Rundale

By Louise Fitzgerald

This article is about differing knowledges and perspectives on how the green transition is taking place in Ireland. This transition denotes efforts to decarbonise such as the change to renewable sources of energy, as well as moves to broadly address the climate and biodiversity crisis. The spaces where the transition is being experienced in Ireland, and thus the realities of climate action, are often overlooked and denied. Mainstream discourses around the environment within media and policy spheres often run in direct contradiction to the on the ground realities of those experiencing the infrastructural and material burdens of the transition first hand. This happens both in rural and urban spaces, but this article will focus on rural places, drawing particularly on my research and other connections with communities in Leitrim. This article builds on the contribution by Patrick Bresnihan in the last issue, to explore why this is happening, what are the impacts, and how we might chart a different way forward.

Mainstream environmental policy

Mainstream environmental policy tends to frame environmental issues in terms of metrics, e.g. carbon emissions. At a national and EU level, climate policy is driven by a technocratic and technological focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving renewable energy-based targets. This can lead to the discounting of other values and concerns. Those who have internalised this dominant perspective, dismiss anything outside of this dominant framing to various degrees: as unimportant, as localism or a downright ignorance of the climate situation. 

An illustrative example of the outcomes of such a technocratic focus and dismissal of other values is highlighted by the campaign to Save Dough Mountain in Northern Leitrim. The group was set up to challenge the proposed building of an industrial wind park on an upland blanket bog. Through an Uplift petition, and other measures, the group has been seeking to highlight the community and environmental impacts of the proposed development. Such campaigns are often dismissed as examples of NIMBYism. The implication being that the concerns of these groups are both self-centred and based on insignificant issues. ‘Who are these people to block much needed climate action?,’ the response might go, with the inference that any impacts such communities face is a small price to pay for climate action.  

The ‘green transition from above’ describes technocratic environmental policy driven by abstract, quantitative metrics. This dominant approach comes into contestation with, and works to make invisible, the on-the-ground lived realities of those experiencing these policy processes and outcomes. As Mehta & Harcourt have noted elsewhere, such approaches privilege global environmental concerns over local ones, justifying top-down solutions at the expense of people and livelihoods, and don’t address the trade-offs between some people’s notions of a ‘good life’ and scientifically defined environmental limits. Given the limits of abstract metrics to appreciate place-based sensitives, and the dominance of global concerns over local ones, we could also term this Transitions from Afar.

I empathise with and recognise that many who are inadvertently or otherwise promoting such dominant logics, are doing so out of serious fear and anxiety of the climate crisis, and the need for urgent action. However, what I hope to show in the remainder of this article is that these are self-defeating logics, with significant justice and environmental impacts that, when made clear, show another approach is needed. The path to this approach is recognition and empathy with those places and people impacted by how the transition is currently taking place.

The Elsewhere

There are important considerations that are made invisible by dominant environmental policy logics. One shortcoming of this dismissal is a misreading of what is at stake, and the current impacts of the transition.

Returning to Dough Mountain – the proposed development includes 18 wind turbines of 185 metres height each, the largest turbines in Europe. Many urban and liberal environmentalists might celebrate such a development, yet this requires a more careful reading. Dough mountain is a rare and special habitat of upland blanket bog. The area is important to many species, including pine martens and hen harriers. The proposed wind turbines would entail the damaging of the bog which, as locals point out from previous cases, results in a huge risk of landslides. Locals challenging this specific development aren’t against, nor do they deny the need for, climate action, but point to the inappropriate nature, location and scale of the plan and its impacts on wildlife and bog habitat. Put another way, they share many concerns of official environmentalism, which however often works to make invisible such social and environmental costs, issues of power and contrasting visions in how the transition is being pursued.         

A fundamental issue with not looking to such rural places is a misunderstanding of the nature of the transition itself. The landscape of the Irish transition is predominantly rural, outside of the cities and town centres. This is where much of the infrastructure and mining is being located, and associated environmental struggles are taking place. Focusing just on abstract targets and dismissing environmental struggles by those facing the lived impacts will be self-defeating, because it denies engagement with the real environmental and justice costs taking place in the name of current transition approaches, as Lynda Sullivan also discusses in her piece this month.  

Contradictions

There are other insidious impacts of such routine dismissals and the denial of the on-the-ground realities of communities facing transition interventions. Much of these less visible impacts come down to the contradictions inherent in current transition approaches, which become abundantly clear when you engage with the communities experiencing the impacts. Much of my personal engagement with such communities has come through researching the impacts of dominant approaches to forestry. My research on forestry policy has gathered an inventory of contradictions. For instance, locals note the official line in policy and media centres the environmental benefits of trees or turbines. Yet, locals contrast this with the ecological impacts of forestry and turbines that locals can see and experience daily, contrasted again against the backdrop of state declarations of a biodiversity crisis. Likewise, during the time of the moves to ban the sale of turf, or ‘turf wars’, locals in Leitrim I chatted with at the time pointed at the apparent concern being shown by the Irish state for bogs, with what locals identified as the at-scale risk of state-facilitated destruction of bogs via wind turbines and forestry plantations, which have even in recent times been located on peatland.

Getting on to national commitments to a just transition, locals contrast the portrayal of projects and policies as supposedly developed in close consultation with local communities, with local communities rather feeling there has been a lack of consultation or meaningful consideration of local views in specific projects or policy development. Furthermore, communities facing the impacts of wind energy projects, point to the lack of local benefit and ask important questions about whom and what are these projects being built to serve. 

Differing Realities

Whole communities’ lived realities are being implicitly or explicitly disavowed in mainstream environmental policy and surrounding discourses. There is the sense that the mainstream media, policy and environmental discussions are coalescing to form a dominant discourse that runs in direct contrast to what communities are experiencing in spaces where the transition is being implemented. It is hard to describe the impacts of this, but there is a growing sense that people are not only being left behind by the transition, but that there are completely different worlds of knowledge and reality existing around how the transition is taking place in Ireland. People are losing trust in the legitimacy of how the official transition is being pursued, or that the proposed solutions will have any positive impacts, given that they’ve experienced so much fallout from interventions to date.

There is only so long that people can experience contradictions before trust is eroded in official policy or media discourses. The Transition from Above falls down on – and actively undermines and worsens – what it purports to address. In doing so, it also creates divisions through its inherently contradictory logics. There is a real risk that the mistrust being sown by the contradictions communities are experiencing within transition interventions will seep beyond the environmental realm. As Patrick Bresnihan outlined in the last issue, such contradictory logics contribute to the growing risk of far-right forces capitalising on the mistrust and discontent left in its wake.

Peripheral Vision

To dismiss the concerns of communities affected by environmental policies is not only normatively problematic from a just transitions perspective but is also undermining achieving an actual environmentally sound transition. The critique that rural voices in Leitrim that I have engaged with are levelling is a sophisticated one, putting into sharp relief the illusions of dominant approaches. Rural communities feel the impacts of the Transition from Above and its serious oversights and shortcomings. These voices are warning us of the multi-layered extractivism, focused on extracting profit from the earth and its peoples,  inherent in how the transition is currently being pursued, which inevitably will not achieve the environmental goals these policies purport to advance.

Many of the people I have met with deeply care about their environment, their communities, and are involved in many initiatives that are actively creating the solutions we need. However, their time and energy is now being spent on having to challenge dominant approaches to the transition, in mega-wind turbine developments, industrial forestry and mining, caught up in campaigning, petitions, fundraising efforts and legal battles.

Whilst local concerns are often undervalued and represented as unimportant in the context of the urgent need to transition, they offer essential knowledge and invaluable feedback on the failures of dominant environmental approaches. Opening up and witnessing what is happening in rural places, understanding their struggles, will lead to actual understanding of how the transition is taking place in Ireland. It can also point to ways of doing the transition differently, in more just and equitable ways.

Indeed, within environmental struggles, out of the cities, in the mountains and around the bogs, meaningful visions for how to achieve the transition are being articulated. Often, communities are against projects because they are for other ways of pursuing environmentally sound and just transitions. For instance, in Leitrim, there are visions for rural futures and livelihoods based on environmentally sensitive travels and tourism, community energy, organic agriculture, care for species, heritage and habitats and a deep connection to place. These visions offer us an alternative way to approach the transition, embedded in very different ways of relating to our environments, and each other, based on relations of care, placed-based sensitivities to local contexts, for navigating just and environmental care-ful ways out of the climate crisis.