Mary KennyMary Kenny gives her opinion on how we could live more healthy and environment friendly lives
Mary Robinson, our former president who has been garlanded with more than 30 international honours, and is thus a person of great influence, has urged us to quit eating meat, so as to save the planet. She admits that she has not become a vegetarian herself, which we shouldn’t hold against her: we all advocate courses of action whose ideals we fail to meet ourselves.
However, Mrs Robinson has not pleased agriculturalists who depend upon animal husbandry for their employment and survival, and that is understandable.
But let me try and be constructive and suggest alternative ways of saving the planet besides putting beef and sheep farmers out of business.
Consumption
Here is my list of suggestions to reduce the impact of energy consumption and ecological ruin on the environment.
- Walk, cycle and take public transport more: drive your own vehicle less.
- Don’t turn on the central heating in October. Wait until extreme winter weather sets in. If you’re feeling the cold, put on another sweater and take a hot water bottle to bed.
- Never (in our climate) use air conditioning. If it’s too hot, open the flipping window.
- Never take a bath, only showers. For anyone over 60, one shower every three days is quite sufficient. Never install a power shower – they gobble up energy.
- Fly less. Take a boat.
- Eat the food that’s in season. Demanding strawberries in November means flying them in from tropical climates. Eat home-grown food where possible.
- Bring back the horse as a working animal. Gardeners will tell you that there is no more fruitful natural fertiliser than horse manure.
- Avoid plastic wherever possible – admittedly difficult, since it’s found in so many products. It’s ruinously indestructible. A fur coat is a much more ecological – fur recycles, and then decays organically – than any garment which contains plastic. The supermarkets have stopped handing out plastic bags: now pester them to stop pre-wrapping virtually every product they sell. Walk around Marks & Spencer’s in Dublin’s Grafton Street and observe that almost every food product on the shelves is wrapped in cellophane, bubble-wrap or plastic.
- And turn off those lights! There is far too much artificial lighting lavishly used.
There are an awful lot of things we can all do in our everyday lives to help the environment before we turn to the option of putting beef, pig and sheep farmers out of business.
Our ecological Pope
Elisabetta Piqué, the Argentine journalist who is the source for a movie dedicated to the life of Pope Francis – just out in France – has been speaking to the French media about the close working relationship she built up with “Fr Bergoglio” over the years.
She got to know him in Buenos Aires, and he liked a book that she wrote about her war experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. When she went to see him at the Vatican, she told the magazine Point de Vue, she noted that while some officials were distinctly patronising about women (she was also pregnant during some visits), Francis was entirely natural.
She loves the fact that he’s a Pope “for sinners”, and that “while our politicians are driven in limousines, he runs around in a Fiat 500”. So ecological too!
An ‘infamous vegetarian’
One of the most ‘famous’ vegetarians of the 20th Century was, of course, Adolf Hitler. He deplored meat-eating, and ranted at Eva Braun and her sister Gretl with descriptions of the cruelty to animals involved in the making of sausages.
When this point is made to vegetarians in debate, they usually answer (without irony): “But think how much worse Hitler would have been if he had eaten meat!” Vegetarians advance the theory that carnivores are aggressive, while vegetarians and vegans are peaceable folk.
It now transpires that Hitler, and many of the gangsters around him, were also high on drugs throughout the conduct of the Second World War. In a sensational bestseller just published, Blitzed, by Norman Ohler (translated into English by Shaun Whiteside), the German scholar has unearthed the evidence that the Nazis used cocaine, heroin, morphine, and the lethal drug now known as crystal meth – methamphetamine.
The invasion of Poland in 1939 was conducted with the assistance of crystal meth, given to the troops to keep them awake and aggressive.
By 1944, Hitler was literally drug-crazed. Historians have hailed Ohler’s book as an extraordinary piece of research, and military historians are now saying that drug use explains the entire course of the demented Ardennes campaign which Hitler directed under the influence.
Another irony worth adding is that the Fuehrer was himself fanatically anti-alcohol.
But better, surely, a beer or a glass of wine taken in moderation than cocaine and crystal meth.
And so much for the grand old hippy theory that drugs make a person ‘chilled out’ and peaceable.
