Transcript Sinead Mercier #envucc 2016

Understanding Fairy-fort
Destruction in the
Modernist Lawscape – A
Lesson for Climate
Action
Sinead Mercier
Philip Lee
Consultant in Climate Change
and Environmental Law
Brian Friel’s Translations
• Terra Nullius: 1820s Ireland the
first colony to be mapped by the
English state
• The Ordnance Survey: A military,
economic, scientific campaign to
map the landscape in a readable
format
• A parable of the harm high
modernist ideology can wreak on
local metis and knowing
• The importance of language in the
sustenance of place, identity and
memory
• Making a home in the new
language
Language ‘Speaks’
Living in the new language of modernity and abstract space required
a cutting away of the people and meaning of land
Does law do the same?
When operating in environmental and heritage law we must ask – in
what conditions does it presuppose to be effective?
The Spatial Paradox of Environmental
Law
• Law is predominately a creature of the
enlightenment and must write the world in its
language
• Nature becomes dephysicalised, dead matter,
rendered seen only in terms of scientific or
capitalist rationalities – bundles of rights.
• Environmental Law then has no subject - it is at
once everything and nothing
• ‘Hot Law’ - Wracked with controversy
‘Man’ and Nature
• The environment
‘environs us’
• The self is static, selfsufficient on a pin in the
centre of the world with
nature in dynamic
arrangement around it
• Humans are undivided,
autonomous, rational
with clear boundaries of
self, body, mind
The Origins of Environmental Law:
Sacred/Profane
• Dominion over nature: • Nature as ‘Web of
Abrahamic religions and Life’: precious,
the Enlightenment e.g.
inviolable
Francis Bacon
• Interconnected,
• Colonialism: Nature as
acquisatory commons
resource - ‘sustainable • Scarcity in heritage and
development’
the natural world is
• Today: ‘Natural Capital’
socially produced
– force a financialised
through Malthusian
nature to compete with
factors of human
in the consumptive
overpopulation and the
frame that has led to
laboring poor’s struggle
climate change
for existence
‘High Modernist Ideology’
• States sought to
create resources from
nature and
populations from
people (James Scott)
• Known, linear,
standardized,
regulated =
productive
• Systems of knowledge
codify the world and
enter all processes
into one abstract,
instrumentalised
objective rationality
• Dissolvent rationality
against competing
frames of thought
The Lawscape
• A spatial cartography that renders all beneath it
‘fixed’ by the eyes of the powerful.
• Nature is brought into being and becomes the
‘inert background for the unfolding of the human
saga’ (Escobar)
• Desphysicalised to suit an increasingly
financialised economic system
• Mal-physicalised through rationalised ‘biodiversity’
• Heritagised to legitimate the state through which
these actions must be implemented
• Law creates a economic rationalities where realworld environmental and human costs become
‘unforeseen negative externalities’
• Yet, by virtue of its neutral status, law
dissimulates itself creating an atmosphere that
enables operation beyond black-letter
• Nation-state and market doctrines are
disembodied, presented as innocent and
objective – informally and formally slicing and
producing bodies
The Lawscape
The Spatial Turn: ‘There is no Outside’
(Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos)
• Earth as natura naturans: All things produce in the
Livingness of the World
• Life/Nature is a swarm of productive, vibrant matter
with a ‘recalcitrant materiality’ of its own (Bennett)
• Dynamic relationships: Humans operate in a web of
multiplicity, amongst, within and through intimate
interconnections
• A holistic, enfolded concept where ‘the us and the it
slipslide into each other’
Thing-power:
An inherently ecological Being-in-the-World
Other Spaces and
Poetic Dwelling
• Society creates spaces of
subversion where the
lawscape dips and shows its
face
• The alien, inherent
unknowability of nature – A
source of solutions that
enables us to redraw our
maps
• Letting-dwell: where the
constant accountancy and
exploitation of modernity
halts
• Land is physicalised through
sense of place of place
The Official Analysis?
• No law protecting archaeological
sites or environmental features
pay attention to their being
‘fairy-forts’
• This trend is also present in
newspaper and NGO reports
• This is despite the understanding
of fairyforts being highly
significant in their protection
and reporting to Gardai
• Attitudinal surveys show
“farmers can see no
circumstances in which they
would remove an archaeological
site occurring on their lands”
(O’Sullivan 2010)
• The majority of ring-forts
remain, despite existing on
prime arable land
The History of Irish Environmentalism:
‘Fear of the Collective’
• A conflict between ‘growth-based ecological
modernisation’ v. ‘grassroots localised ‘rural
populism’ (Tovey)
• Official environmentalism: Influenced by the UK
and EU ‘cultural modernisation’ finally ensured
appreciation for visual amenities, historical
residues, ecological complexes
• NIMBYISM, Celtic Tiger entitlement, ‘Bungalow
Blitz’, exclusive place-orientated Irish identity,
neo-colonial arguments
Beyond ‘Environmentalism’ Unaccounted Concepts
• ‘I said I don’t want money to
protect the corncrake. I love
the corncrake I said and I’m
not going to cut the grass
until the corncrake is finished
with it.’ (Mayo farmer)
• ‘Trying to separate the
natural from the cultural
heritage in the Burren is
futile, it is one and the same
thing’ (Heritage Council)
• ‘Love of the land and love of
the place’ (Shell to Sea)
Do fairy-forts survive in spite of local
people or because of them?
• Acceleration of destruction increased after accession to the EU
• Agricultural payments linked to ‘good farming practice’ and
environmental protections - developed by and aligned with the
knowledge of official experts
• Little to no change until Field Monument Advisor Scheme in 2004
– Now Aran Islands and Burren ecosystems – push towards High Nature
Value Farming (Heritage Council)
The technologies of the Enlightenment – Accountancy/
Law/Economics cannot represent or even acknowledge
these perspectives
• Such rationalities are increasingly the dominant structuring
elements of environmental protections today
• These cannot be expressed in environmental terms
because they are not ‘environmentalist’, that is, their
mentality is not that of ‘environs us’
Magic is rooted from legitimate discourse ‘sparing
no remnant of metaphysics apart from the
abstract fear of the collective from which it arose’
• Law, environmental scientists,
archaeologists and folklorists all
neglect fairy-legend’s influence
in the protection of the
environment and heritage
• Irish law takes its understanding
of these monuments from
experts, not local residents
• Their significance to the majority
of the Irish population is ignored
• Irrational beliefs that threaten
the system, allow ‘other spaces’
of productive thought and
imagination to flourish must be
rooted out, not by the ‘fire and
the rack’ but abject dismissal as
superstition
Climate Change: Do
not fear the
Collective
• Aarhus: Environmental Rights as Process Rights:
Participatory practice cannot work without acknowledging
and examining how law structures its subjects, or indeed,
creates its objects.
• Inclusivity and collaboration also requires a reexamination
of deep-rooted dismissals of alternative ways of seeing
• Powerful emotions erupt - finding no home in official
environmentalist discourse and so no avenue in law
• Empowered, local, collaborative communities are a rich
source of solutions – devolved governance as solution