Ciara Murphy Ciara Murphy is Environmental Policy Advocate at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. She works on influencing policy change at a national level as well as focusing on community-based local initiatives. She holds a PhD in Environmental Microbiology from UCD. INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICAL, ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIETAL CONTEXT The green wave – the… Read more »

Niall Leahy SJ Niall Leahy SJ is the Director of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. Before entering the Jesuits he worked in the financial services sector and qualified as a Chartered Accountant. Since joining the Jesuits he has gained degrees in philosophy, education and theology with a focus on eco-theology. After ordination he… Read more »

Angela Kenny Angela Kenny is Advocacy Manager at FoodCloud. After an early career in advertising Angela changed direction and is now focused on advancing climate policies to protect our precious planet, for our current and future generations. On a damp morning in Dublin, volunteers at a local community centre gather around crates of bread, fruit,… Read more »

Divya Ravikumar-Grant in association with Professor Saoirse Nic Gabhainn and Professor Colette Kelly Affiliation: Health Promotion Department, University of Galway Divya Ravikumar-Grant is an assistant lecturer in health promotion and nutrition at ATU Sligo. She is a registered dietitian with a master’s in health promotion. Divya has also worked as a researcher on several health… Read more »

Edmond Grace SJ Edmond Grace SJ is a research fellow with the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. He studied theology in the Milltown Institute, law at Trinity College Dublin, and Columbia University. He is the author of Democracy and Public Happiness, Advisor on Citizen Participation on The Wheel, and former Secretary for Ecology in… Read more »

Fintan Lyons OSB Fintan Lyons OSB is a monk of Glenstal Abbey. His publications include Martin Luther: His Challenge Then and Now; Food, Feast and Fast: From Ancient World to Environmental Crisis; The Persistence of Evil: A Cultural, Literary and Theological Analysis; and The People’s Celebration of the Eucharist. Issue 98 of Working Notes was… Read more »

Ruby R. Alemu Ruby R. Alemu holds a PhD in Theological Ethics from Aberdeen University. Her recent thesis The Cries of the Animals: Integral Ecology After Laudato Si’, explores missing nonhuman animals in the encyclical through the perspective of ‘anthropocentrism’ and the Thomistic and Franciscan influences of Laudato Si’ and Catholic Social Teaching. She has… Read more »

Judith Russenberger Judith Russenberger, Christian Climate Action, is a retired mother of three, with degrees in Building Surveying and Biblical Studies, and a member of the Third Order of the Society of St Francis. Her activism has included weekly vigils outside the British Parliament, Lloyds of London, and the headquarters of Shell and BP. Her… Read more »

Mariana Silva Mariana Silva is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, working with Bord na Móna and the Environmental Protection Agency on bog rehabilitation. INTRODUCTION: GENERATION Z, GENERATION LAUDATO SI’ I am a 26-year-old Catholic peatland ecohydrologist. My faith formation, among other Catholics of my generation,1 has been indelibly influenced by Pope Francis’ ecological… Read more »

Davide Dell’Oro SJ Davide Dell’Oro, SJ is an Italian priest of the Society of Jesus. He is currently a visiting scholar at Politecnico di Milano, where he researches building decarbonisation and climate change mitigation and adaptation. He has a Ph.D. and an MSc in Civil Engineering-Architecture from Politecnico di Milano. He was a visiting scholar… Read more »

“…the reach of the present extends into the far future.” [1] Henry Shue Introduction Some truths bear repeating. First, we were all once the “future generations” ourselves, existing only as potential until the day we were conceived and born. Second, each of us will most likely, at some point, meet someone from the future—whether our… Read more »

Dr Mark Mellett Vice Admiral, Dr Mark Mellett was Ireland’s highest ranking military officer, Government’s Principal Military Advisor and member of the National Security Committee and the EU Military Committee. He now runs his own company Green Compass advocating for sustainability and is Board Chair of the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority and Sage Advocacy. INTRODUCTION… Read more »

Deborah Burton and Dr Ho-Chih Lin Deborah Burton is one of the co-founders of Tipping Point North South, a non-profit set up by former debt, trade and tax justice campaigners to work across both the creative and NGO sectors through campaigns, events and cinema documentary production. She leads on Tipping Point North South’s primary policy/advocacy… Read more »

Every time you go from one neighbourhood and enter another and see an inequality and say ‘that is the way it is’ you are calling that which is demonic, natural.

Written by Prof. Patrick Brereton Prof. Patrick Brereton is an emeritus Professor at the School of Communications at Dublin City University. His most recent monograph was Essential Concepts of Environmental Communication: an A-Z Guide (London: Routledge, 2022) and he was one of the editors on the important Palgrave volume, Ireland and the Climate Crisis (2020).… Read more »

When compared to the rest of Europe, Ireland is rated as one of the worst countries for ecological integrity with our diminished diversity of larger fauna and the dominance of land use dedicated to grazing further reducing the complexity and diversity of our landscape. Whatever way we look at it, the state of Ireland’s biodiversity leaves a lot to be desired. But why should we care?

I have suggested that rehabilitation is a noble pursuit because it is a creative act and requires vision and imagination. But these insightful essays, taken as a whole illustrate that rehabilitation is an act of hope.

Over the last twenty years, there has been a remarkable and well-documented collapse of children’s engagement with nature – nearly as fast as the collapse of habitats and environmental resources in the natural world itself.

Reading these essays, the threads that interconnect the different elements of care in our society are clear. When you lack care for one aspect of existence it is easy to imagine this seeping into all other areas.

As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has recorded, between 1990 and 2010 there was a fairly consistent level of global forced displacement of between 30-50 million people per annum. However, the past 10 years have seen a significant increase in all forms of forced displacement, defined by UNHCR as displacement resulting from “persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order.”

The first Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan, described the economic policy of the nascent State as one of “helping the farmer who helped himself and letting the rest go to the devil.”[5] By 1926, agriculture accounted for 32 per cent of GDP and 54 per cent of workers were employed on farms or in the food processing industry.[6] This, then, is the context in which we might consider environmental policy at the founding of the State and in subsequent decades.

The Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), is also known as the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat. On Earth, there are over 2,200 rodent species comprising about 40 per cent of all mammal species. What’s one rat?

“I tried to raise the point of who was Edward Colston, and why are these people saying the statue needs to come down? I was just floored, basically told to shut up, and that these people protesting were just ignorant and stupid. So, I just sat there crying silently and just feeling ostracised and disappointed because the other students were also not educated. So that’s where some of this began.”

Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice · Do We Really Feel Fine? Towards An Irish Green New Deal The Problem: The Centre Cannot Hold The world as we know it is falling apart, but in a thousand different ways. A pandemic rages, but contrary to what the dystopian movies taught us, society is intact. Climate… Read more »

“…sustainability is not an individual property but a property of an entire web of relationships: it involves a whole community” – Fritjof Capra Introduction Climate change and biodiversity loss are crises that not only put ecosystems, but also human societies at risk. Our present mainstream sustainability thinking discusses the compromises between the three pillars of… Read more »