specifically) remains my best advice. I recognise that there are lots of people who can’t afford to do that, and in Ireland’s current housing crisis - or housing insanity - it’s even more difficult. This isn’t the case in most parts of the US, though, and definitively not in places like coastal Florida, which are being hardest hit. Take the insurance money and go! And per the article, that’s being made sort-of compulsory in Quebec, where:

the provincial government predicated disaster relief funds on a requirement that homeowners either use the money to relocate out of the expanding flood zone or, for those choosing to rebuild, consent to a permanent prohibition on any future public relief funds for both present and future property owners.

The article also has plenty of good material on the more general retreat approach to climate change, with examples from the Netherlands (which looks to me to be one of the countries that’s handling things best).

Government-backed retreat - be it pre-disaster or post-disaster - seems to be a pretty definite best approach. Persuading governments to actually provide this seems fraught, particularly in the pre-disaster version. In Ireland, there is the Humanitarian Assistance Scheme (I am aware that the word “scheme” looks weird to non-Isles English speakers; it’s in the sense of “plan”, not “nefarious”). However, it’s pretty clear that the number of people successfully getting through this plan is pretty low, and that getting any help through it is difficult. People in that last article opted to construct their own flood defences after official ones completely failed to actually appear.

That kind of thing is going to become more and more problematic over time - first because of the the number of people affected, and then because some of the self-built flood defenses are not going to do what they’re supposed to. This may sound cynical, but even defences planned by engineers sometimes fail; something constructed by a few lads with a JCB is inevitably going to have either failures or unexpected consequences. So there’s a need to make the government programs work better. There’s an election expected here by March of next year; I’m expecting to see flood planning forming a larger part of the campaigning than it has in the past.

Medium Term Plans

Maynooth has recently published a plan for expansion and development over the next decade. I spent an afternoon going through it, and I think - from the case number - I put together the first response to it, which was nothing more than broad approval and correction of a few minor details. It’s a pretty ambitious plan, aiming to cope with an expected increase in population of the town from 17,000 to 27,000 over the next ten to fifteen years.

It includes two segments of ring road (reducing the sometimes ferocious congestion in the main street of the town), a whole new commercial district, a lot of new housing, and some local shops to serve that, and a second train station out to the west of the current one. It also has plans for environmental considerations, flood handling, pedestrianisation of the town centre, and a number of other sensible improvements. Overall, I’m happy with it, and while it doesn’t really contain much in the way of handling for complete emergencies, the area is not really very vulnerable to much in that direction. Anything that affects the immediate area is either temporary (snow, storm damage, and the like) or a national-level issue (really really major flooding, fires from massive drought, pandemic, and so on), and there’s handling in there for some of those possibilities. It also includes plenty of provision for green power and blue and green spaces.

There should be similar plans out there, or appearing soon, for most towns in Ireland - I don’t know if there’s a coherent program of such things in other countries. I feel it’s worth finding out if there are plans in this timeframe for your area, though, whether urban or rural, and seeing what environmental considerations they’ve taken into account. The people who write, maintain, and follow these plans are the ones who have some degree of control over the joined-up thinking necessary to handle climate change, so getting on to them if the local plans look insufficient is probably a very good use of time.

Importing Native Species

There’s a history in this country of importing plant species which we already have, because there aren’t enough of them to be had in convenient pots, and planting them from seed ourselves is apparently out of the question. The latest in this is, of all things, hawthorn. I am aware that people import hawthorn to plant, but I find it almost funny, given the prevalence of the tree here in nature. It might be, maybe after ash, our commonest tree. Of course, ash is already being hit by ash dieback disease, which came to Ireland via, you’ve guessed it, imported ash trees for planting.

I’m coming to the genuine conclusion that the importing of native (or established) species should be banned. Grow them yourself, wait for a plant nursery to grow them for you, or plant something else, but the risks involved in bringing in live plants from places where they have endemic diseases to an island that doesn’t have them are stupid. We’re getting to a stage that with ash and hawthorn both threatened, our hedgerows will be reduced by 50-60% before other plants can fill the gaps. And with the enthusiasm the farmers have for cutting things down, the ash trees may never be replaced.

The solution here is to plant more trees, and in some cases to move seedlings and saplings from where they are to places they’ll have better success. Poking around the edge of the canopy of oaks, for instance, can show you dozens of tiny oak seedlings which have gotten as far as leafing, but probably won’t make it to a second or third year. Dig them up with a chunk of soil in autumn, before the first frost, or in early spring, and either move them to new suitable locations, or into decent-sized pots to await locations.

There are - depending on how you define “tree” - either 21 or 28 native trees in Ireland, and I reckon they cover pretty nearly any need for tree-planting. If you’re inclined, you could add beech, which isn’t native, but has been around for about a thousand years now, give or take, and integrates well with the local ecology.

A few other links

The apocalypse already under way. From that article: “the premise of apocalypse is not collapse in the sense of “giving in” but rather in a clear indication that the future will not be like the present, and so we need to decide what we want it to be, how to shift the status quo”.

Heating yourself in old houses. There’s been a massive shift in internal heat in houses in Ireland in my lifetime - the house I lived in until I was 7 had no central heating at all, with single-glazing, and it wasn’t uncommon to have frost flowers on the insides of windows in winter in the lesser-used rooms. Everyone routinely wore three layers of clothing, and shoes indoors.

Norway is stockpiling grain against disasters, be they pandemic, climate, or political.

Closing

I’ve a lot more open tabs, but I’m going to stop there in the interests of getting this issue out the door; it’s been in-progress for nearly two weeks. I’ve some thinking arising from seeing how various building and infrastructure projects are being handled in Finland, but honestly apart from pointing and shouting “why can’t we do that in Ireland?”, I don’t know if I can distil much from it. We’ll see.

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