Introduction.- 1. Roads to Nowhere: Irish Roads Protests.- 2. Music in Stone: Ecomusicology and the Burren.- 3. Bogspeak: Biosemiotics and Bogland.- 4. “Farewell to Every White Cascade”: Ecological Protests over Natural Resources.- 5. Glór Na hAoise: Songs of Solidarity in the Shell to Sea Campaign.- 6. Creature Care: Irish Animals and the Ethic of Care.
Donna L. Potts is Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Washington State University, USA. She is the author of two books about poetry, Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism: The Influence of Owen Barfield (1992) and Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition (2011), as well as a book of her own poetry, Waking Dreams (2012). She lived in Galway while holding a Fulbright Lecturing Award at the National University in Ireland from 1997 to 1998, returning there on sabbatical from 2004 to 2005, and again, for a fellowship in the NUIG Irish Studies Centre, from 2011 to 2012.
This book examines how the Irish environmental movement, which began gaining momentum in the 1970s, has influenced and been addressed by contemporary Irish writers, artists, and musicians. It examines Irish environmental writing, music, and art within their cultural contexts, considers how postcolonial ecocriticism might usefully be applied to Ireland, and analyzes the rhetoric of Irish environmental protests. It places the Irish environmental movement within the broader contexts of Irish national and postcolonial discourses, focusing on the following protests: the M3 Motorway, the Burren campaign, the Carnsore Point anti-nuclear protest, Shell to Sea, the turf debate, and the animal rights movement.