My Articles to the Newspapers

Derry’s answer to global environmental catastrophe!

A report published last month by 1,400 scientists for the United Nations has concluded that “humanity’s very survival” is now at risk. Each person in the world now requires a third more land to supply his or her needs than the Earth can supply.

Is anyone really surprised? Economic development on the scale that has been undertaken in the West is devoid of a moral basis. What’s morality got to do with it? Our economic system, as I’ll explain, has at its very core an endless immorality involving greed, selfishness and unfairness and that immorality has generated the high unsustainable productivity that has threatened our habitat.

Derry is slightly different because it has been neglected by successive governments on economic development and because it has – according to several key local commentators – fewer entrepreneurs than anywhere else on these islands. But a population that values money and position will generate high numbers of entrepreneurs and the act of becoming an entrepreneur is itself an act of strident individualism that sets the entrepreneur apart for his desire not to be one of the sheep. It is at once admirable and unchristian. It is admirable because everyone likes to see people succeed in life, and entrepreneurs can sometimes succeed. Most don’t. Yet ultimately the impulse that motivates the entrepreneur is morally questionable in that our Judeo-Christian value system seeks to curtail individualism and instead supports a strong community dimension.

That is why Derry has so few entrepreneurs today. There is a morality in poverty and in the past Derry was a largely moral city where people tended to be brought up with strong community empathy. Wealth is seen as coming to those who bend the rules and that is why there tends to be a level of suspicion of the values of those who have generated great wealth.

Successful entrepreneurs usually have a little capital to begin with, which is “theirs”, and nobody else’s, a morally questionable assumption. Even if it is theirs, a Christian approach would be to share it, not to use it in their selfish interests against the interests of those who are at a disadvantage, their new employees. This is a morally questionable path. It is certainly not a Christian path. So the foundations of these businesses tend to be unchristian, based as they are on inequality and unfairness.

Nothing succeeds like an enterprise where everyone is competing out of inequality-generated insecurity and unfairness, and these qualities help the profits (of the entrepreneur) immeasurably.

The reality is that Western society has millions of enterprises all based on inequality and unfairness that means our economic system, particularly since the industrial revolution, is profoundly unchristian.

This level of economic activity is unsustainable as the environmental scientists tell us today. The planet cannot take the abuse that it is getting from heavy industry in particular. Man’s habitat is consequently in danger. The USA knows this and refuses to take Global Warming, for example, seriously because it knows that when it does, it will have to curtail its own industrial output.

But thank God for Derry. We have been starved of economic development by successive unionist and British governments and we find that we are now in a better position to cope with the changes that need to be brought about by the new realities of environmental protection.

The clarion call of the young people of Derry will soon be to tell the world about the more fair society of previous generations – in their poverty and low levels of economic development – who didn’t have the climate of insecurity that generates entrepreneurs, unequal enterprises and Earth-threatening economic activity.

Our young people can tell the world of the need for a new economic outlook that slows down economic growth and ensures that the scarce capital resources are shared rather than competed for, where human beings cooperate in a meaningful way rather than try to outdo each other rather selfishly in order to lever their way up a profoundly hollow ladder of life.

Most Derry people are in a unique position, having never sold their souls to heavy industry and having never been bought off by those who would destroy the Earth, to see the future more clearly. The future is moral as needs be in contrast to a past that defied Christ’s message, doing much damage to the environment and man’s habitat in the process.

I believe that we in Derry now have the opportunity to help save the planet and we must send a very firm signal out that when they starved us of jobs, they were showing us the essentially unequal and unfair nature of their system and these anti-Derry politicians – and the misguided Derry-based campaigners for the entrepreneur and his Earth-destroying economic activity – cannot expect us to back them now as they contribute to the destruction of our habitat.

Those who would advocate more entrepreneurs and more economic development for Derry without a sea change in the moral basis of those enterprises will one day be shunned as winding the clock back on reality and living in a grotesque past where they endanger our very survival as human beings.

The way forward is towards sharing and cooperation that means that everybody has and no-one goes without. That always has been the moral way and the Derry way, in spite of poverty, discrimination and the starvation of economic development. Sharing and cooperation have been the way that we survived: let it be the way that the planet survives. Let’s choose the Derry way!

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*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.

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