Editors’ Introduction: Ireland and the Environment in Crisis

Abstract

Editors’ Introduction: Ireland and the Environment in Crisis* Kelly Sullivan (bio) and Justin Dolan Stover (bio) In “alphabet,” the long poem that completes Ailbhe Darcy’s 2018 poetry collection Insistence, she writes, “we are not doomed yet // juggle the numbers // some are doomed / but not the 3 of us // or not the 3 of us / just yet” (58). In a vision increasingly willing to consider the disaster of the twinned ecological crises of climate change and mass extinction, Darcy wills herself to imagine the fate that her child may encounter in that unknown future: “maybe you are suffocated / by spiking heat / and cannot make protest,” or “maybe you are taken by another person / angry and broken when scarcity thickens” (62). “Alphabet” writes back to Inger Christensen’s book-length poem of the same name and uses its structuring principle: both increase on the basis of the Fibonnaci sequence, expanding so that each number is the sum of the two that came before it (70). The Fibonnaci sequence roughly correlates to the golden ratio, and as Darcy explains, it “is inevitable, since it is found in nature” (70). The poem’s numbered sections model exponential growth. They appear fecund beyond control. And although the futures that the poet envisions for her child are not “inevitable,” the work that the volume does is vital. It accomplishes what Darcy describes of Christensen’s poem: it “expresses the leap of faith involved in thinking about a horror that is happening now but not here” (“Worrying”). Equally difficult, the [End Page 5] poem enables us to think about a horror that will happen here but is not happening yet. This task—imagining the ecological effects of human activity on our collective present and future—could well describe the central goal of the emerging field of environmental humanities. And yet the difficulty in envisioning our ecological future comes from the human desire to gather knowledge, to build a scaffold enabling anticipation. In Being Ecological environmental philosopher Timothy Morton refers to an “information dump mode” in writing about ecology and environment, and argues that we employ this mode because—like Freudian PTSD dreamers—we are trying to locate ourselves “at a fictional point in time before global warming happened. We are trying to anticipate something inside which we already find ourselves” (xxiii). Morton explains this kind of jetlag, this desire to anticipate and therefore plan for something already happening, as part of the vital experience of “being ecological.” It is “uncanny” to feel a sense of hesitation in our experiences: yet existing in the midst of a climate crisis may feel not quite real (2). Darcy’s “Alphabet” enacts the dissonance of knowing something without yet (necessarily) negatively experiencing it (global heating and extinction) and of simultaneously attempting to prepare for the future catastrophe already unfolding. Articles in this special issue of Éire-Ireland came as responses to a broad call on the topic of “Ireland and the Environment,” yet almost all of them address the question of emergency, disaster, or misconstrued stability in some way. Significantly, all of them also present responses to and historical contexts for ecological and environmental crisis, therefore offering ongoing explorations of the still-unfolding (ever-unfolding) catastrophe of Anthropogenic climate change in the distant and more recent past. Some of these essays articulate historical examples of the feeling of disempowerment that being in the midst of an ecological crisis may engender. Knowledge about environmental issues—now and in the past—can inadvertently “enhanc[e] the incapacity of things to mean anything anymore to us” (Morton 154). Daphne Dyer Wolf’s work on nineteenth-century reactions to the natural disaster of “moving bogs” offers a case study of historical ways of dealing with environmental emergency; yet as she explains, the primary local response was not to adjust behavior in order [End Page 6] to avert future disaster but instead a longing to return to everyday life. Other essays suggest an awareness of the ongoing detrimental effects of environmental degradation, particularly when caused by human conflict. In a reading of the topobiographical elements of Ernie O’Malley’s war memoir, Derek Gladwin suggests that the deeply rooted sense of place developed through...