Irish Examiner Column 10/05/2021: Always Wrong is Alright too

Sustainability’s a hard sell right now. Our impulse is just to be unsustainable for a while. We want run out into the streets shouting “WE’VE ENOUGH SUSTAINING. I WANT AN OUTDOOR HANGOVER. TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME A SUBSTANDARD POLLUTING THING. I JUST WANT TO FEEL ALIVE.” 

But sustainability isn’t just a joyless sequence of “stop that” and “you can’t have that” and “this is wrong”.

Well actually there is a lot of “that’s wrong”. But wrongness is very important. It’s the only thing I can be sure I’m right about: I’m probably doing the wrong thing.

Some wrongs are obvious in hindsight. For years we burned our rubbish. My father would look at the weather forecast on a Friday night, see a damp morning in store for Saturday and announce ‘a great day for burning rubbish’. I yippeed. Piling on the prize-winning letters from the Reader’s Digest, roasting the bean tins, great wodges of plastic bags. Sending it all up into the boundless forgiving sky. Catharsis.

I was fully signed up to neat ditches and perfect lawns. I attacked dandelions for years. Round-upped them as recently as a couple of years ago. Kidding myself really.

There’s the wrongness from prejudice and simple bad PR. Poor wasps. Hated by so many. The w*nkers of the Hymenoptera order. Just swaggering around spoiling for a fight.

But it turns out wasps are really good for nature. Well of course they are. In fact everything in nature does a job. Except most of us. but we have excellent PR. Speaking of which: Honeybees. A message went around our local whatsapp group recently about bees. I know because I sent it. The gist was: LETS HAVE MORE BEEHIVES!

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