Search results for ""Author Ethel Crowley""

The Land Question has always been predominant in Ireland. According to forecasts, there will be as few as 15,000 farmers in twenty years’ time. As the Irish rural image undergoes radical transformation, this timely, informative, vigorously argued book will be necessary reading for those working in rural development, food production, housing, transport, heritage and conservation, to say nothing of those who simply care about Ireland’s future. Land Matters concerns social and ecological change, the underlying results of structural and policy decisions made in Brussels or Dublin and their impact on the ground. It addresses the following themes: globalization and the forces that shape society; the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), and why it has been reformed; social inequality; REPS (the Rural Environment Protection Scheme) and its impact; survival strategies in everyday life (farm households and diversification); green capitalism; landscape, heritage and the ‘politics of perception’; nitrate pollution; migration; contrasting rural visions (housing in the country, ‘clean’ food); and views of a region – west Cork – in which competing claims are made by farmers, hoteliers, conservationists and second-home owners. Key organizations such as Teagasc, the IFA, An Taisce and Organic Trust are also examined and profiled. Land matters permeate all our lives, from our supermarket shelves to our television screens and studies, from our boardrooms to our streets, dwellings, communities and belief systems. No one will be untouched by the issues raised in this pioneering, analytic work.

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Life at Full Tilt is a whirlwind tour of Dervla Murphy s travels. It begins in Spain in 1956, before her first book, and follows in her tracks for over fifty years, including descriptions of her beloved Afghanistan in 1963, of the Peruvian Andes, of South, West and East Africa and most recently of the troubled territories of Palestine and Israel. Dervla s style of travel, to go somewhere that interested her and see who she met, made for fresh encounters every day, recorded faithfully each evening in her journal. She read hungrily to prepare for her journeys and folded her learning seamlessly into her books. Finally, between these covers, we are able to catch up with her work in its entirety. What shines through is her passionate engagement with the world and its injustices, and her utter independence of mind. Ethel Crowley, an Irish sociologist, has for the first time looked at all Dervla s writing her journalism and her twenty-four books selecting half-a-dozen extracts from each. She introduces us to a complex character, hard to pin down, but a role model for women and environmentalists, Irish to her fingertips and a crucial part of the larger English tradition of travel writing. With a preface by Colin Thubron

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