Irish Landscape, Farming: Environmental ConsciousnessPat BreretonAssociate ProfessorHead of School of CommunicationsDublin City University (DCU) Ireland

Preamble – Farming today!

• Agriculture employment declined by 63% between 1961 and 1995

• Fall of 17% in small farms and farmers between 1991 and 2000

• ‘Celtic Tiger’ lifestyles v’s traditional values and structures of family farming/ownership

• Move from the land – transformation of Ireland• Move to bigger ‘Factory Farming’ models

Farming: Perceptions in Ireland• Positive stereotypes include: nurturers and protectors of

the land. Stoic individuals who can withstand economic and climatic pressures.

• Negative attitudes include: exploitors and polluters of the land, conniving entrepreneurs, often unsophisticated and stuck in the past!

• Ignored and not recognised as worthy of consideration; as a relic of the past v’s a new form of big business

Farming on Irish Film• ‘Up to the 1960s, Ireland had been culturally defined and

economically determined by a rural and agricultural based society. This preoccupation and even fixation had been augmented by a long and troubled history as a British colony and contested space where her people have fought for hundreds of years to regain sovereignty and ownership of the land.

• In this broad-based revolutionary project, the land[scape] was also appropriated by romantic nationalists to affirm its unique beauty and as a bulwark towards the cultural and political struggle for independence’ (see chapter in EcoSee, ed. Dorbrin and Morley, 2009).

• As a primal rural profession that oscillated between nurturing and exploitation of the land - can serve as a barometer of core ecological/environmental land ethics.

Ecology and Landscape/Farming• Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic: ‘a thing is right when it preserves

the integrity, stability, beauty of the biotic community, it is wrong when it tends otherwise’ [Old Testament]

• Biophilia (Wilson) because we evolved from nature, we still carry a part of nature in our hearts… and feel responsible for the land!

• Thoreau – wilderness is a state of mind!• From ‘Romanticism’ to ‘Environmental Sustainability’• Organic farming: co-existence v’s dominance, minimizing

environmental dangers, ethical treatment of animals etc.

Audience Research in Eco-Cinema• Gerbner et al. (1986) discusses how audiences’ perceptions of reality are

‘cultivated’ or encouraged to grow in a certain direction led by the media. • Berger and Luckmann (1966) also speak of how we live in a world literally

defined by our own perceptions and derived from the society and culture in which we live.

• The media can either mobilize nor negatively malign social behaviours (Carvalho 2010).

• Ecological risks presented in environmental films can be regarded as ‘stigmas’ to produce ‘cognitive maps’ in audiences, ‘who could relate to phenomena in their everyday spatial environments’ (Flynn et al. 2001).

• Adam (1998) further affirms that environmental problems often remain invisible if not understood for their gradual development over time.

• How environmental films can effectively trigger behavioural change by engaging viewers (Howell 2014).

Environmental Triggers for Effective Audience Behaviour

• Using Pilot Study in DCU (Brereton and Hong 2013)• Eight sub-categories were analysed including: fear, guilt,

affection for land, long-term thinking, short-term thinking, collective benefits and social capital, individual benefits, empowerment.

• Pooley and O’Connor (2000) and Moser (2007) for instance argue that besides appealing to the cognitive processes of audiences, emotional triggers are essential for securing a successful communications exchange via imagery, music and sound effects

Viewpoint 1: Rational, susceptible to both cognitive and affective triggers

• Factor analysis from the Q methodology shows four broad types of audience characteristics which are not necessarily clearly differentiated, much less only associated with particular agencies or groups, but remain very fluid and interconnected.

• Yet the varying viewpoints serve to map the range of responses suggested and include:

• 1) non-activists with rational long-term thinking and recognition of environmental consequences;

• 2) pro-environmentalists who are pre-disposed and consequently less likely to be influenced by films;

• 3) fatalists who feel guilty and powerless to change • 4) participants triggered by environmental films showing the close

relationship of people with the nature.

Viewpoint 2: Pro-environment, pre-disposed

• This viewpoint is shared among participants who are active, pro-environmentalists.

• They are pre-disposed to environmental issues and are less likely to be influenced by films since they already have fixed views on environmental behaviours.

• They appear more influenced by education and family/friends to specifically care for the environment.

Viewpoint 3: Fatalistic, feeling powerless

• This viewpoint portrays those who are to a certain degree fatalistic; who are ostensibly guilty but feel powerless to change and even for some unwilling to change their unsustainable behaviours.

• These participants are passive and not enthusiastic, much less being explicitly aware of environmental problems.

Viewpoint 4: Questioning the human-nature relations

• Participants in this factor have two distinct but connected viewpoints.

• They are triggered by the relationship of people with both positive reinforcement and negative ones.

• They are more likely to be triggered by films showing positive examples of people living sustainably and how people can live in harmony with nature.

• For participants who load negatively on this factor, negative examples such as unsustainable lifestyles reinforce with and against their intention to change behaviour.

Frugality and Irish Farming• Re-imagining Deep Ecology in Ireland?• Mark Sagoff (in Crocker et al. 1999) illustrates how early environmentalists

such as Henry David Thoreau cited the intrinsic properties of nature rather than its economic benefits, as reasons to preserve it.

• It was believed that economic activity had outstripped not its resource base but its spiritual purpose.

• John Muir particularly condemned the ‘temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism’, who ‘instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty dollar.

• This condemnation certainly was not simply a call for improved cost-benefit analysis.

• Nineteenth century environmentalists, saw nature as full of divinity and regarded its protection less as a prescribed prima facia economic imperative than as a moral test (ibid.: 28).

Community Farming

Metabolic Rift and Irish Soil• John Bellamy Foster (1999) on ‘metabolic’ relation between

humans and nature• Can Capitalism be reshaped to the demands of sustainable

development?• Postcolonial process of de-fertilizing Irish soil – The Famine• Pressures of mono-culture – versus balanced farming • Soil Fertility and pressures of ‘intensive farming’• Frugality v’s Hard Primitivism (Panofsky)

Sustainable Growth with Deregulated Farming!

Metaphors of Sustainable Growth

Man of Aran vs The Quiet Man• An authentic, albeit nostalgic, yet still frugal form of Irishness has remained

closely associated with a rural landscape. • As Gibbons suggests, Irish culture has a preference for a romantic outlook

and a form of ‘soft primitivism’ unlike the ‘hard primitivism’ of Man of Aran which was replaced by a more realist aesthetic that became more noticeable, as the dominance of the rural economy decreased.

• Like the poet W.B. Yeats’ critique of materialism, America is clearly represented as obsessed with ‘lousy money’ and materialist ambition, which drives Sean Thornton (John Wayne) back to the idyllic fictional Ireland and his ancestral home, described as ‘another name for heaven – Innisfree’.

• The nearest Thornton gets to farming the land however, is by sowing flower seeds rather than more useful and utilitarian vegetables, as his wife initially scolds him.

• Man of Aran - primal economic imperative in, where the natives struggle and eke out a hard existence on land and sea.

•

Romantic Irish Sky-scape

The Apprentice Farmer

The Field: Sheridan and Keane• Gathering seaweed – natural fertilizer - Hard Primitivism• ‘God made the world, but seaweed made the field’ –

organic/utilitarian land ethic• Travellers regarded as nomadic eco-warriors [dandelion seed

– allegory]• Without the land [we] are barren and dispersed. The land

owns/possesses and will destroy him!• Pathological ‘love’ of the land - a product of ‘Postcolonial

Lack’ as much as a ‘Deep Environmental’ sensibility

Dandelion Allegory

Commodification of the land

Farming Troubles

Therapeutic Escape

Female Otherness

Jungian Escape into the Sea

Pathologising Agency and the Land• Landscape – etched with centuries of barren wishes and

dreams but unable to satisfy basic utilitarian needs.• Productive stewardship vs industrial use proposed by the Yank

for the field• Priest: ‘such hunger for land will destroy your souls’• Allegorical epic land struggle?• Ireland’s ‘Four Green Fields’ allegory – From Political to Land

‘Troubles’• ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ v’s Cult of Private Ownership

Tragedy of the Commons

How Harry became a Tree• Man is measured by his enemies [British defined the Irish etc.]• ‘Sins of the Father’ trope dominates Irish literature and film• Parody of eco-activist or tree hugger!• Becoming symbolically ‘at one with nature’• Cautionary tale of the abuse of land as a commodity• Drawing from eco-literature and Nature Poetry• Perverse forms of hyper-identification with Nature

Pilgrim Hill • ‘This is no Rousseau-inspired bucolic idyll, nor does it call to the romantic

representations of rural Ireland of The Quiet Man. Jimmy’s silence speaks of regret and loneliness, the demands of his solitary life eased only by the occasional match or funeral, while the leisurely pace resolutely refuses to fetishise the Irish countryside or the unfolding of ‘natural’ time, placing its passage of time not as ‘serene’, so much as ‘anaesthetic’, and solidifying gradually into a picture of rural Ireland in crisis (Canning: 1).

• ‘My future is thirty acres on the side of the hill out in the back end of nowhere, with no prospects … So many people who’ve given up. And just exist’.

• The film’s final shots or the empty farm, soundtracked simply by the wind, are left to point towards an implied future of loneliness and despair, a rural Ireland which speaks only of lost youth and wasted opportunity (Canning: 3).

Concluding remarks• Cautionary tales of troubled farmers and their over

weaning passion for the land• Contemporary Irish have no direct transformative

experience of nature! [John Barry]• We must find another relationship to nature besides

reification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia. [Donna Haraway]

• Frugality certainly can be applied as a radical new way of re-framing the current hegemonic discourse of ‘austerity’; as a counter-narrative to redress the material excesses of the Celtic Tiger and its rampant embracing of conspicuous consumption.

Landscape – new environmental power for the future!• Film often contains 'moments of transcendent possibility that

illuminate profoundly other ways of being’• Brian Butler affirms, this ‘unapologetic quality of the

Hollywood narrative can serve as a therapeutic tool because of the reluctance on the part of academics to promote any positive ideals’

• ‘[W]hile academic theory has enormous difficulty articulating, much less legitimising, various foundational beliefs, Hollywood has no qualms whatsoever in promoting them’ (Brereton: 35).

• Irish Farming film can be read as valuable as artefacts for ‘seeing ecology’ and promoting a radical ethical environmental agenda embedded within imagining notions of (universal) notions of sustainability.

Irish Farming and Ecology

• I still want to believe that (spectacular) representations of landscape in mainstream Hollywood film – and for that matter more small scale indigenous Irish cinema including representations of farmers - call upon and often contain 'moments of transcendent possibility that illuminate profoundly other ways of being' and that this erstwhile 'romantic utopian impulse', expressed through visions of the sublime for instance nonetheless remains 'what Hollywood has always been good at exploiting' (Brereton, 2005: 39).

• Yet there are so many obstacles …

Dominance of Capitalist Mindset