Introduction: Reading Ireland's Food, Energy, and Climate

Sharae Deckard Introduction: Reading Ireland’s Food, Energy, and Climate [Pre-print draft of editor’s introduction to a special issue, ‘Food, Energy, Climate: Irish Culture and World-Ecology’, of the Irish University Review, 49.1 (May 2019)] Over the past decade, concerns about Irish food and energy regimes in an age of climate crisis have gained new prominence in the Irish media and have gathered political urgency in the public sphere. In October 2017, writing in the wake of ex-tropical storm Ophelia, climatologist John Sweeney suggested in The Irish Times that while Ireland has a long history of enduring extreme storms due to its location at the receiving end of the Atlantic storm tracks, this new brush with a nearly-intact Atlantic hurricane seemed a harbinger of ‘the shape of things to come’. 1 Namely, Ophelia could be interpreted as a sign of climate shift, part of the new forms of volatile weather produced by the warming of the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, in the last four years, Ireland has variously experienced the wettest winter on record, the ‘Beast from the East’ caused by the disruption of the polar vortex due to exceptionally warm Arctic temperatures, and a record-breaking heatwave and drought in summer 2018. The impacts of this emergent pattern of climate volatility can be seen in everything from changing patterns in species migration, to the drenched floodplains of the Shannon and the Lee, to bog fires across Connaught, to fodder crises for farmers; indeed, climate change promises to affect the whole of the web of life in Ireland. Linking extreme weather events to Ireland’s ‘culpability’ in not ‘meeting its obligations on greenhouse gas emission reductions’, Sweeney speculated that ‘Perhaps Ophelia will assist in sensitising the Irish public to the reality that things are likely to get worse in terms of extreme events, and 1 that the combination of circumstances that produced Ophelia are on balance more likely to increase rather than decrease in the years ahead’. 2 Far from being a ‘green’ country, Ireland’s carbon emissions are currently among the highest per capita in the EU and continue to rise, falling far short of the reductions required by the Paris Agreement. In January 2019, representatives of the Irish government appeared in Ireland’s High Court to defend against a lawsuit, ‘Climate Case Ireland’, filed by the advocacy group Friends of the Irish Environment, which seeks to hold the government accountable for knowingly contributing to dangerous levels of climate change as a result of its weak policies. 3 Legal action on climate has been accompanied by political protest and activism. To give two recent examples, more than 40 climate activists occupied the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment on 7 December 2018 in Dublin, calling on the government to accelerate progress in adopting climate action legislation by enacting the three climate bills currently before Dáil Éireann, and asking for the creation of a just transition commission to oversee the transition to a carbon-free economy founded on renewable energy. On 1 February 2019, a coalition of secondary school students from counties across Ireland announced a call for a mass demonstration on 15 March to coincide with the global day of protest ‘School Strike for Action.’ Building on the Children’s Rally for Climate Action outside the Dáil, and inspired by the 16-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, the protestors demand immediate government action to curtail Ireland’s growing emissions and decarbonize the economy. 4 The movement captures both the sense of growing generational urgency expressed by young people whose future will be indelibly marked by climate transition, and the growing connections between national and international scales of climate activism. Irish activism more directly targeted at energy infrastructure includes the campaign to stop the ‘Shannon LNG,’ a massive processing plant for imported liquefied natural gas 2 planned for the Shannon estuary in 2019. It is projected to be one of the largest fracked gas terminals in Europe, operational until 2050, with half of its cost funded by EU taxpayers, despite promises of the Irish state to divest from climate-polluting fossil fuels. Activists from the coalition of groups seeking to block the Shannon LNG, some of whom are veterans of the earlier Shell to Sea campaign against the high-pressure Corrib gas pipeline in Mayo, argue that the plant poses an environmental danger to the Shannon Estuary, which is designated a Special Protection Area for marine wildlife. Furthermore, they emphasize that the plan to replace the Moneypoint coal-burning power station with an LNG facility, far from mitigating Ireland’s complicity in climate change, would exacerbate it, since the methane and greenhouse gases leaked by natural gas pipelines warm the climate as much as coal in the short term. 5 As such, the development project epitomizes the contradictions in Irish energy policy and its continued dependence on fossil fuels, since despite the Irish ban on fracking, the terminal would lock Ireland into three decades of processing and consuming fracked shale gas, with the liquified gas shipped in giant tankers from the US and re-gasified in the plant. Perhaps the most salient crystallization of the nexus of concerns around food, energy, and climate in Ireland in recent months is the mixed reaction to the release of the ‘Food in the Anthropocene’ report by the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health in January 2019. The ‘planetary health diet’ recommended by the group of 30 world-leading scientists attracted world-wide attention with its recommendation of a serious reduction in European consumption of meat and dairy, with the twin aims of improving human nutrition but also the ‘health’ of the planet, by reducing the environmental impact of the meat and dairy sector and creating ‘sustainable food systems’. 6 Globally, the use of land for growing food and forestry produces around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, while livestock alone accounts for between 14.5-18%. Industrial agriculture is a massive consumer of petrochemical inputs in the form of fertilizers and of fuels, a leading contributor to methane and nitrous oxide 3 emissions, a significant contributor to air pollution due to ammonia, and a major polluter and consumer of water, consuming up to 70% of global freshwater sources for irrigation.7 Adapting the idea of the carbon footprint, Tony Weis uses the term ‘ecological hoofprint’ to conceptualize the environmental degradation and systemic violence produced by the nature of the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex, arguing that the pollution loads, resource loads, and inequalities produced by grain and oilseed monocultures are amplified by everincreasing populations of commodified animals concentrated in industrial farms. 8 In Ireland, the radio, television, and print media widely disseminated the story of the Lancet report, but with little analysis connecting contemporary diets to the political ecology of the grazier economy in the Ireland, or the historical and socio-political causes for its rise to dominance. The Irish agricultural lobby was quick with rebuttals, championing the ‘goodness’ of Irish beef and dairy; the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) president Joe Healy, for instance, claimed that ‘It was a ludicrous distraction to suggest that people should have little or no meat and dairy as part of their diet’. 9 Ireland’s ‘ecological hoofprint’ is disproportionately large – beef and cattle production dominate the agricultural economy, with milk and beef output accounting for over 61% of agricultural goods in 2017 alone. 10 Irish farming, particularly the industrial livestock production contributing to the ‘meatification’ of global diets, is directly imbricated with climate change. 11 A familiar myth of Ireland perpetrated by Teagasc reports, agri-business lobbies, consumer advertising, and the tourism industry alike is that of rural pastoral, teeming with green fields, happy farmers, and delicious butter. Yet examination of Ireland’s carbon emissions, agriculture, and energy regimes reveals a very different picture of environmental crisis escalating in tandem with global climate change. Its fields are not only green but brown with emissions, its fishing stocks dwindling, its biodiversity diminishing, and its dependence on fossil fuels unabated. How can we move beyond myths of Ireland as an ‘emerald isle’ to discussion of its slurry-filled rivers 4 and roofless factory farms, its strip-mined peatlands and turf-burning reactors, its crumbling ghost estates and decaying water infrastructure, its floodzones and eroding cliffs? * By way of answering this question, a central aim of this issue is to call for new ways of reading food, energy, and climate in Irish culture, both in order to challenge dominant myths of ‘green’ Ireland, and to reveal alternative narratives of Ireland’s environmental history and place in the capitalist world-ecology. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore have recently described capitalism as ‘not only as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of the web of life on earth.’ 12 The capitalist world-economy is thus also a world-ecology, which emerges through ecological regimes. They argue that the modern world of the Capitalocene era ‘has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives.’13 For Patel and Moore, ‘cheapening’ refers to those set of strategies to control the web of life and render easy to appropriate at little to no cost the work and energy of both human and extra-human natures. 14 The low costs of ‘cheap’ food, energy, and resources are essential to the profit-making strategies of the capitalist ecological regime, as is the ‘unpaid’ work of women in the spheres of social reproduction and care. Ireland, which historically functioned as a laboratory for imperialist tactics of plantation and enclosure of ecological frontiers, such as those leading to the rise of the grazier monoculture after the nineteenth-century famine, and which has served as a testingcase for neoliberal strategies of enclosure and austerity in the contemporary era, seems a prime example for analysis of the interdependent ‘subordination of women, nature and colonies’ which Maria Mies argues has been central to the emergence of the capitalist worldsystem. 15 Analyzing representations of food, energy and climate in Irish culture is necessarily 5 to examine the ways in which the lives and work of some humans have been rendered ‘cheap’ or conceived as disposable, to consider how biopolitics and migration are intertwined with climate transition, and to contest the proliferation of ‘armed lifeboat’ and citadel discourses in connection with forms of green authoritarianism, climate fascism, and border regimes, which Christian Parenti describes as those politics which respond to climate change by ‘arming, excluding, forgetting, repressing, policing, and killing’. 16 It is to interrogate how populations and species across the island are rendered unequally vulnerable to ‘climate violence’ 17 and ‘uneven disasters’ 18 both in the present, and in the future to come. Conversely, it is also to ask how literary and cultural representations might offer alternative conceptions of value that repudiate capitalism’s devaluing of human and extra-human natures. Critics in petrocultures and energy humanities are increasingly foregrounding the centrality of class differentials and inequalities of race and gender to environmental criticism. In her recent introduction to Fueling Culture, a landmark volume of keywords for the energy humanities, Jennifer Wenzel urges us to consider, ‘Where does energy fit into the Marxian trinity of land, labor, capital? How do we understand energy’s role in the relations among base, superstructure, and ideology? How is access to energy (or energy poverty as a lack thereof) or vulnerability to the harms of its extraction, production, and consumption a mode of social difference and inequality that we might consider alongside those of race, class, and gender?’ 19 In a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on resources and resourceful resistance, Claire Westall similarly advocates for world-literary critics to adopt a new methodology of ‘energetic materialism’ which takes a ‘historical, relational and dialectical approach to the material culture of capitalism’s resource-bound work/energy systems that helps move thinking beyond the resource-conflict dystopias and benign worldending consensual paralysis synonymous with neoliberal capital’. 20 6 Our issue’s cover photograph, shot at an industrial peat bog harvested by Bord na Móna in County Roscommon, twins two of Ireland’s energy regimes in one image, foregrounding the black bog from whose surface peat has been scraped by huge tractors, leaving it bare and water-sodden, and the array of giant windmills crowning the hills in the background, harbingers of the growing renewable energy sector. As such, the photograph captures a key moment of energy transition suspended between past and future, fraught with tensions and contestation. The stark bogscape could recall Kevin Barry’s description in his dystopian novel, City of Bohane, of an entropic wastescape along the Shannon, mined to exhaustion: ‘These times, the city of Bohane was powered largely on its turf, and the bog had been cut away and reefed everywhere. […] The bog’s occult nature had been interfered with, its body left scarred, its wounds open’. 21 At the same time, the ghostly arms of the wind turbines evoke the ‘luminous bones’ which lend Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones its title, intimating to the novel’s protagonist ‘a destiny [the world] had been forced to give up on, a dream of itself shelved’. 22 As Robert Kiely describes in his article in this issue, the industrialization of Irish peatlands was a key project of national modernization – of resource nationalism – in early twentieth-century Ireland, aimed at generating jobs and reducing the young republic’s dependence on oil and coal imports. Today, after almost a century of exploitation, less than one percent of midlands raised bogs remain intact in Ireland. 23 Many environmental campaigners contest the state’s celebratory narrative of ‘closing bogs to fight climate change’, claiming that Bord na Móna’s recent closure of 17 bogs and plans to close the remaining 45 over the next seven years not only comes too late to preserve Ireland’s raised bogs, but is primarily driven by declining profitability rather than the imperative to decarbonize, and will have little effect in curbing carbon emissions, given that the peatlands, shorn of their surface, will continue to emit greenhouse gases. 24 At the same time, local turf 7 cutters across the midlands insist the state’s new bog conservation strategy unfairly discriminates against small-scale harvesters for whom turf-cutting remains both culturally significant and a vital source of livelihood in economically-disadvantaged rural communities. 25 The wind turbines’ techno-topian aura is undercut by the technocratic claims to ecoauthority in the name of climate mitigation made by experts from the renewables industry advancing neoliberal ‘green energy’ development projects. The distribution of energy from wind farm projects is frequently uneven, failing to benefit the rural communities on whose land or water it is based, and instead serving the interests of foreign capital. Indeed, a key factor in the Irish Wind Energy Association’s lobby to build wind farms across Ireland, as reported in November 2017, is the desire to profit from the 18% rise in demand for electricity projected in response to the planned construction of 19 data centres in Ireland for transnational corporations including Apple, Google, and Facebook; Apple’s proposed centre in Athenry alone is expected to consume enough electricity to power a town the size of Bray. 26 The energo-politics at play here predominantly disadvantage rural populations denied autonomy over the means of energy production. Applying the critical frameworks of energy humanities, energetic materialism, and world-ecology to contexts such as these should lead us to ask new questions about Irish culture. What are the particularities of Ireland’s geology and energy history – such as its notorious status as the only country in the EU to generate electricity from burning turf – and its relation to ‘power’ as both energy and as politics? Does Ireland have an equal share in petromodernity, or is it both site of semiperipheral extraction, as in the Corrib gas pipeline, and of energy dependency and privileged consumption? To what extent is Irish agriculture dependent on oil and how are its agrarian regimes and technologies of farming refracted in cultural praxis? How could we examine the campaign to stop the Shannon LNG alongside other forms of activism, including the Shell to Sea movement, the anti-fracking campaign in 8 Leitrim and across the Northern Irish border, the successful anti-nuclear campaign at Carnsore Point, ongoing debates over the use of turf, or even contemporary struggles over the installation and location of power pylons, wind turbines, and waste incinerators, as forms of resource insurgency shaped by the particularities of Ireland’s petroculture and energy regimes? How are the vectors, striking energies and affects of these movements mediated – or not, since aporias might be just as telling – in Irish culture? How do monocultures of industrial farming, pharmaceutical plants, IT services, and financialization, or what Conor McCabe has called the triad of ‘cattle, construction and banking’ shape twentieth and twentyfirst century Irish environments? 27 In order to begin approaching these questions, we invited contributors to explore the many ways in which the nexus of food, energy and climate in Ireland is represented in text, media, creative praxis, music, and performance. Articles in this issue trace how the affects, subjectivities, behaviours, and cultural forms corresponding to socio-ecological relations are mediated and constituted in literary and cultural production. Of particular concern is how the Irish web of life is organized through specific energy regimes, infrastructures, and forms of extractivism; modes of agriculture and aquaculture that shape land and water; geographical divides between urban and rural development; and unequal divisions of labour and consumption articulated along biopolitical axes of gender, class, and race. As such, this issue aims to make four key interventions in the growing field of Irish environmental criticism. Firstly, by analyzing how food, energy, and climate are represented in a wide range of Irish cultural productions, it seeks to move beyond a critical focus on ecocentric readings of nature writing or ‘green’ depictions of Irish landscapes to consider how a whole variety of cultural forms mediate the sets of socio-ecological relations through which agrarian and energy regimes are organized, and through which vectors of environmental crisis and climate volatility are experienced. As Malcolm Sen notes in his essay in this issue, earlier Irish 9 ecocritics have sometimes tended to lament the absence of a sustained tradition of nature writing equivalent to that of the US or the UK, as when John Wilson Foster lamented in 1997 that Irish Romantic prose and poetry, while unabashedly political in its imagination of the land, contains ‘little celebration of Irish nature for its own sake, none of the self-rewarding sensuousness of Keats or the personal enrichment or pantheistic spirit Wordsworth found in the Lake District’. 28 The politicized representation of land and conception of nature in the Irish literary tradition, however, cannot be understood outside of the history of colonialism, the forms of resource imperialism that violently transformed Irish environments, and alienated and expropriated Irish residents in the service of a ‘production of nature’ that served colonial interests. The lack of a Romantic aesthetics of the ecological sublime could be considered as revelatory in itself of the socio-ecological relations constituting a particular historical environment and the forms of alienation experienced by humans within it. Rather than concentrate solely on representations of landscape, it is just as important for Irish environmental critics to consider the agrarian practices, agricultural policy, and food regimes shaping the use of land, to read farming fictions, famine novels, or disaster writing as being as ‘environmental’ – if not necessarily environmentalist – as wilderness narratives or nature poetry. Indeed, it is crucial to recall the origins of the very word culture in agriculture, as Raymond Williams reminds us. At the same time, Irish critics should consider water as much as land. As Michael Paye notes in this issue, the emergence of new ‘archipelagic’ and blue humanities readings in Irish Studies represents a crucial movement away from concentration on urban or agrarian settings towards consideration of coasts, seascapes and rivers. 29 Paye and Sen both independently summon the notion of ‘tidalectics’ adapted from the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite in order to reconceive the oceanic aesthetics of Irish cultural production, while Morgan invokes subaqueous and riverine acoustics in her sound art. 10 Furthermore, irrespective of whether there exists or not a strongly ‘green’ or ‘ecocentric’ tradition of Irish writing, we would argue that depictions of energy, food, and climate are already everywhere in Irish culture – the question is not so much of their absence, as their hitherto lack of visibility to critics. Indeed, Derek Gladwin’s study Contentious Terrains, reviewed in this issue, is a ground-breaking example of the kind of work that can be done in its excavation of a rich trove of literary depictions of bogs with their own distinctive environmental imagination, 30 while his latest book Ecological Exile offers key readings of the petro-political work of contemporary Irish writers such as playwright Donal O’Kelly’s Little Thing, Big Thing. 31 Likewise, contributors to this issue seek to reposition both canonical figures from the Irish literary tradition and contemporary writers in this new conceptual frame: whether, for instance, Ryan Dennis’ reading of John McGahern’s ‘farming fictions’; Kiely’s excavation of the politics of coal and turf in the Free State as satirized in Myles na gCopaleen’s ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ columns; or Kate Houlden and Sorcha Gunne’s attentiveness to the gendering of food in relation to social reproduction in Marita ConlonMcKenna’s ‘Children of the Famine’ trilogy. Their work is immensely suggestive of how much remains to be (re)discovered in Irish culture and interpreted from a world-ecological perspective. Secondly, the issue seeks to champion a transmedial approach to genre and culture, exploring the capacity of differing forms and media to address the representational challenges of environmental crisis and climate change, and to imagine alternatives or resistance to existing energy regimes and resource frontiers. Rather than concentrating solely on literature, we bring together essays on fiction, experimental poetry, film, news media, digital memes, sound art, and music. On the literary front, Malcolm Sen reads the representation of the intertwining of political and ecological precarity in a rich array of contemporary post-Tiger literary fiction written in the age of neoliberal austerity; Lucy Collins introduces two poems 11 by Christodoulos Makris and contemplates how his experimental poetics explore the valences of environmental and social disasters precipitated in the name of capitalist progress; Kate Houlden and Sorcha Gunne demonstrate the particular insights children’s literature can offer into the culture of food and famine; Sourit Bhattacharya examines famine novels and conceptualizes the aesthetics of catastrophic realism in the genre of disaster writing; Ryan Dennis uncovers the critique of agricultural policy in the farming narratives of Laxness and McGahern; Robert Kiely compares the satirical energy imaginary of peat in Brian O’Nolan’s newspaper columns and The Poor Mouth; and Treasa De Loughry interviews novelist Mike McCormack about his conception of environment, infrastructure, and technology in relation to the landscape of western Ireland. In other media, Michael Paye compares filmic representations of fish and oil commodity frontiers with resource fictions from Ireland and Africa; Diane Negra analyses the politics and gendering of extreme weather in Irish news media and their memetic transformations in digital cultures; Trish Morgan reflects on her praxis of ecological sound art in order to ‘sonify’ the fluvial ecosystem of the Shannon in an era of flooding produced by climate change; and Gerry Smyth argues for an ecomusicological approach to Irish music and provides a leading example in his reading of the pastoral imagination of Van Morrison. Thirdly, the issue advocates a comparative approach that endeavours to position Irish literary and cultural production alongside that of other geographical contexts, and which interprets the particularities of Irish ecological regimes and resource cultures in relation to the wider ‘world-ecology’ in which they are situated. Thus Houlden and Gunne pair texts on food crisis from Ireland and the Caribbean, Bhattacharya juxtaposes historical contexts of famine in India and Ireland, Dennis compares agrarian crisis in Ireland and Iceland, Negra explores the influence of US extreme weather culture on Irish media, and Paye situates Irish culture in relation to the wider Atlantic economy, including west Africa. This also entails 12 reading Irish texts in new ways to detect how they mediate larger systemic conditions and conceptions of global crisis that exceed their local settings, as in Malcolm Sen’s eloquent elucidation of the ‘telescoping of precarity – from the personal to the national, and from the national to the planetary’ in the contemporary fiction of Sara Baume, Kevin Barry, and Mike McCormack. In order to enrich this comparative perspective, this issue seeks to mobilize the theoretical insights of a set of interlinked and emergent critical fields from outside Irish studies in order to facilitate the analysis of Irish culture in relation to wider systemic concerns, including energy humanities, petrocultures, and resource criticism; food regimes and agrarian studies; blue or oceanic humanities; postcolonial ecocriticism and disaster studies; and world-literary and world-ecology frameworks. World-ecology and postcolonial ecocriticism are particularly crucial for many of this issue’s contributors, because of their focus on the political ecologies of colonialism and capitalism over a long temporal durée, and their emphasis on geographical comparison and intent to reveal the analogous experiences of socio-ecological crisis and resource exploitation that Ireland shares with other postcolonial or semi-peripheral societies such as India, Nigeria, Iceland, and Jamaica. Finally, this issue seeks to foreground the relation between theory and creative and political praxis. In addition to Makris and McCormack, many of the contributors to this issue are not only academics and scholars, but also creative practitioners, writers, poets, and artists. In her essay, Morgan provides a powerful account of the intertwining of theory and practice in her own work when she defines praxis as ‘what is to be done in the face of these seemingly insurmountable environmental problems’. For Morgan, a crucial issue is how to contribute not only to critique of the systemic conditions causing environmental crisis, but the imagination of what could be otherwise – for her, this is achieved through the re-sonification of what often seems inaudible – the subaqueous lifeworld of the Shannon river. 32 If theory and scholarly analysis seek to produce knowledge of environmental crisis and its mediation 13 in Irish culture, praxis is the question of agency, how to act upon that knowledge. A crucial question, then, for critics seeking to situate Irish culture in world-ecological perspective, is not only how to interpret and visibilize cultural imaginaries of food, energy, and climate, but how to circumvent the paralysis of resource dystopia and identify opportunities for political organization and socio-ecological transformation. NOTES 1. John Sweeney, ‘Hurricane Ophelia: The Shape of Things to Come?’, The Irish Times, 17 Oct 2017. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/hurricane-ophelia-the-shape-ofthings-to-come-1.3257894 2. John Sweeney, ‘Hurricane Ophelia’. 3. The case argues that ‘the government’s approval of the National Mitigation Plan in 2017 was in violation of Ireland’s Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 (the Climate Act 2015), the Constitution and human rights obligations’. For more details, see Climate Case Ireland. Available at: https://www.climatecaseireland.ie/ 4. Kayle Crosson, ‘School Students Call for Climate Protest Next Month’, Green News.ie, 1 February 2019. Available at: http://greennews.ie/secondary-school-students-call-massclimate-protest-next-month/ 5. The Stop Shannon LNG website is maintained by Futureproof Clare, a group of local volunteers, in coalition with Safety before LNG, Food and Water Europe, No Fracking Ireland, Love Leitrim, Stop Climate Chaos Ireland, Not Here, Not Anywhere, Friends of the Earth, Friends of the Irish Environment, and more. In particular, Safety before LNG have been organising against the development scheme since 2008. See Stop Shannon LNG, available at: http:// http://stopshannonlng.ie/about-us/ 14 6. Walter Willett, et. al., ‘Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems’, The Lancet, 16 January 2019. Available at: https://www.thelancet.com/commissions/EAT 7. James Gallagher, ‘A Bit of Meat, a Lot of Veg - the Flexitarian Diet to Feed 10bn’, BBC News, 17 January 2019. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46865204 8. Tony Weis, The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock (London: Zed Books). 9. The Cattle Site News Desk, ‘IFA Defends Irish Beef, Dairy Production Against Lancet Report’, The Cattle Site, 18 January 2019. Available at: http://www.thecattlesite.com/news/53693/ifa-defends-irish-beef-dairy-production-againstlancet-report/ 10. Teagasc Agriculture and Food Development Authority, ‘Agriculture in Ireland’, 2018. Available at: https://www.teagasc.ie/rural-economy/rural-economy/agri-foodbusiness/agriculture-in-ireland/ 11. Tony Weis, The Ecological Hoofprint, pp. 1-12. 12. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), p. 3. 13. Patel and Moore, History, p. 3. 14. Patel and Moore, History, p. 19. 15. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed, 1986), p. 77. 16. Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011), p. 11. 15 17. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence’, The Guardian, 7 April 2014. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/climate-changeviolence-occupy-earth 18. Ashley Dawson, ‘The Global Calculus of Climate Disaster’, The Boston Review, 6 September 2017. Available at: http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/ashley-dawson-globalcalculus-climate-disaster 19. Jennifer Wenzel, ‘Introduction’, in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. by Jennifer Wenzel, Patricia Yaeger, and Imre Szeman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), p. 5. 20. Claire Westall, ‘World-Literary Resources and Energetic Materialism’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53.3 (2017), 265–276. 21. Kevin Barry, City of Bohane (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 116. 22. Mike McCormack, Solar Bones (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2016), pp. 26-27. McCormack’s novel is referenced in multiple essays in this issue as a kind of ‘signal text’ or touchstone for the current moment, part of the reason why the interview with the author is so apt. 23. Pádraic Fogarty, Whittled Away: Ireland’s Vanishing Nature (Cork: The Collins Press, 2017), p. 9. 24. Rory Carroll, ‘End of an Era as Ireland Closes Its Peat Bogs to “Fight Climate Change”’, The Guardian, 27 Nov 2018. Available at: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/27/ireland-closes-peat-bogs-climate-change 25. Michelle Hennessy, '“This is about heritage and tradition”: Turf cutters say the new bogs strategy won't solve the problem’, The Journal.ie, 22 December 2017. Available at: https://www.thejournal.ie/turf-cutting-3-3766317-Dec2017/ 26 Colin Gleeson, ‘Athenry Facility Would Consume Enough Electricity to Power Bray’ The Irish Times, 2 November 2017. Available at: 16 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/athenry-facility-would-consume-enoughelectricity-to-power-bray-1.3276790 27. Conor McCabe, Sins of the Father: Tracing the Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy (Dublin: The History Press Ireland, 2011), p. 7. 28. John Wilson Foster, ‘Nature and Nation in the Nineteenth Century’ in Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, ed. by John Wilson Foster (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), pp.409-39 (p.411). 29. See, for instance, John Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Lucy Collins, ‘Observations at the Surface: Contemporary Irish Poets and Marine Life’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 40 (2017), 174-93. 30. Derek Gladwin, Contentious Terrains: Boglands in the Irish Postcolonial Gothic (Cork: Cork University Press, 2016). 31. Derek Gladwin, Ecological Exile: Spatial Injustice and the Environmental Humanities (London: Routledge, 2017). 32. Readers are encouraged to listen to the 12 soundtracks comprising Morgan’s The Miracle of the One Thing at the https://soundcloud.com/eco-sound-art, with the caveat that they were not designed to experienced individually, but rather as part of a spatial installation of overlapping tracks. 17