This story is of an adventure told through the eyes of Michael D’Arcy and his Uncle John Ennis, two different generations, separated by half a century. A chronicle of collapse, the story of our headlong gallop towards disaster, of the destruction being waged by shortsighted or corrupt politicians, unscrupulous men and their businesses, on our environment, our planet, our home, our only home, in this dark, silent, hostile universe.
Doesn’t concern me, did I hear you say?
Well you’re wrong there, you’re part of it, part of a wild race to apocalypse. Yes, look around you, as waves of extreme weather sweep over us, as new diseases threaten us, as the shadow of war and famine appears to the East, and as a financial crisis of huge proportions threatens the breakdown of our institutions and political systems.
This story, is different. Why? Because it is a warning. The future of our natural world depends on its outcome, it’s the story of greed, finance, capital and geopolitics, the story of our blindness, and yes we are all part of it, part of that wild race.
Excerpt from Chapter 1:
It was stifling, I guessed about 30°C, unseasonably warm for early May, the humidity as high as it usually gets during the summer months in Shanghai.
I’d lost count of the time I’d been held in the detention centre. Months. The last person that visited me was from the Irish Embassy in March. The days were longer now. I figured it must be May.
With no watch, no telephone, no television, no windows, and just 30 minutes exercise each evening in a small caged pen outside, I was living in a kind of suspended animation. The only thing I knew was they’d gone overboard with their Covid rules, everyone wore masks, as I did—alone in my cell, and added to that the whole place stunk of disinfectant, shit and noodles.
After the usual monotonous midday meal of rice, watery vegetables and a sparse scattering of fatty pork offcuts, I flopped down on my iron bed with its thin mattress, then with nothing urgent on my agenda, I drifted into an uneasy sleep.
Suddenly I was fleeing an overcrowded, burning, planet. Staggering through a forest, a green grasping maze of hanging vines and lianas covered with long hard spines that tore at my hands as I struggled to keep my balance on the uneven ground filled with pools of dark foetid water. I gasped for breath, desperately brushing the swarms of insects from my face, trying to spit out those I’d sucked into my mouth. I collapsed between the buttresses of a giant tree, then looked up through the multi-layered forest into the dense canopy far above me, there I caught a glimpse of the blue sky and small white clouds.
Then, I was hitting the ball at the Epherra golf course in the Basque Country, surrounded by the cool green hills of the Pyrenees. The fairway lined with fine trees, some of them knarled mountain oaks, one hundred and more years old, all that remained of the temperate rainforests that once covered the region.
I wondered if I wasn’t in some kind of controlled hallucination my mind was inventing, the blueness of the sky, the tranquility. Then, the metallic crack of the club hitting the ball rang out and I watched it soar into the clear sky over the magnificent rolling landscape. In the distance a large Basque farm, its white walls and deep red woodwork contrasting with the greenery, reflecting the luminosity of the sky.
It was a glorious landscape carefully transformed by men over two millennia, since the times of Roman Aquitania.
How long would that last? my uncle John Ennis had asked me. The population had increased over the past half century, and since the 1870s it had been multiplied by five along the Pyrenean Atlantic coast, that is from Hendaye on the Franco- Spanish border to Bayonne.
Humanity was growing at an uncontrollable rate, perhaps the percentages seemed small, but in absolute terms the figures were huge. In the two centuries from 1800, the population of the planet had increased from one billion to eight billion and in a very much shorter period of time would reach ten, that plus man’s animals with the lands cleared and the seas trawled to feed them all.
Little wonder the planet was going to hell in a bucket.
I woke up with a start, the noise of a heavy bolt, my cell door swung open. I was back in my real or perhaps parallel world. An officer appeared accompanied by a guard.
‘Mr D’Arcy follow me,’ he said mangling my name, making me a stiff sign to follow him.
Would it be yet another invitation to write an autocritic, denouncing my errors in accusing China of ecological crimes, fraudulently importing illegally cut tropical timber?
I obeyed, falling in behind him with the disinterested guard following, along a series of identical corridors, finally arriving in an area that I recognized as the visitors centre.
I was led into a room and pointed to a seat at a grey metal table and left alone with the guard. Some minutes later the door opened and the officer reappeared with a woman I recognized behind her mask, Deidre Noonan, one of the Irish consular staff, in the company of an older man, also hidden behind a mask, who seemed vaguely familiar, with them was a Chinese woman, one of the detention centre’s translator—not one of the best.
‘Hello Michael,’ Deidre said, then presented the man with her as an envoy sent by Brussels. It took a few seconds before I realised to my astonishment it was my uncle, John Ennis, who I hadn’t recognized behind the mask. With a slight movement of his hand and index he signalled me to remain silent. I could barely retain my surprise.
I wanted to ask about Lucy and Edouard, but held my tongue.
With no more ado Deidre spoke in Gaelic, in fast bursts, interspersed with English, announcing, in what could have seemed a jumbled stream of words, a coded plan, simple, but dangerous.
The translator was confused, destabilised, momentary lost. Gaelic obviously wasn’t part of her algorithm.
Uncle John didn’t speak Gaelic, but he acted as if nothing had changed.
‘On one side of the exercise yard is a communications tower,’ Deidre quickly told me.
I was about to open my mouth, but John flashed me a sign to cool it.
I obeyed. I’d had plenty of time to contemplate the tower—a tubular structure like that of a wind turbine, though not so tall and of a much smaller diameter, more like a 5G mast.
I listened attentively as she explained the tower was fitted with a narrow steel ladder that rose its entire height, providing access to different maintenance platforms for the electronic transmitting equipment, the first set about fifteen metres or so off the ground.