“…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.”