You have one week to nominate a person or place doing good work to restore nature and fight climate change here at home. Whether a nomination for an individual “net-zero hero” or for a suburb, village, town or community, this small act of recognition could make a big difference in time.
There may be a backlash in some political circles against the green agenda but increasing action on the ground tells a different story. Most people are still really worried about climate change. They want to see it addressed and are often willing to play their own active part in delivering solutions.
The evidence of that activism is all around us. Each year more and more Irish farmers are looking to see how they can use less synthetic fertiliser, to save costs of course but also to protect their local environment. Each month some 5,000 homes are putting up new solar panels on their roofs, again with the same dual motives. Each week voluntary groups are also heading out on local community clean-ups, armed with nothing but a picker and a refuse sack, this time motivated by nothing but love for their own area.
Every nomination category is important, but the Best Suburb category is particularly interesting to me. It matters because about half of our homes are in the suburbs. It is hard to define the exact number because the boundaries are rarely clear between the city, suburb and countryside. This is particularly the case in Ireland, where so much one-off housing is dotted along country roads like a winding suburban estate, or where we have so much low-density housing right close to town.
RM Block
[ Ireland’s Greenest Places: Why we want to salute Net Zero HeroesOpens in new window ]
Car dependency is one of the big drawbacks of our suburban living but anyone who has grown up in the suburbs also knows that they can be a great place to raise a family, where you can have good neighbours and a strong sense of community. There is often also a real connection to nature, thanks to lots of green spaces, busy gardens, big open skies and access to local rivers and streams, which retain a sense of place.
If you had to judge whether all this new green activity was really happening, what would you look for?
Well you might start at the primary school gate, noting all the green flags, which reflect a commitment to prepare the next generation for the big challenges they will face. As the centre points of our community, you might also notice one of the 526 safe routes to school projects that have started in the past five years. That has been matched by the efforts of parents to make it safe again for their kids to walk and cycle to school, trying to allow children freely explore their own neighbourhood, which is one of the biggest things we’ve lost in recent decades.
A second check might be to see if the suburb contains one of the thousand sustainable energy communities established across Ireland over the past 10 years. It has not been easy to get big projects up and running, or to build community-owned renewable power at scale. However, every one of those communities have smart local people working together to try and accelerate the switch away from fossil fuels. It is going to take two or three decades to make the transition happen, but with such commitment we are well and truly on our way.
A third sense might come from visiting the local church. Three years ago the Irish Catholic bishops decided that 30 per cent of all church grounds would be returned to nature by 2030. Things started happening very quickly in Clare, where 24 parishes have already acted and similar projects are now spreading across the country. It would be great if local authorities or State agencies were willing to set such a target for the public land they hold in trust for us all.
That would build on what local community groups are already doing. For example, in Tallaght they have developed real expertise in planting out pocket forests or digging in new wildlife ponds; in Ballymun they have a particular grá for circular economy thinking; and in Ballina, Co Mayo, they could win the Sam Maguire for urban regeneration planning.
Last, you might look at what local sports clubs are doing and see if the suburb has its own street feast celebration, which 1,200 communities held in May, recognising that promoting sustainability is as much a cultural as a physical thing.
It is for that cultural reason that it makes sense to take the small effort to nominate a person or place, where you see good things happening. I hope you might in particular nominate a suburb, however you may define it, in recognition of the good work that is going on, and to give us all some hope in this uncertain and insecure world, which we need to change one street at a time.
For the end of Greenest Places piece: Eamon Ryan is chair of the European Commission’s housing advisory board. He is former Green Party leader and ex-minister for the environment. He is a judge on Ireland’s Greenest Places.
