The Day After Tomorrow

     " 'The Day After Tomorrow,' you seen it?" Noreen asks me as we wash the dishes from our light lunch here at Cahergal Farmouse, the bed and breakfast she and her husband run from their farm. 

     "Yes."

     "Do you think it could happen? I saw that movie, and I say to Michael, 'Michael, do you think it could happen? We won't be around, but our kids..."

     For those of you who haven't seen this movie, it's one of many films that seem to demonstrate cinema's obsession with the world's cataclysmic demise. In the film, climate change ushers in a new ice age, wreaks havoc with violent storms, and the people of the world have to migrate to survive. For a better synopsis, see IMDB's synopsis of the film. I'm not a fan of the melodrama, but the message to be taken is that climate change is terrifying and powerful in a way that makes our nations and social structures irrelevant.

     I told Noreen I didn't think anything that dramatic would happen, but mentioned that I had heard a story on NPR about an island nation where people already have to move their houses out of the way of a rising sea. Read the story and watch the video here. 

     In my five days in Ireland, I've noticed that nearly everybody has something to say about the environment. The delivery truck driver John, who gave me a lift from Cahergal House to Bunratty yesterday, works for Kingspan Environmental delivering parts and doing service on their biocycling sewage treatment units. Ireland no longer allows septic tanks due to the possibility of leaks and pollution. "No houses built in the last ten years have septic tanks," John told me. I imagined that big hulk of a vaguely rectangular hill in my parents' back yard, where their septic tank is buried. If we went by Ireland's laws, we would instead have something that treated sewage naturally and released it as clean water. That water could irrigate our orchard. It's hard to imagine a law like Ireland's ban on septic tanks passing in the US, though. 

     As we talked on the approximately thirty minute drive to Bunratty, John told me Ireland's climate has changed. "We used to have all the seasons here, now we only have two." From what he told me, Irish summers used to be milder and less prone to the pouring rain that had kept me inside the day before. The winters, however, used to be much colder with more snow. Now John says it's the same all year round. "How's the climate where you're from, is it changing?" 

It is, actually. I don't know the science behind it, but my home town of Sacramento has seen unusual weather two years in a row. Sacramento is normally rainy up through March or April, and then hot and dry from May through September. For two years running we've had rainy, stormy weather up until June, with an increase in hail and other violent weather. I told this to John and he added that things are changing everywhere. 

The outlet has a switch!
Red means electricity is flowing.

     I must admit that I didn't expect to hear climate change talk from a truck driver. I didn't expect it from a farm and B&B owner, either. Noreen is very environmentally savvy, not because she is an eco-freak but because she is practical. "Fill the sink partway when you wash the dishes, to save water," was one of my first lessons. At home I would run the faucet and use new water for every dish; here I probably use half as much by simply filling the sink and washing the dishes in there until the water gets dirty. We conserve electricity here too. Noreen's 300 year old farmhouse and the somewhat newer bed and breakfast are equipped with power outlets that actually turn off, to avoid the kind of waste that happens when appliances are idle but still draining electricity. It makes so much sense it hurts; why don't I have these at my house? At home I always feel a compunction when I am too lazy to reach under a desk or move the sofa to unplug something, but here in the Irish countryside miles away from town all I have to do is flip a switch and I am more eco-friendly than I ever was back in Sacramento. And when I mentioned that John had told me about biocycling, Noreen treated it as common sense. She doesn't want septic tanks leaking pollution into the green pastures where her sheep and cattle graze. And of course she recycles, while food scraps go to the chickens and dogs. Nothing at Cahergal House is wasted. 

Deefer will eat anything.

     Guests here have also surprised me with their consciousness of the environment. Last night I went to check on a couple of guests while they took their evening tea, and as conversation got going I learned that the gentleman, Dave Hogan, was an ecologist and tour guide originally from Connemara. When I excitedly mentioned that I was considering a job in ecotourism, however, he didn't share my enthusiasm. He doesn't want "fifty people tramping the same bog day after day," and doesn't want a tour company's need for profit to undermine conservation efforts. He leads only a few select tours a year through Ireland as a part of Irish Byways, taking small groups of people to the lesser-traveled parts of Ireland and sharing with them his knowledge of history and ecology. Since the few tours he can do without negatively impacting the land don't provide enough income to earn a living, and since he is unwilling to compromise the environment for the sake of earning money, he works several other jobs as well. 

     Like John, Dave says Ireland is changing. He talks jokingly about his brother, who "when he's had a few too many starts talking about the old days." Dave quotes him: "There are two things that changed Ireland, I don't know if it's for bad or good: the TV, and the school bus, and they both came in 1965."  

There are fewer farmers and more tract homes than there used to be. John says the pace of life is faster; people don't say hello to each other any more. I think Dave would agree. He doesn't like hurried tourists. "They want to walk ten kilometers a day, every day." They never stop to look at the plants they step on, and which Dave could probably spend hours informing them about if they would stop and listen. He talks more fondly of a group of botany students he took out. "We spent a whole day in a half acre of peat bog." 

This house older than the Declaration of Independence
has solar panels, which gather sunlight during Ireland's
nearly 18 hours of daylight during summer's longest days.

     The environment is ever present in the minds of people here. All I have to do is talk to somebody for five minutes and the topic somehow comes up. And even amid the mixed feelings about Ireland's growth and also its Americanization, I can't help but be impressed by the Irish concern for and commitment to environmental sustainability. Noreen showed me the solar panels she had put on a house that is older than my country. "Do you have that in the states, solar? You don't have much of it, do you." I guess the few solar panels I see every here and there in Sacramento are not that impressive. If Noreen was running the US like she runs her bed and breakfast, the deserts of Texas that so impressed her with their heat when she visited would be full of solar panels. "You've got the climate for it," she keeps saying. She shakes her head at how many things we haven't done. We haven't taken such simple steps as replacing paper towels with cloth rolls, using solar energy, and saving our water. When running a farm on a small island country, it is a matter of practical survival to take every opportunity to save resources. There are so many missed opportunities in the US, where sustainability is left to the eco-freaks. There are no eco-freaks in Ireland. Just people like John the delivery truck driver, and Noreen with her bed and breakfast, and Dave with his tours that often move far too quickly through the beautiful Irish countryside they all want to preserve for tomorrow, and the day after.