Contemporary Irish Writing and Environmentalism

The Wearing of the Deep Green

Donna L. Potts

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319958972
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Europäische Literaturkritik

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.

© The Author(s) 2018

Donna L. PottsContemporary Irish Writing and EnvironmentalismNew Directions in Irish and Irish American Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95897-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Roads to Nowhere: Irish Roads Protests

Donna L. Potts¹

(1)

Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA

Donna L. Potts

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

“Sar sāntey rūkh rahe to bhī sasto jān”

If a tree is saved even at the cost of one’s head, it’s worth it.

Amrita Devi, 1730

In much of the rest of the world, including the UK and the United States, roads protests have tended to be driven by empirical factors: fears about depressed house prices, urban blight, noise and pollution, vehicle emissions, climate change , community impact, loss of historic buildings, and loss of wildlife and its habitat. Hence, the basis for Clare folklorist Eddie Lenihan’s road protest, covered by The Irish Times in May, 1999, seemed unusual: the photograph featured a heavily mustached, intensely focused man, sitting under a thorn tree of which he had successfully protested the removal for the sake of building a motorway. The accompanying story, “Fairy Bush survives the Motor-way Planners,” explained that he had been protesting the highway construction solely because it would uproot the tree, which he maintained was a “fairy bush” that marked the path used by the trooping fairies from Kerry on their way to and from battles with the Connacht fairies. ¹

The tree was a hawthorn, which in Gaelic folklore marks the entrance to the otherworld and, especially when standing alone, is strongly associated with fairies , who, according to a later source, “may exact a nasty revenge on anyone who tampers with their timber.” ² A local farmer told Lenihan he had seen white fairy blood around the bush. If the bush were bulldozed to make way for a planned highway bypass, Lenihan warned the fairies would curse the road and all who used it, making brakes fail and cars crash, to wreak the kind of mischief fairies are famous for when they are angry, which presumably is often. In Lenihan’s letter of protest to the city council, he explains, “I’ve taken many people to see this tree. I feel a responsibility for it.” ³

I kept the photograph on the door of my office back in the United States for many years, first in jest, because the expense of so much effort on a single tree epitomized the tree hugger caricature I had been raised with among evangelical Christians in southwest Missouri, and later in earnest, as I gradually absorbed the basis for Lenihan’s seemingly idiosyncratic ecological protest. As bizarre as Lenihan’s story seemed to me then, it turned out he was not at all alone in his protest, nor in his rationale for it. According to an account in the People’s Weekly, “Fairy Dust Up,” a number of other County Clare residents phoned local radio stations in support of Lenihan’s cause. The New York Times, widely revered as one of the most reliable newspapers in the United States, wrote about the protest in an article called “If you Believe in Fairies , Don’t Bulldoze their Lair.” ⁴

Although the county eventually assured Lenihan that the tree would be incorporated into the highway landscaping and remain unscathed, pranksters sawed off some branches. The tree eventually made a miraculous recovery, which seemed to vindicate Lenihan’s efforts. “The fairies are able to look after their own property,” he remarked (Fig. 1.1). ⁵

Fig. 1.1

“Eddie Lenihan” photo courtesy of Valerie O’Sullivan

Later, recounting his story to an Australian friend of mine, I discovered that Lenihan’s protest on behalf of an unseen world (he confessed that he himself had never seen fairies ) was much more widespread than I knew. She cited similar protests by aboriginal peoples intent on preserving sacred sites. And indeed, Native Americans have protested road building on similar grounds. In the midst of Lenihan’s protest, Pueblo Indians protested highway construction through the Petroglyph National Monument Park, because it would desecrate a protected area that they regarded as a church. ⁶ The 1999 reroute of Highway 55 in Minneapolis was protested by dozens of white Earth Firsters ⁷ and Native American activists—particularly Dakota—because it would lead to the destruction of sacred oaks. The Minnesota Historical Society’s archaeological and historical sites inventory cited an 1860s source that describing a burial site on a small hill in the vicinity of Fort Snelling, known to the Dakotas as the dwelling place of the Gods. The document notes the exact location and present condition of the burial site is unknown; knowledge of sacred sites was often passed down through the generations solely through the oral tradition. ⁸ A more recent protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline , in North Dakota, was also prompted by the belief that the land and artifacts on it were sacred, although a federal judge refused to halt the project over the religious objections of the Cheyenne River Sioux. ⁹

Ranajit Guha’s The Unquiet Woods , a book devoted to documenting peasant protests in India, describes sacred groves in which the traditional form of forest preservation—found all over India—was a communal agreement that no villager would harm the vegetation in any way. In fact, planting a grove is regarded as an act of religious devotion, and leaves are offered to the goddess Patna Devi (goddess of leaves). Guha cites cases of open land left uncultivated “because it had been dedicated to fairies of the forests, who were believed to come there at night to play.” ¹⁰

Nearly three hundred years ago, the Bishnoi ¹¹ women of northern India became the earliest recorded tree huggers. The Maharajah of Jodhpur, Abhay Singh, sent his soldiers to Bishnoi villages to cut trees to build his new palace. As the soldiers began cutting the Khejri trees with their axes, Amrita Devi , a Bishnoi woman, ran to stop the felling. Hugging a Khejri tree to protect it from the blows, she begged them to stop. When she refused to offer a bribe to stop them from cutting, declaring it an insult to her faith, she was killed. Witnessing her murder, her three daughters rushed to hug the trees as well and were also killed. As word spread throughout the village of Khejarli, others joined in, hugging trees in a nonviolent protest. The soldiers continued to mercilessly kill people, until 363 Bishnois were dead, protecting their beloved sacred tree. The king afterwards forbade the killing of any animals or the cutting of trees in Bishnois territories. In the same spirit, the Chipko movement of the 1970s involved women hugging trees in an effort to end rampant deforestation in Uttarakhand, resulting in a government ban on felling trees for fifteen years until the green cover depleted by deforestation was restored. ¹²

Although there has been little analysis of the rhetoric of Irish roads protests, Ireland ’s colonial history, which entailed the suppression of indigenous language as well as the oral tradition conveyed through it, parallels that of other colonized countries closely enough to justify applying postcolonial theory more broadly to their roads protests. Peter Read’s Haunted Earth examines Australian aboriginal sacred sites that have inspired protests, and Paul Devereau’s Spirit Roads explores sacred roads and pathways around the world. Devereux notes that historians are poor at studying “invisible mental structures” of this kind. However, Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India , which analyzes over 100 cases of peasant rebellions in British India between 1783 and 1900, depends on such “invisible mental structures.” Guha demonstrates that peasants’ protests are usually organized “along the axes of kinship, religion, and caste, and involve gods, spirits, and supernatural agents as actors alongside humans. ¹³ He regards “peasant” acts here as a shorthand for all the seemingly non-modern, rural, non-secular relationships and life practices that constantly leave their imprint on the lives of even the elites in India and on their institutions of government. ¹⁴

The Irish peasantry responsible for keeping fairy and folk tales and myths alive have similarly left their imprints. As with Indian protests, those of the Irish may be viewed as indicative not of a “backward” consciousness—a mentality left over from the past—so much as a nuanced response...