According to Professor Tim Jackson, Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity: “When the moon rises, said the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, the sea covers the land and the heart feels like an island in the infinite. Children understand this feeling. Look! Look! It’s the moon, they cry. The moon! They turn their own moon faces up towards you. Delight and trepidation finely balanced there. Look at the moon, Daddy!

“Who are these children, you ask yourself? Where do they come from? The truth is they’re strangers. Visiting us from another country. It’s called the future. Your children are not your children, said Kahlil Gibran. You may house their bodies but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

A few years ago, my associate, Prof. Jackson, was insulating his home one Sunday afternoon. His daughter, who was young at the time, was helping. They were pressing strips of adhesive foam into the corners of windows and doors to keep out the draughts.

At least, that’s what the Professor was doing. His daughter was doing something else altogether.

“Will this really keep out the giraffes?”, she asked.

He could hear the five-year old mind at work. How did the giraffes get into their garden? Can this tiny strip of plastic really keep them out? After all, everyone knows how tall and think giraffes are. They can probably squeeze through the tiniest cracks. And what will happen if they do?

Will they tangle family members up in their gangly limbs at breakfast time? What kind of cereal do giraffes eat, anyway? And would she meet the giraffes on her way to school?

Tim’s daughter is a millennium baby. She has a certificate from the Queens to prove it. Tim has reflected on how his daughter’s age will always track the passing years of the 21st century. In 2050 she will be 50. It’s her century. The century in which the climate (and other associated ecological battles) will either be won or lost.

Reflecting on that Sunday afternoon exchange with his daughter, Tim says: “I’ve thought a lot about those giraffes. At first I mistook them for a childish mis-interpretation of a weekend chore.

But with Kahlil Gibran’s help and the memory of my daughter’s moon-face, raised inquiringly, I see I was mistaken. The giraffes are there. They really are in the garden.

“The task is real. Keeping out the giraffes matters.”

There are lots of puzzles in our failure to combat climate change. One of them is the many easy things we routinely fail to do about it. Like draught-stripping, for example. Insulating our homes makes unassailable sense. In the midst of a cost of living crisis, it makes even more sense.

It saves us money, lowers our carbon footprint, reduces our exposure to shocks to the oil and gas markets resulting from growing geopolitical instability in Europe. It makes our lives safer and more comfortable.

And yet they don’t get done, these simple things. Time and time again. Technologies like insulation work, the economics are favourable, the results are demonstrable.

But our political attention is missing. Or our priorities are elsewhere. Climate is bottom of our list. Rainforests are a long way from here.

What difference could Northern Ireland make to reducing global pollution, given our relatively small population and place in the world?

After a generation of conflict, don’t we have to prioritise economic development and creating jobs?

We count ourselves lucky to make it from one end of the day to another. Locked in routine. Lost in anxiety. Striving for status. Keeping out the giraffes.

For everyone knows (and instinctively fears) the havoc that long-necked creatures wreak when they slip through the cracks in our lives.

The reporting staff at The Impartial Reporter have done a tremendous service this week, collating the evidence-based accounts of how the climate emergency - and its economic, industrial and agro-industrial drivers - are bearing down on the landscapes of our own local imaginations.

Climate change and its impacts are becoming immediate, real and intimate. Catastrophic flooding in Europe during the past fortnight is fully in line with longstanding predictions.

When I reflect on the prospects of erosion, habitat loss and flooding in Fermanagh, the data is no longer abstract and distant but begins to weave through my own memories of navigating the loughs and islands alongside my own children.

And yet, I am reminded too of the ritual quality of climate change warnings going back a generation. The increasing frequency of flooding. Rising temperatures. Drier summers. Wetter winters. Species loss. I think of the lost opportunities for early action that might have forestalled and prevented a future of ecological and economic chaos that is now locked in to our children’s lives.

It was back in 1896, in a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, that we heard the first warnings that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

In 1859 it was an Irish scientist, John Tyndall, who laid the foundations for climate change science when he discovered that a change in the amount of water vapour or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could change the climate.

In 1991, one of America’s pioneering environmental legislators - who steered clean air laws through the US Senate - published an early warning about the climate emergency, titled ‘A World On Fire: Saving an endangered earth.’ His name is Senator George J. Mitchell.

Instead of effective action, globally and locally, we have opted - for the most part - to call for more evidence, more measurement, more data...more time.

The former Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, once warned that we’re in danger of going down in history as the first species that chose to monitor our own extinction rather than taking urgent steps to avert it.

In an age of degraded attention spans it has become more and more difficult - and yet increasingly urgent - to focus on the toll we have exacted on our life support systems.

Climate change has been described as a form of ‘slow violence’ that escapes our increasingly tenuous modern grasp of the rhythms, complexities and entanglements that define us, our bodies, and our relations with local landscapes, marine systems and the atmosphere.

Its a form of violence that goes unnoticed for decades until the illegal dumps threaten our rivers and water supplies, until toxic algae shows up in our loughs....until Nature and the more-than-human demand their own moment of restorative justice.

In Colombia, judges and courts now recognise the land, the rivers and forests as victims of the decades-long conflict in that country. Nature and the more-than-human is are part of the judicial conversation about making peace, restorative justice, and the legacy of conflict.

Perhaps Senator George J Mitchell would approve of a similar approach here.

Dr. Peter Doran is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast.