Catherine Drea: What will it take

There’s hardly anywhere I go that I don’t get into conversation with friends, family and my favourite, complete strangers. 

One thing that is certain, sooner or later someone will say in a despairing voice, something like, “What the hell is happening to our world?” 

Some are askance at the state of politics, the wars and riots we are witnessing, and how there is never anything good on RTÉ. 

Others bemoan the housing shortage, the cost of living and the destruction of the planet by the out of control and accelerating biodiversity loss and climate change.

Amongst friends we always allow time for the occasional rant. It’s an essential part of meeting up and trying to explain the inexplicable to ourselves. 

Even though we have lived through some of the worst economic and conflict-ridden years of the 1970’s and 1980’s, we still can’t fathom the entrenched inequalities and the hopeless stupidity here in Ireland and around the world.

And yet, when we look across the water and see the mayhem on both sides of us, everything could be so much worse. We often end up saying, aren’t we blessed to live in a peaceful little backwater after all.

One of the phrases that I hear all the time from the younger generations who are not feeling as blessed perhaps as their grandparents is “What will it take?” 

What will it take to persuade us all to change our behaviour to save our planet? 

What will it take for the men who run the world to stop killing each other and, even worse, massacring innocent women and children? 

What will it take to share the wealth across the world so that people can find employment and opportunity no matter where they are born on the planet?

In the darkness of what is happening around the world, what will it take to change our way of life so that we can feed ourselves, replenish our land and cherish all the children? Who has the answers?

Sometimes in the bigger picture where the craziness of others in far-flung places takes up all of our ranting time, we lose sight of what is happening on our own doorstep. 

Right now amongst nature lovers there is alarm across these islands at the decline in butterflies and insects this year. It’s not just the loss, it’s always for me the questions about us as a species too. If all around us other species are failing then very soon will we die off too? Everything is interconnected.

When I start worrying about losing a positive picture of the future, I wonder if we can learn from the past? 

I am drawn back to simpler times, particularly my Great Grand Aunt’s farm in Kilkenny. Her homestead couldn’t have been more different to what rural Ireland looks like today. My father’s “spinster” Grand Aunt Margaret, who was no spring chicken, ran this ramshackle farm on her own.

Probably in her eighties by the time I used to visit the farm, she wore an apron made from a hessian sack and smoked a pipe. I used to be amazed by the riot of life once we went down the lane to the farm. Dogs and cats ran everywhere when our car drove into the yard. Her small garden was bursting with cabbage, potatoes, onions, carrots and summer fare like lettuce, radish and scallions.

You would never leave without a dozen multi-coloured eggs from hens and ducks all around the house and a big bag of apples. One day when I was there, herself and another man were dipping sheep. Another time we walked out over the fields where she had cattle, a donkey and a few milking cows. It was a bit of everything in those days.

A farm was a place where the life force of growth, heritage and food flourished. I used to come away with a feeling of total exhilaration and of course a budding love of the natural world and our place in it. 

While there was probably no money in it, there was instead the wealth of a meaningful lifestyle and the knowledge that you were allowing the land to flourish instead of killing it off.

One of my younger friends enlightened me about the meaning of “wealth” the other day. What level of wealth or income makes someone part of the richest 1% globally? Well I assumed hundreds of thousands! No, he told me, according to Investopedia it’s $32,400 a year is the threshold. Hard to believe because in Ireland that is barely a living wage.

But if we begin to answer that question of “What will it take?” maybe our future will include living a simpler life and counting our blessings a bit more. It’s not too late. We are still a relatively green, connected and prosperous country.

We surely shouldn’t be aspiring to the American Dream of the biggest house, the biggest car and a “me, me, me” socially isolated and polarised country? Or to look to the class-ridden UK on the other side and become a country with swathes of poverty, neglect and a rising right-wing?

Maybe artificial intelligence will help us to solve our future dilemmas about how to make the world a saner and better place for our grandchildren to grow up in? 

I will sit down now and ask Chat GPT “What will it take?” and see what the robot thinks…