Major acts of denial

We are carving out hills to support mortgages in major acts of denial involving our historic inheritances, and our futures, whilst existing in a stressful present.

We are continuing a carbon-creating cycle into a second decade of road and property development even as our environment and climate give clearer and clearer signals that our biosphere cannot sustain this kind of development. We still imagine carbon increase is not affecting us, but sewage and polluted and depleted water are tangible on this finite island. We are providing an instructive example of humans' impact on their surroundings.

Road building using intrinsically destructive construction methods, speculative property development, and driving to work all add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Vehicle design, even for private ones, will have to alter radically in shape and weight; current ones are inefficient and light fuel to drive them is running out. Types like SUVs that can create in everyday use, 1 kilo of carbon every 3 kilometres cannot for long be sustained.

We ought to now reflect that it is time to stop using inefficient, profligate, and obsolete building methods of no future benefit in this second decade of structural development. Within 20 years at enormous cost we will need to replace the thousands of miles of rail track, taken up and the lines of rail network disposed of across the Irish republic in the 20th century. Rail, to harbour or back, is the most efficient delivery method for heavy freight, whilst use of trucks is currently the most inefficient, other than possibly for smaller delivery trucks at end of line delivery. As fuel becomes more inaccessible within 20 years, large and articulated trucks may be taken off roadways.

We have needed development of access and secondary roads for safety and efficiency, and we need rail development for freight and commuting. Major highway development serves road builders. Voters will have to review their circumstances comparing those against narrow gain.

Our Internet broadband upload speeds cannot serve those wishing to work outside urban districts. We have needed for a decade to address the development of telecommunications/broadband infrastructure for conducting business. Reports indicate that we in the Irish republic have continuously lagged behind other developed countries. Broadband specific to business should by now be keeping pace with standards in other developed countries. This would have enabled people to work in ways conducive to home life and family building, in turn lessening stress, reducing carbon dioxide release, and enabling contact with and more development of local communities.

As things operate, by our actions, we seem to prefer adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, by carving out ancient hills, by burning fossil fuels, and by tearing apart our psychosocial underpinnings and inheritances. And for what, for speculative property-making purposes, using methods that are obsolete? Why would anyone with foresight wish to destroy our critical archaeological inheritances for such aims?