Where's the sting?

Despite having the knowledge and the power, Éanna Ní Lamhna fails to make any real statement about the environment, says Rosita Sweetman

STRAIGHT TALKING WILD
By Éanna Ní Lamhna
Published by Townhouse
€14.99

Sorry Éanna, it just won't do. It nearly will, but a chatty book about the birds and the bees just doesn't cut the mustard. Not when the polar ice-caps are melting, the great glaciers are receding, whole species are disappearing and extreme weather phenomena are increasing. And not when the one thing that might help – the Amazon rainforest (and the Costa Rican, the African and the Indonesian ones) – is cut down and burned to grow beef for already over-beefed fast-food consumers.
This is Éanna Ní Lamhna's third wildlife book, or rather a re-vamped version of her Talking Wild and Wild and Wonderful books. It is written in her familiar no-nonsense style, throughout which her genuine love and regard for the beasties – beautiful and ugly, large and microscopic – unfailingly shines.
But, at the end of the day, she sells herself, and the beasties, short.
First of all, though, an astonishing fact. When Eamon de Valera came to power, nature studies in Irish schools were dropped so there could be more time to study Irish. It wasn't until 1971 that ‘environmental studies' came back. So Irish citizens between the ages of 40 and 70, unless they had parents who cared, or went to posh schools, have had no environmental education. None!
Maybe it's no wonder that environmental brutalism rules in Ireland.
I remember the day Coillte moved in their contractors near my home. My son Luke and I ran down the lane to try to halt the blitzing of a stand of beautiful 200-year-old crabapple trees.
“What are you doing?”
The contractor, screaming chainsaw held aloft AK-47-style, sneered, “I don't know what you're crying about now. Wait till the machines come in tomorrow and tear this whole place apart.”
And sure enough, the next day the machines came in and tore the beautiful mountain and unique upland bog apart. It was the first time I understood the meaning of the words ‘rape of the environment'.
Yes, brutalism definitely rules.

But, back to Éanna Ní Lamhna and her Straight Talking Wild.
Firstly, she's a damn good communicator, both on RTÉ Radio's Mooney Goes Wild and here in these modest nature books.
Secondly, she's a damn good scientist; you don't get to be this chatty about honey bees, guelder roses, cockchafers, ravens, sea beet et al without a vast underpinning of real knowledge.
Thirdly, she is now head of An Taisce, “the most important environmental body in Ireland” (the only environmental body in Ireland?). Why isn't she screaming about what's going on from the rooftops of Taylor's Hall?
What is a good communicator, with a smashing knowledge of our local flora and fauna, who also happens to be head of An Taisce, doing writing books this simple? This simplistic?
While every serious environmentalist on the planet is gnawed by hair-tearing frenzy at what we are doing to Mother Earth, our leading environmentalist is rambling on anthropomorphically as if we were all still in junior infants.
Can you really, for instance, write a chapter about trees and not berate Coillte (as opposed to supporting them at every turn, which is what An Taisce does) for its (bad) joke of a ‘trees policy', ie stick 10 gazillion Christmas trees covered in pesticides all over Ireland? Or devote a (wonderful) chapter to the extraordinary lives of bees without mentioning the fact that many species are now at the point of extinction, and some are already extinct, thanks to chemicals and pesticides, habitat loss and immune systems so damaged that a mite is systematically destroying them?
If Gaia showed us anything, it's that we're all in this together. If the bees go down today, sure as eggs, we'll go down tomorrow.
Not that there aren't real treasures within these pages. Éanna Ní Lamhna's affinity for animals, particularly the much-maligned ‘creepy-crawlies', is a marvel. The spiders with eight sets of eyes on their heads; the humble earthworms with their amazing sex life; the grey slugs with their even more amazing sex lives, bungee-jumping from branches, mating as they go; the earwigs, known, in earthier times, as arsewigs; and the astonishing lives of wasps and bees. The lives of robins, the magic of the dawn chorus, why we have very few species in Ireland (the others couldn't cross the land bridge in time after the last Ice Age), what the last Ice Age actually was and what happened afterwards. What it was like trying to live as a hunter-gatherer (hard work) and why it is extremely stupid to poison everything creepy or crawly that enters your domain (you'll effectively be poisoning yourself).
And, to be fair, she has one chapter, ‘Why You Can't Burn Holes in the Ozone Layer from Your Back Garden', where she clarifies the twin (often confused) swords of Damocles hanging over our future: the destruction of the Ozone Layer and global warming. The latter is driven by the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as oil, gas and coal are recklessly burnt by the huge petro-chemical and nuclear industries that fuel economies worldwide. It is helped of course by all of us as we lap up the goodies – SUVs, ‘cheap' air travel, an endless stream of low-priced, low-grade goods from the East thrown our way to keep us happy and keep our minds off Armageddon.
What to do?
Well, it's obvious from Straight Talking Wild that Éanna Ní Lamhna cares. It's also obvious that she knows she has power. Those are pretty good credentials for seriously stirring things up. So, gloves off Éanna and sock it to the besuited crooks who are screwing everything up! You're from Co Louth, for heaven's sake! Straight-talking was invented up there.
Open up a naming-and-shaming spot on An Taisce's website. “This week's worst environmental depredator!” “This month's most two-faced government minister!” “Today's greatest spouter of greenwash!” Open it up for all of us – as you so very rightly say, wildlife is not just for children. Start the debate proper.
The creepy crawlies – and most of us humans, or at least the ones among us with a bit of heart left – will thank you for it.