Yes, Happy! As we struggle with January Blues, let's recall that there is much to be positive about these gloomy days. For years we have been caught up in an unrealistic and destructive trip. At last it has run its course. Genuine happiness can only be founded on realism. It makes me happy, for one, to hear Pope Benedict say, during Mass for the New Yearat St. Peter's Basilica.:-
"The current global economic crisis must also be viewed as a test: are we ready to look at it, in all its complexity, as a challenge for the future and not just as an emergency that needs short-lived responses?"
"Are we prepared for a deep revision of the dominant development model to correct it in a concerted and far-sighted fashion?
"The state of the planet's environment and above all the cultural and moral crisis ... are demanding this, even more than the immediate financial problems."
It even makes me happy to hear, for example, Professor TimLang of the UK government's newly formed Food Council, state that:- " A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of "new fundamentals"; he warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing "structural failures", such as "astronomic" environmental costs.
What does not reassure me at all is to hear the likes of our Irish Prime Minister, Brian Cowen, come up with statements like this, on the radio on Christmas Eve:- "If the right things are done now, Ireland can get back to its previous position reasonably quickly."
It seems our Government is likely to resist the Pope's challenge, avoiding if it possibly can any 'deep revision of the dominant development model'. On the contrary, it is mortgaging the nation's future in a doomed attempt to keep the present set-up going.
Well, grand statements are all very fine, but who is going to get down to the nitty-gritty? Here on the Gannets' Way, we're going to have another effort to push the Sailfish Project. I will be contributing to the relaunch, at a public presentation in February (details to follow), in these terms:-
In 1973 Dr E.F.Schumacher, Economic Adviser to the British Control Commission in Germany from 1946-1950 and subsequently to the National Coal Board, published the very influential book ‘Small is Beautiful’, thereby giving a hefty endorsement to some of the more serious insights of the subsequently much derided ‘hippie generation’. He summed up his case for ‘getting off our present collision course’ thus:-
‘I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognise that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which it has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income. I specified three categories of such capital: fossil fuels, the tolerance margins of nature, and the human substance. Even if some readers should refuse to accept all three parts of my argument, I suggest that any one of them suffices to make my case.’
That same year, three years before ‘Small is Beautiful’ came our way, my wife Fiona and I caused consternation to our parents by ‘dropping out’ of middle class British life, ‘when we had the world at our feet’, and going to live with three small children in a leaky old two-room thatched cottage up a mountainside in Donegal. I’m not sure that the older two of those children have entirely forgiven us to this day! However I could see little but grief ahead for the brave new world that was coming into being in the London that we left. In truth I did not expect that city to see the turn of the millenium in such relatively good shape as it did. But at least I found an honest way to make a living in artisanal sea fishing, we did the subsistence thing as best we could, and we lived in a wonderful place.
I wanted to dump all my intellectual baggage into the sea, in the context of that archetypal interface of human activity and nature represented by fishing, and to see what would float and what would sink away! But with regard to the fishing, I could only lament as all my worst fears were realised; the optimism of the 1970s, from the point of view of inshore fishermen like myself, was soon crushed by the advent of industrial fishing techniques, driven by no consideration but short-term profit, that were very destructive of both artisanal fishing and fish stocks. I vividly, and my friends may say too frequently, recall an occasion when I passed through Killybegs on my way to a short sail with my father across the English Channel. In Killybegs I nipped down to the pier to watch the big new tank boats pumping huge bin-fuls of mackerel ashore, forklifts flying in all directions spilling and squashing them on the pier. Everyone knew that one pair of those boats would be capable of catching, and very likely need to catch, the entire Irish quota. Well in mid-Channel we came upon a fleet of small French boats, each with a sail set and tangons spread, just one man in each boat fishing mackerel with lines. I watched them landing in Cherbourg subsequently, a beautiful product packed with ice in little polystyrene boxes. No marks for guessing which fishery could be called sustainable. But it is unlikely to have survived the bubble of so-called development that has taken place since, with each new technological phase digging ever deeper into the very fabric of the resource. How much longer will we let such tragedies happen?
By 1991 I was commenting in the Irish Skipper:- ‘Here we are in Ireland with a magnificent, self-renewing resource, on the edge of a seething continent crying out for its product. With all our wonderful technology, can we really do nothing but destroy it?’ But now we have all been made painfully aware that the people who have been holding the purse strings and controlling ‘development’ simply have no concept of the big picture. Alternatives that respect both the basic requirements of human justice, the demands of our hearts and our natural environment do not so much as occur to their imagination in any serious way. Recent events at least hold out the hope that at last these considerations may be taken seriously once again. Perhaps we can insist that those with the onerous responsibility of providing capital will consider above all whether their investments are Just, Kind and Sustainable ?
Indeed, these criteria allow for a just return on capital, but Justice also requires that they do not trespass on the livelihood of others or require an unfair share of the goods of nature; Kindness, besides insisting that they should not even cause hardship to others, cares also for the welfare of the workers, spiritually and emotionally as well as financially, along it may be said with the true and lasting satisfaction of owners; Sustainability requires that one does not destroy the biosphere, Nature’s capital, but actually seeks to enhance it, treating it as mother, sister and friend rather than as an enemy to overcome. Christians may recognise the three persons of the Blessed Trinity in these attributes, which all amount to the same thing in the end, and before which we must not prefer the work of our own hands or any other idol.
A couple of years ago, such aspirations chrystallised for me around the idea of sail-assisted post oil-age fishing vessel, that would be constrained by its very nature to fish in a sustainable manner. Sam and I then made some unsuccessful efforts to raise funds for it, including an approach to BIM; see http://www.gannetsway.com/news/2006-11.htm . We are presently renewing our efforts. I would like to consider some practical aspects in the light of the triple criteria above.
As a research project, the return on capital investment is indeed hard to pin down. I take it as generally accepted that we urgently need to find new ways of generating employment, laying the foundations for economic recovery rather than contributing to our current woes. A fishing boat that employs lines and hooks is going to produce a catch of the highest quality, with neither excessive impact on fish stocks nor the destruction of juveniles and unwanted by-catch. This would be a kind of boat acceptable to all fishing communities throughout the world. From a market point of view, landing small but high-quality catches maximises value while minimising waste and favouring small-scale and localised distribution and processing. Far from favouring over-centralised industries that need to draw in large ship or lorry-loads, and that small processors must compete against for a share in the resulting glut or famine supply of indifferent product, our kind of boat would be more inclined to make small but high-quality and more localised landings.
Working with a massive investment in power and technology, the intrinsic satisfactions and qualities of traditional fisheries fall away. Competitivity tends to squeeze out cooperative collaboration. Our wee Frenchmen referred to above would cooperate to find the shoals, look out for each other and operate as a fleet. The big ships tend to go to considerable lengths to avoid letting their competitors know what they are doing. The pressurized lives these lead is more akin to warfare than anything else, with colossal amounts of money depending on manipulating all that technology correctly in the frantic bursts of action. In between the crews are in for a great deal of boredom, with little to do but watch blue movies. We would like to put the onus back on the skill of each individual, while restoring the intinsic satisfaction, the sheer fun of the job.
Is this business of using sails going too far? Any yachtsman can tell you that the moment you stop your engine and start to sail is magnificent; all of a sudden one feels peaceful, at one with nature, while the motion of the boat becomes more comfortable, and indeed it is a relief not to be dependent on that noisy, smelly, dirty and vibrating machine. From the point of view of trolling for albacore, sailing certainly seems more effective that fishing under power at low speeds, so besides having advantages in comfort, economy and safety, since every knot of speed makes it more difficult to haul in the fish, it may well be more effective. Is it for real in the context of making a living? This is something we are setting out to prove, but we must allow for the possibility of being wrong, and anyway the imponderable combination of fish availability, fuel cost and market price is ever changing. However, there are the current certainties that fishing today is of very marginal profitability and widely seen as a dying industry, oil is getting scarce, erratic of supply and expensive, while food-supply also is becoming problematic. Is it not crazy that we are letting our fishing industry die? Why ignore all that free energy whistling past? Can we really be sure that we will not once again find ourselves short of food, with sea all round us, but no means to go and fish?
Diesel engines may indeed have plenty of life left in them yet, especially if one economises as much as possible. But even if only to help keep the price of oil down, and spin it out as long as possible, surely it is time to develop alternatives. I can see none so promising as hydrogen. For a start, I am enchanted by the concept of a boat with electric power but no engine, so much cleaner, quieter and more convenient. Surely, once this technology is available, we will no more want to use a diesel engine than we do a steam one today, even though coal is still readily available. To get ahead in its application is obviously a great opportunity for us in Ireland.
The two main objections to hydrogen fuel cells centre round the issues of producing and storing it. One encounters people in the environmental movement who are quite virulently opposed to it, on the grounds that it simply moves the venue for pollution from the place of use to the place of production. It beats me why they assume one must use carbon energy for it; the world is steaming with renewable, natural energy. This struck me very forcibly in the Cape Verde Islands, where one encounters tracts of desert with the sun beating down on it, the trade winds whistling over it, and geothermal possibilities underneath it, while there they are importing expensive oil by pipeline from moored tankers. My humble researches so far lead me to believe one could readily begin by distilling and heating water from the sea with solar power, and so produce hydrogen by passing an electric charge from windmills through it. Perhaps our fishing boat project could be integrated with a hydrogen production project along these lines. With regard to hydrogen storage, well, our boat would again be a very good place to start, for what do we need but a large working platform on top of a floating fridge?
This may seem an unpromising time to make a new push for raising money for anything, but a remarkable and in a sense encouraging change has taken place. For the first time since I recall, it may be possible for the likes of me to raise our voices, without being dismissed as idealistic nutcases or doom-mongers; to say that it is impossible to base a healthy society on the pursuit of ever increasing wealth, production and technological power, and to propose alternatives. There remains some distance to travel before it is generally admitted that our whole society, like the Madoff fund, has in recent years been functioning as one big Ponzi scheme, but all sorts of factors have crowded in to reinforce Schumacher’s famous case; the whole business of climate change and environmental degradation, the economic collapse, the inescapable admission that there will be no return to stability until we undo the Gordian knot of overdependence on oil.
Now, as we peer into the void of a threatening global collapse of barely imaginable proportions, it may at last be possible to mobilize resources for a humble project that responds to all of these challenges. As the saying goes, it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.... |
