The agro-food industry and climate change: Environmental justice in contemporary Ireland

Critical Ecologies

In this podcast, Jennifer O’Malley discusses the complex relationship between the agro-food industry and climate change in contemporary Ireland. Jennifer describes the emergence of the metabolic rift in the context of colonial Ireland in the nineteenth century to examine the complex interconnections that exist between nature and society. This system was based on extractive economic relations that resulted in Irish labour, soil and ecology being appropriated for consumption in the imperial core. Today the implications of this process are still relevant as Ireland’s thriving agro-food industry is reinforced by political and economic forces that see nature as a natural resource exploited. The interconnecting relationship between climate change and capitalistic processes of agricultural production in Ireland can be mostly determined through complex global commodity chains which sees the relationship between Ireland’s economy, exportation and climate change as a mix of social and environmental processes that are produced and re-produced across various sites and systems with each mutually constituting the other resulting in human and ecological consequences. We need to understand that Ireland’s contribution to our planet's ecological crisis remains one of unequal exchange which can only be corrected through new and innovative reforms to our agro-food industry.