On Wednesday, September 3rd, I did my first broadcast interview to discuss the launch of my new book, ‘The Lie of the Land’, and chose The Last Word on Today FM to do the piece, given that the show and presenter Matt Cooper have given me a weekly platform for the last four and a half years to discuss climate and environmental issues in a systematic way, rather than simply covering them around a specific event, as is the norm.
You can listen to our conversation here, and the transcript is below:
Matt Cooper Over the last four years, this programme has given a commitment to using John Gibbons on a weekly basis to talk about environmental issues. He has now extended into another branch of media, you could say, by the publication of his first book, The Lie of the Land, which has the subtitle, a Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis. ?John Gibbons, thank you very much for joining us. The title, The Lie of the Land. ?There’s a double entre there. Explain what you mean by it.
John Gibbons The first thing as the name suggests is to lay out the situation. ?Where do we stand, how do we get here, and where are we off to? So really that that’s the lay of the land. Obviously, inside there, there’s also a double meaning, and that is the lies that we tell ourselves and one another about our relationship with, for example, the land. ?That very fundamental relationship is one that I examine in some detail in the book. And I suppose my own background coming from a farming background gave me some insights that I wanted to explore and to sort of really tease out. So that’s really where where that comes from.
Matt Cooper ?I was quite surprised to read that there was a time when you would have taken a shotgun out and you would have been killing animals on the farm.
John Gibbons Yeah, well, that was what we did. I was regularly dispatched, a shotgun or sometimes, a .22 rifle another time, a hurley the odd time. Basically, I think the way I describe it is that that in our farming life, there were two types of animals that you encountered, one was livestock, and the other was what the generic term was vermin. And essentially anything that wasn’t livestock was fair game. And that was the reality now, maybe there’s other farms where that didn’t happen. ?But certainly I don’t recall anybody saying it was unusual at the time, nor did I ever hear anybody remark on how strange it was. To be honest with you, in hindsight, it’s pretty strange, but at the time, that’s what I grew up with.
Matt Cooper But do you regret it, now? ?Or do you think that that is just part of the natural process that has to be done in farming?
John Gibbons Yeah, I do. I have regrets, for sure. ?I think when you look back at that kind of context, you know, obviously I was young, I wasn’t in a position to know what was good or what was not so good. But yeah, I would have regrets. The idea of shooting animals like that – is it’s pretty unpleasant. ?Also, that sort of antipathy to nature, which really was part of what was drilled into me, I regret that too. I think, you know, that was considered to be progressive farming. I think maybe we’ve had that with the passage of time, we’ve all had an opportunity to reflect on the fact that farming has to happen alongside nature. ?It can’t be one or the other. And I think we’ve seen that really with the major declines in wildlife in Ireland, in biodiversity and pollution and so on., we’ we humans have taken a very heavy toll on the landscape and obviously farming by dint to the fact that it occupies so much of our landscape, is very much part of that, and I suppose part of the purpose in writing this book, maybe is to be honest about it, Matt, look it in the eye, call it as it is, and say, okay, this is where we are, this is the reality of the systems that we’ve developed. Now, can we do better in the future? ?And my argument, of course, is that we have no choice. We’re going to have to do better, we cannot continue. with business as usual, across a range of areas and subjects.
Matt Cooper But do people want that? ?Isn’t this part of your problem and that you have maybe as well, for readers of the book as well as you might have on the radio on a weekly basis, that people don’t necessarily want to confront these issues. They want to believe that solutions will come up that won’t impact on their existing ways of life.
John Gibbons ?I think you’re right. I think there is a belief, and I refer to, say, Ireland, as this Goldilocks country. The idea that we are climate that’s not too hot, not too cold. ?And I think that has lulled us in this country in many respects, into the belief that the climate emergency is something happening elsewhere that will impact other people severely, and nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, Goldilocks basically is dying. We are exiting that phase of temperate, moderate climate. ?In Ireland, we’ve already seen it across Europe and so on, so we’re exiting that, and we need to face that honestly. And I think part of my reason for wanting to write this book, Matt, is I just believe that much of the public conversation around climate around is it just beats around the bush. and it’s very noncommittal. And I think every time we encounter a vested interest group, it’s well, we can’t upset them, we can’t offend them. ?And I think our politicians in particular have been very cowed, no pun intended by the lobbies here. They’ve backed away from difficult decisions and the issue really here is that sometimes you have to take tough decisions now in order to safeguard our future. and we know that we look into our own history all the way back to Ardnacrusha, a plant which was commissioned a century ago this year. These were difficult decisions made by a young government that needed energy independence. ?And I think that type of strong radical thinking, it just seems to have seeped away from our politics. Now it’s full of fear. It’s full of looking over our shoulder at which lobbyist is going to give me a belt of a stick, and we need to keep clear of them. ?And I think that fear fearfulness, we see it in our planning system, we see it in ridiculous things like opposition, for example, to solar farms, to greenways. We just see a kind of a NIMBYism and a fearfulness. And I think what is missing in my opinion, even, from the discussion is an honesty. ?And that honesty is that we’re in a time of radical climate change and the most radical thing you can do in a time of radical change is nothing. The era of business as usual is already over. Many people may not have noticed this, but it’s over. ?We’re heading into a a much more dangerous future, a future, for example, where our energy systems are threatened, where our food systems, our food supplies in Ireland are threatened. And that’s something, Matt, I think that you and I have talked about here, many times over the last four years, but I still think people are incredulous. We’ve convinced ourselves part of that lie are referred to in the opening. ?We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re uniquely good at food production, for example.. and you hear people like the Taoiseach saying that we’re feeding 40 million people. That’s another lie, and that’s a lie I explore in some detail. We’re doing nothing of the sort. ?In fact, overall, Ireland is a net food calorie importer. We are actually drawing food resources away from the rest of the world to feed our small population. And that, quite frankly, is disgraceful. ?And yet that has happened because we haven’t been honest about it.
Matt Cooper There’s something that you haven’t addressed in the book to the rest of my knowledge, and excuse me if I’m wrong with this, but I didn’t see it. It’s in the news today, the Mercosur Agreement, for example, and this is an agreement that’s going to take place between the European Union and Latin America in relation to trade. ?And farmers are up in arms about it, but don’t they actually have a point in the sense that if farmers in Ireland are being asked to reduce their output for environmental reasons, what’s the point in doing that when suddenly we’re going to have lots of cheap foods imported from Latin America, which is produced as well without any real environmental concern?
John Gibbons There certainly are concerns with the Mercosur trade agreement, I would agree with you, but I do think it’s a little rich for the Irish agricultural lobby to criticise Brazil, for example, for its destruction of biodiversity. Huge tracts of Brazil, are intact biodiversity. ?Ireland, on the other hand, is largely a biodiversity desert. So I do think it is rather rich for us to criticise the Brazilians, for doing with their land, what we’ve already done with ours. Now, of course, we don’t want that to continue. ?We need to stop it, but I think there’s an inherent hypocrisy in this. I mean, is somebody, for example, who’s concerned about the loss of Brazilian biodiversity, are they prepared to put their hand up and say that they will support rewilding here in Ireland, for example? I haven’t heard a single voice from that lobby support that. ?So I think it’s really, it’s more hypocritical to say, we’d like the Brazilians to clean up their act, but don’t ask us to do anything.
Matt Cooper And one of the things that came across as well about your own regrets of the family farm that you grew up in was that you had one particularly large field, I think it was called the Big Seven, because all of the hedgerows and gaps had been literally been taken away to provide for this big piece of land.
John Gibbons That’s right, when my father bought this farm, it would have been back in the 50s, essentially, he was a progressive farmer, and part of that involved making fields much larger. So the Big Seven, as we called it, there’s an old map at home, which shows the original layout of it. So there was miles of hedgerows were dug out using excavators to make this large field that was suitable for large machinery. ?We also extensively drained the land to improve it. And all of these things were, in many respects they were improvements, and certainly in terms of productivity, but probably the thing that I, again, I look back on with some regret, is there was really no discussion around the fact that, in Ireland, given how little space there is for wild nature, our hedgerows are probably the only places left for biodiversity to cling on. So when we remove hedgerows, as we did, and as many other farmers have done since and are still doing, you’re destroying that last toehold for nature because there’s very little room for nature, for example, in our current monocultural ryegrass set up, which absolutely dominates the landscape in Ireland. ?We have a remarkable lack of diversity in our agricultural system, and that’s the issue here. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have livestock, we shouldn’t have dairy. What I’m suggesting is we need to have a balanced agricultural system that is part primarily focussed on meeting the food needs of the population of Ireland, not the export desires of multinational PLCs.
Matt Cooper However, is there not an issue for you again, another problem in that the book is full of facts outlining your arguments, but do we tend to live at present in what is largely a fact free environment, that for an awful lot of people, it’s how they feel. ?It’s emotions that seem to get the attention rather than facts or things for experts and experts are denigrated.
John Gibbons I take your point entirely, Matt, and I think that’s probably why I broke my own rule of the last 20 years, and I put myself into this story, because you’re right. Facts can be very dry and very hard to digest. ?So I did inject my own perspective, my own experience into the story. I hope to make it a more palatable read, something much more accessible, and something that I hope brings a sort of a town-and-country flavour to it, because I’ve lived my early life in the countryside, in that farming background, and the rest of my adult life, really has been spent away, and obviously a good chunk of that as an environmental commentator. So I’m trying to meld those messages together and to sort of offer an overview that is, I hope, sympathetic, I certainly hope readable, and of all those stats that you refer to, I think it’s important that we have a factual basis for our discussions, whatever our political positions. ?So, yeah, I make no apologies for putting in lots of facts, but I hope I’ve done it in a way that doesn’t impede people’s ability to catch the flow of the story, because I am trying to tell a story, I guess it’s framed through my own experience, for sure, but it’s also the story of the evolution of modern Ireland, in the era of climate breakdown.
Matt Cooper One last one, John. As you know, when you’re with us every week, we get lots of text messages and WhatsApp messages coming into the programme. ?We get a lot of people who are very supportive of you. We get a lot of people who are highly critical. If the highly critical people, many of whom are farmers, were to pick up and read this book, do you think might have changed their minds?
John Gibbons I would like to think so. I certainly hope so. I think if people approach it with an open mind – a colleague sent me a text text the other night, having read an advance copy of it, and basically said, look, the arguments are solid, and if people approach it with an open mind, then they’re open to be persuaded. ?If people simply want to project their own views on it, well, of course, we’re not going to meet in the middle. So I hope I’ve tried to frame it in a way, Matt.
