Photo: Editor Dr. Peter Doran

There are intimations that this island of Ireland, her landscapes and the communion of species with whom we belong together, are speaking to us with new clarity. There are signs that Ireland and the more-than-human are re-entering our histories as active subjects, as shapeshifters of possible futures. These intimations are both place-based and resonant with a planetary movement of movements in pursuit of life-affirming practices of resistance and radical care. We are being called to turn away from the monocultures of empire and turn towards a world that can embrace many worlds.

These intimations have the feel of a welcome disruption, akin to a chance encounter with a half-forgotten memory of a beloved, an old friend or an evocative scent. There is an emergent openness to re-enchanted ways of being and belonging to our landscapes and the Earth as we slowly come to terms with the thought that we have been living off expired or expiring stories, stories that were never quite ours to begin with. In her beautiful meditation on the word ‘Kanyini’ – a word from the Australian Aboriginal dialect of Yankunytjatjara – Nuala King writes of a ‘trembling recognition’ that Ireland, too, once spoke a language that held the world as kin: ‘We had our own web of belonging – not only in kinship with one another but with an t-anáil bheo, the living breath of the Earth. But much of that has fallen silent beneath the asphalt of progress and the amnesia of modernity.’ (Chapter 12: XX)

In praise of Dúchas: 

In that ‘Fifth Province’ of imagination, buried memories and our hearts in which Seamus Deane now rests, I see a gentle knowing smile steal across his face at this latest Field Day publication.  Essential Reading in recovering a lens through which to better analyse our environmental crisis, and a compass to help find our way back from the brink, to belonging in the living, breathing, planet' 

• Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey, Civil Rights & Rights of Lough Neagh activist, writer

This is an exciting and deeply insightful collection that brings Ghosh’s ecological thought into rich dialogue with Irish intellectuals, activists, and ecologists. The volume brings a uniquely Irish perspective to the global concern of climate change. Rooted in the legacy of Seamus Deane and the Field Day project, the book is an indispensable contribution to current deliberations about colonialism, ecology and the future of the planet.  

• Prof Mairéad Nic Craith, Institute for Northern Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland 

Building a new world – or rather a new way to inhabit the world – is a task of the imagination. We find ourselves caught in multiple snares of language, tying us to an extractive, domineering mode of being. This book brings together Amitav Ghosh’s 2024 Field Day lecture with a number of powerful responses to offer an evocative and fruitful exploration of how we might find new words and concepts to guide us on our way.

At the core of these ideas is the recognition that we need to recover a sense of enchantment toward our shared planet to have any prospect of escaping the techno-rationalist imprisonment that is taking us to global disaster. The contributions explore grounded modes of presence, based on a new eros beyond consumerism, within a revived culture of care. These encompass retrieving indigenous wisdoms, place-based co-operation with all that lives, mythologies as forms of knowing, and the revival of those endangered languages which are rooted in intimate relationships with place. A hopeful note is how well-placed Ireland is to move past the enclosures of the narrowly ‘rational’ towards an encounter with our own deep reserves of history, language, and spirituality. The learnings from the many ‘in-between’ spaces the Irish experience has been obliged to occupy may now be a great resource in the building of an ecological and just world.

• Mark Garavan, Atlantic Technological University, Sligo (Ret.) & Feasta