Making your VOICE heard on the Irish environment

Never heard of the Plenitude Economy? Neither had we before we watched this great little video from the Center for a New American Dream.

This fun animation provides a vision of what a post-consumer society could look like, with people working fewer hours and pursuing re-skilling, homesteading, and small-scale enterprises that can help reduce the overall size and impact of the consumer economy. Narrated by economist and best-selling author Juliet Schor (http://www.julietschor.org).

The shorter work week reminds us of the New Economic Foundation’s (NEF) ’21 Hours’ project, where everyone works just 21 hours a week. You can find out more about the NEF project by clicking here.

The destruction of Ireland’s blogs is a serious concern for the Irish environmental movement. It has implications for many interconnected issues such as habitats, biodiversity, energy and climate change.

Today, we have a guest post and bonus online article to our Winter Newsletter  from Brian Morris who explains why efforts to tackle the thorny issue have failed and what we must do in the future.

The Bogs: How To Reach a Just Solution

by Brian Morris

At the present moment, one of the most political hot topics in the country are the bogs if you are to believe a certain West of Ireland TD and he is right to a point. The government’s efforts to restrict turf cutting on 55 raised bogs (out of a total of 1500 raised bogs) are a dynamite issue which is facing massive political opposition. And we in the Irish Environmental movement are losing the debate. We have failed to explain the importance of peatlands, we have failed to explain how Ireland contains the best examples of peatland habitat in Western Europe and we have failed to be leaders.  For a country with such a deep connection and history of bogs, we should be world leaders in their conservation and sustainable use. Sadly we are not.  The Irish state has not even attempted to restrict turf cutting beyond a handful of raised bogs, to the remaining 15% of the original peatlands of Ireland still worthy of conservation and given the political fallout from trying to restrict cutting in a few raised bogs, it is unlikely that any further measures to protect our bogs will be brought in anytime soon.

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