Critical Ecologies

In this podcast, Jasmine Buckley discusses an environmental injustice, green gentrification. She discusses how green gentrification is a good example for demonstrating the links between environmental and spatial injustice. This podcast explores how the procedure of providing green space in urban neighbourhoods may not always have positive outcomes despite it being known for its health benefits. Examining the Liberties, an urban neighbourhood in Dublin, we learn about how green gentrification has affected this community and the struggle of trying to balance housing and greening. Looking at this, we learn greening does not always have positive outcomes.

In this podcast, Jennifer O’Malley discusses the complex relationship between the agro-food industry and climate change in contemporary Ireland. Jennifer describes the emergence of the metabolic rift in the context of colonial Ireland in the nineteenth century to examine the complex interconnections that exist between nature and society. This system was based on extractive economic relations that resulted in Irish labour, soil and ecology being appropriated for consumption in the imperial core. Today the implications of this process are still relevant as Ireland’s thriving agro-food industry is reinforced by political and economic forces that see nature as a natural resource exploited. The interconnecting relationship between climate change and capitalistic processes of agricultural production in Ireland can be mostly determined through complex global commodity chains which sees the relationship between Ireland’s economy, exportation and climate change as a mix of social and environmental processes that are produced and re-produced across various sites and systems with each mutually constituting the other resulting in human and ecological consequences. We need to understand that Ireland’s contribution to our planet's ecological crisis remains one of unequal exchange which can only be corrected through new and innovative reforms to our agro-food industry.

Ireland has been an exemplar case for the struggle between green commitments and democratic responsibility and, since the Irish Agri-Food sector speaks for over one third of the nations’ emissions profile, the sector has been placed on the frontline of the struggle to combat climate change.  By all appearances, Ireland’s climate responsibility division debate is shifting from the classic rural-urban divide to a conversation of intra-rural inequality and recrimination, driven by bottom-up power dynamics. The potential sacrificing of Irish beef to make way for dairy expansion, remains a dominant source of contention within agri-discourse and amid whispers regarding national herd reduction, it is the aim of this discussion to shine light on the need for a Just Transition to low-carbon living, where the social and economic sustainability of all rural lives and livelihoods are more carefully considered. Fundamentally, climate action must be fast but, it must be fair.

The concept of slow violence is one that has gained recognition in recent years, providing a definition for events that are violent but not normally seen as such, due to its slow nature and continuation over many years. The current destruction being caused to communities and the environment in Leitrim by Sitka spruce plantations can be viewed as slow violence, as well as the area itself being referred to as a ‘sacrifice zone’. Leitrim’s small population, lack of media attention and small electorate have resulted in the area experiencing extreme changes to its environment, with afforestation also affecting community life. This podcast discusses the terms of ‘slow violence’ and ‘sacrifice zones’ and how they can be used to better understand what is happening in Leitrim, while also detailing an account of the field trip Maynooth University Geography students took in April to Leitrim, and a discussion of the impactful work of the group Save Leitrim.

This podcast episode explores the ideas of gentrification and slow violence. It also discusses how gentrification can be seen as the eventual product of a long period of slow violence through disinvestment and is functionally dependent upon a history of violence in an area. In order to make the links between the two spatial justice frameworks it looks on the case study of Inchicore. Dr. Bresnihan and his interviewee, postgraduate diploma student Séamus Murray, briefly go over a history of cycles of state disinvestment and disregard in the area before moving with particular focus onto the currently unfolding redevelopment and gentrification project on the last of the St. Michael's estate sites - and the work being done to resist it.

This podcast examines the intersections between issues of the built environment, sustainability and environmental justice in Ireland. Discussion around the environmental impact of buildings has become more prevalent in both policy and public discourse as we look towards zero-carbon futures, with Ireland taking on board the policies of the European Green Deal. In the public eye much of this topic has focused on retrofitting and issues of fuel poverty. Through these there are large questions as to how equitable and inclusive a roll out of retrofitting measures will be, especially following the Government’s recent moves to ban turf cutting. However, beyond this there is a need to bring together issues around the built environment (such as lack of housing & public space and high vacancy rates)  with our current ecological and climate crises. While this has already started to some degree (e.g. Anois Agency in Cork) furthering these links could usher in a new mode of environmental politics and activism which links both the rural and the urban.

In this podcast, Will Stringer discusses his research into climate activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) and their demand for climate citizens’ assemblies. Drawing upon the idea of participation as an issue of justice through the work of political theorist Nancy Fraser, this episode explores what approaches to inclusion we can see within XR’s structures and demands. Before finally considering what implications these structures and demands have for two different affiliate groups, XR Aotearoa and XR Ireland, and how these can reveal the need to be attentive to local particularities when building inclusive movements for climate action.

It is becoming ever more clear that we face widespread and worsening ecological breakdown. However, while these issues are global, their causes and disastrous effects are not evenly distributed. The poorest often already facing the worst of the disruption, endangering lives and livelihoods. Is there a connection between what has made regions poor and the climate harms they face? In this podcast, Paul Goldrick-Kelly discusses the concept of uneven ecological exchange. Over the course of the conversation, Paul discusses how this theory developed, how it might explain the link between material and ecological poverty globally, where Ireland fits within global uneven ecological exchange, and the implications of all this for spatial and environmental justice.

In this podcast, Nicola Whelan traces the historical development of Ireland’s agricultural industry since the colonial period. Starting with a discussion of Karl Marx and his account of the Irish ‘metabolic rift’ under British rule, we consider some of the lasting impacts this period of intensive production has had on the farming landscape of Ireland today. Nicola suggests that following independence, Ireland inadvertently turned to other forms of imperialism, looking particularly at the power that modern science and technology continues to hold over conventional farming methods. We discuss both the opportunities and risks presented by an agricultural future built around digital and techno-fixes. Nicola then introduces the concept of agroecology, outlining the potential of this growing movement as a solution to agriculture’s most harmful practices. To finish, we consider some of the systemic changes that would be needed to mainstream an agroecological approach, highlighting the important work that Irish farming group Talamh Beo are doing in this regard.

Katlyne Armstrong joins Patrick Bresnihan in this podcast to explore bogs as a living intersection where heritage, planning, and resistance collide. More specifically, Katlyne introduces the borrowed concept of a hurting heritage and how this might be playing out in the Irish context. Colonialism, for example, continues to structure life in Ireland and it is important to consider the ways in which this has implications for how we think about, use and engage with landscapes such as bogs. Here, we discuss enclosure, waste, and value through colonialism’s robbery of nature as well as Bord na Mona’s beginnings and present day climate enterprise. Despite these colonial mindsets, local resistances and knowledges emerge and provide for alternatives, which is illustrated through community projects at Sliabh Beagh, activism for the rights of nature among Friends of the Ardee Bog, and Leitrim groups blocking forestry developments and wind turbines on bogland.