Contesting Green Extractivism and Eco-modernity in Ireland

When: Thursday, September 12th, 16.00-18.00 (Finnish time), 14.00-16.00 (British Summer Time)

Where: Online on Zoom. A Zoom link will be sent closer to the event.

Please register for the event here.

Speakers:

Patrick Bresnihan, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University.
Patrick Brodie, an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. Together, they are writing a book entitled ‘From the Bog to the Cloud: Contesting Eco-Modernity in Ireland’.
V’cenza Cirefice, an activist researcher doing a PhD at Galway University on resistance to extractivism in the Sperrin Mountains, North of Ireland. She organises with the all-island CAIM (communities against the injustice of mining) network and the Making Relatives Collective.
Louise Fitzgerald, an Assistant Professor at the School of Law & Government, Dublin City University.

Ireland is emerging as Europe’s foremost digital infrastructure complex, with 25% of Europe’s share of data centres accounting for 21% of Ireland’s electricity demand, primarily driven by the big tech “hyperscale” cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that this demand will balloon to 32% of Ireland’s grid capacity by 2026, implicating the all-island electricity system in the unsustainable energy costs of big tech. The intensive presence of these digital infrastructures has put Ireland at the forefront of experiments with digital/energy partnerships. The resulting rapid expansion of digital infrastructural systems, wind energy development and other lower-carbon technologies also combines with so-called “green” mining and extractive forestry related to the political ecologies of “sustainable” digital capitalism.

The much-heralded EU vision of “digitalisation and decarbonisation” as twin transitions essential to sustainable growth thus has special purchase in Ireland, where the infrastructural backbones of digitalisation clash directly with environmentally just visions of decarbonisation. In this context, Ireland has become a test-bed for managing the contradictions of an emerging “data/energy nexus” across digital infrastructures and lower-carbon energy generation. This vision of eco-modernity is heavily contested and maps onto persistent historical and geographical imbalances. Ireland’s investment into this “smart,” “green” and “decarbonised” economy driven by enormous multinational corporations’ contrasts sharply with the apparent “under-development” of rural boglands, agrarian landscapes, extractive sites, and so-called wilderness. Communities subject to this data/energy nexus are still struggling for a say to create their own environmental and infrastructural futures.

This EXALT Dialogue explores the emerging regimes of green extractivism in Ireland through its unequal ecological exchanges, and in particular through the lens of extractivism. Join us to explore what the EU vision of digitalisation and decarbonisation means in practice. This event speaks to developing concrete correspondence between multiple interconnected sites of green extractivism in Ireland, which extends to providing suggestions for how academic research can productively interface with environmental justice struggles. Talking us through these issues will be Patrick Bresnihan (Maynooth University), Patrick Brodie (University College Dublin), V’cenza Cirefice (Galway University) and Louise Fitzgerald (Dublin City University). They will give a short-talk (15min) on how they have tracked and documented various aspects of the so-called green transition in Ireland, which will be followed by time for them to exchange with each other, before opening up the floor for questions and answers from the audience. The event will be facilitated by Alexander Dunlap.