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Imagine that at the end of this century, when your human grandchildren have been born, planet earth will be a scorched dust-bowl and humans will only survive on the fringes of the Antarctic. Do you think that’s a possibility? Hard to imagine? Well humans, I’m sorry to say but this is indeed what will happen if radical changes aren’t made in global carbon emissions over the next few years. Some humans even think it’s too late, but, like a lot of dogs I’m keeping optimistic that people will wake up and smell the coffee.

What’s a dog to do?

Well, yesterday, in spite of the rain, I took myself off, with my humans, to the new Cultivate/Eco-Unesco building, The Greenhouse, in St. Andrew Street (where Enfo used to be, opening to the public on 2nd December) for a lunchtime seminar on Carbon Tax. The humans were very interested. I was mildly interested at first and just wanted somewhere to curl up and dry out from having walked into town in torrential rain. But… I couldn’t believe my dog-ears! I had no idea how serious the situation really is. The picture for the future of planet earth, home to us all, is bleak - the rain forests torched, the polar ice caps melted, heat and dust everywhere.

…and it’s not the dogs doing it!

Look at the past few weeks in this country… has the torrential, bucketing-down rain put a smile on your face each day? I wouldn’t think so. Look at the top left photo - that’s me and the position I’ve been in for the past few weeks. There was nothing else for it but to take to the bed and stay dry. Now, take a look at my photo below before things started to get really bad. That’s me carpooling with my human wearing my happy, smiley dog-face.

What kind of world do we want to live in because from where I’m standing it’s looking like we’d better get used to the fact that endless rain might not be a passing weather phase but a permanent fixture in this country.

Our climate is changing forever, unless you do something and do it now. I’m saying this as your Best Friend and I’m hoping that we dogs won’t have to re-evaluate this age-old relationship…!

Remember the classic sitcom “The Good Life?”  John Seymour, the man whose books inspired the series, spent the latter part of his life on his small holding in Wexford.   Despite his profound commitment to being self-sufficient and living off-grid, towards the end of his life he told Patrick Bridgeman of Positive Life that total self-sufficiency was just too difficult; what he envisioned for the future was co-sufficiency: self-reliant local communities that could work together to meet their needs and make the transition to a post-industrial society independent of fossil fuel.

To this end, the Cultivate Centre has developed a course to nurture community sustainability called “Community Powerdown – Training for Leadership, Livelihoods and Local Resilience.”  It can be taken as a weekend intensive workshop or over a ten-week period.  The Powerdown Show, made for broadcast on DCTV, is also available from Cultivate as a DVD.  We can’t all live off-grid or in eco-communities, but within the lifestyles we already enjoy we can change so much to improve our co-sufficiency - this show might just be The Good Life for the twenty-first century!