Follow Dermot Sommers as he takes a journey through time and place mapping out the evolved relationship between Irish culture and the natural world.
In this 4×24′ min series, Dermot Sommers begins his odyssey on the south coast of Ireland during the Ice Age, and will be examining the evolved relationship between Irish culture and the natural world in terms of ideology and practical use.
The hunter/gatherers of the Ice Age relied absolutely on the ebb and flow of natural systems, a race whose culture celebrated the earth as provider. We see that relationship in the Outback, the Arctic Circle and in the work of our fishermen. As the Ice melts, the great oak forests begin to dominate.
In the Boyne Valley Dermot examines how the pre-Celtic and Celtic people of Ireland began farming the land (as in Mesopotamia) and evolved complex deities around nature, as did Native-Americans.
Despite the arrival of Christianity, pagan rituals of the earth survive and peoples’ lives still revolve around natural systems, as in the tribes of the Masai Mara and the Pacific Islands, in the folk songs of medieval England, and the tribes of the Mongolian plains. The earth practically and ideologically becomes a raw material given by God under English colonial culture, as mass exploitation begins. Towns and cities, disconnect ordinary people from nature as in the Amazon Basin, Fiji, and Northern Canada.
The Industrial Revolution provided the means and mentality for mass exploitation, though Ireland was often left behind. We see this change in contemporary China, Russia in the 1930’s, and in Ireland today. In the Free State, there is no spiritual connection with the earth, rather an idea of home and nation, DeValera’s ideal of an agrarian Catholic society, a la Poland and many former Soviet countries.
From the 1960’s Ireland is modernizing and consciously moving away from the ‘old’ agrarian connection to the land. A small New Age mentality similar to America emerges but never really takes hold. Exploitation continues under the Celtic Tiger, there is no ideological connection to natural systems, but we do now see the error of our ways, of the loss the West has experienced. Dermot looks at the arguments for and against.
Standing on the Giants Causeway, Dermot contemplates the consequences of global warming and increased population on our ideology and use of the earth. Considering the inevitable changes in the earths systems, it is not a question of can we evolve a relationship of respect and reliance, but how can we fail to do just that.
The style of the piece will be epic and exciting, a la ‘British Isles: A Natural History’ or ‘Industrial Revelations’, but with a very clear idea of how our relations with the earth are circumstantial and evolutionary and a message not just to the history and future of the Irish race, but to the world at large.
[...] How The Irish Lost Their Nature [...]