My debut novel, The Last Good Summer, is a dual-timeline mystery set in the northwest of Ireland. An important component of the story centres on an environmental scandal that was inspired by a real-life crime that happened right on my doorstep.
The facts of this crime are so extreme, they read like a work of fiction (which made my job easier). The crime in question came to public attention back in 2013 when it was discovered that obsolete sand and gravel quarries, spanning an area of 46 hectares, had been used as the dumping ground for one of the biggest illegal landfill sites in Europe. The extent of the illegal dumping was described by the Environment Minister at the time as unprecedented in scale. The quarries, incidentally, didn’t even have planning permission due to a lax, dysfunctional, if not corrupt, public planning authority. Adding insult to injury, the dump site is located near a Special Area of Conservation and is less than a mile away from the local area’s drinking water supply.
Around the time the scandal came to light, I was working for a political party in Stormont, the seat of the devolved Assembly in the north of Ireland. When I read the independent report that was commissioned to investigate what happened, I was horrified and outraged. The independent report showed that the site contained over a million tonnes of festering, putrefying waste that was producing a steady flow of toxic gases and liquids. These were seeping into the air, soil and water, severely harming the surrounding environment and posing a huge risk to human and ecological health.
The report estimated that the cost of remediation or site clean-up was in the region of £140m. The local government deemed that that was too big a price tag. So, instead of full remediation, they spent £1.2 million contained the pollution risk and mitigating further environmental damage. In other words, they left the waste in the ground and build a barrier around it to seal all its poisons in. I can’t help pointing out that although £140m was too much for the remediation work, the government didn’t think £420m was too much for a road upgrade between Belfast and Derry. Ironically, the last couple of miles of the new road couldn’t be completed because, if you can believe it, the dumpsite stood in the way and couldn’t be disturbed for fear of unleashing its deadly emissions. It would seem that building a road is more important than making sure our environment and our people are safe.
And it was only in November 2022 that, after a protracted court case, were two people convicted of this crime. Their unlawful dumping antics saved them around £40 million in landfill taxes. Initially they were charged with failing to pay these taxes, though that charge was dropped. At the time of writing, November 2023, they have yet to be sentenced. So, here we are, 10 years after the fact, the culprits have not been sentenced, they have not been made shell out to fix the mess left behind, they have not been made repay the lost taxes. What kind of message does that send to other would-be eco-criminals?
These people were motivated by greed and they clearly didn’t care about anybody, not even themselves since – after all, they live in the local area too and any pollution from the site will impact them just as it will anybody else who lives here.
But I think the problem is more profound than that. The criminals are not just bad apples. They’re the product of a system that enables such behaviour, and actually rewards it. For me, this outrageous crime is just another example of capitalist greed and wonton disregard for people and the planet, it’s just another example of the thousands of eco-crimes that are happening with impunity across the globe right now in the name of progress and profit. And who pays for the consequences of these criminal that are acts of private individuals and corporations? The public does.
Of course, we might not be able to lay all the blame at the feet of capitalism, but it’s hard to deny that capitalism has been a major cause of our environmental problems. I also recognise the link between today’s wealth imbalances and our economy. Capitalism is designed to build-in wealth and income inequalities, normalising the idea that it’s okay for some people to earn 200 times more than those on the lowest incomes; for some people to feast while others die of starvation; for some people to own multiple, luxurious residences while others sleep on the streets. Surely we can do better for ourselves than a society that normalises these injustices and tells us we have no alternative. I believe that every single human can live a fulfilling and abundant life without causing suffering to the rest of society and without causing devastation to our beautiful planet, and I believe that there are alternative economic solutions that allow us to do so.
A group of local environmental activists have worked hard to raise awareness about the eco-crime that features in The Last Good Summer, and they’ve campaigned to have the site decontaminated. I have nothing but respect for their courage and determination. In writing The Last Good Summer, I felt I could do my bit to raise awareness about what happened, obviously with my own take on some of the facts (but not that many) for dramatic purposes.
You can buy The Last Good Summer from the usual online platforms and directly from my publisher The Book Guild.
J. J. Green is an Irish writer who hails from Donegal and lives in Derry. She’s had a passion for writing fiction from childhood and has honed her creative writing skills throughout her adult life. As a social and environmental activist, she also writes non-fiction in the form of political essays that mainly focus on economic and environmental injustice. The Last Good Summer is her debut novel.
Short story winner
The Centre for Human Rights in Practice produces Lacuna, an online magazine devoted to stories about equality and social justice. They recently published a story by 18-year-old writer Semilore Kaji-Hausa, who creates a dystopian reality with themes of immigration and oppression, challenging the reader to reflect on the parallels with our own world. Read it here.
Lacuna's Writing Wrongs Schools Programme offers free workshops led by professional writers and journalists and supports young people to write about human rights issues that matter to them.
In their latest blog post, they featured Semilore’s piece along with stories from previous winners and runners-up.
Preach! What a tragic story. Your book sounds like a terrific way to seed a message of righting wrongs. I agree, capitalism has much to answer for, especially the concept of “externalities,” costs to the environment and to people that don’t factor into the enterprise’s bottom line. Accounting just magically takes them off the books. Businesses hate regulation because it affects profits. But in this system it’s what we have to include *all* costs in a scheme, not pick and choose. My stories (now disaggregated from a sprawling novel that doesn’t yet work) center around methane fracking in northeastern Pennsylvania-- one of many rural areas in our country that’s being devastated by industrial-scale energy “development.” It occurs to me that these stories are everywhere for the picking. 😢