If you want to make Lent meaningfully, a pretty good way to set about it is to take the trouble to consider just what, by our way of life, we are doing to this little world of ours. Walking by a stream in Sussex the other day, where a little strip of the old woodland had been preserved amid the housing estates, it was horrible to see the contrast with the clear water that I recall from my childhood in those parts, full of little shrimps, fishes and other criturs. This stream had a milky texture, scum here and there on top, and no life in it whatsoever. It is horrible, to stop and take it in, let alone to consider that these little obvious things are the least of the matter. No wonder we would sometimes rather ‘sleep-walk to disaster’!

Still, things are changing. Statements such as this by Geoffrey Lean, that ‘We could bring about a 5- to 6- degree change in only 150 years if we don’t start constraining the use of fossil fuels,’ backed up by a lot of hard science, are now finding broad acceptance. They have a lot more impact when we begin to feel the effects ourselves, as here in Sherkin, where noone can remember such a winter of gales, which have hardly stopped to draw breath since October. One might say, it’s just a bad winter, but then one might consider the implications of remaining dependent on an increasingly inadequate supply of the same fuels.

And we might bear in mind other environmental matters, apart from the climate. We are in the process of doing the very same thing that was done to that stream in Sussex, to the sea itself. How about this:- ‘The Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England estimates that 48% of fossil-fuel CO2, or 400 billion tons, have been absorbed by the oceans, making them the largest reservoir of carbon, a load greater than that borne by the atmosphere or the earth. CO2, while more inert in the atmosphere, becomes highly reactive in oceans, leading to physical, biological, and geological changes.

‘Carol Turley, head of science at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, warns that no such ph changes in oceans have occurred in the past 20 million years, and that the capacity of oceans to take up CO2 is limited.’

For too long, we have considered the ocean a sink that is capable of absorbing all our poisons. I have to take issue with the good people of Mayo, who have adopted the slogan ‘Shell to Sea’. They should go and spend a few days out there, as these depressions roar up the ocean off their coast. With good reason is the narrow continental shelf there, a major thoroughfare for marine life, protected by one of the very stormiest climates in the world. An ever more desperate search for oil and gas, with the inevitability of spills and other dire effects, can only have a disastrous effect on this and other yet more more pristine and remote areas, from the Orinoco to the Arctic and Antartic.

It’s not as if there aren’t alternatives to going on to the bitter end of oil madness. I know which ones I’m going for; mostly wind and sunshine, with hydrogen production as the means of storing and distributing all that energy streaming past us. Fiona and I are planning to make a start by transforming our little outfit here on Sherkin. Any advice and assistance gratefully appreciated....

Meanwhile, the prophet Joel is our man: ‘Let your hearts be broken, ...turn to the Lord your God again.... Who knows whether the Lord will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him?’ A very appropriate attitude these days, and most helpful for the maintenance of hope and sanity!