Similarly to what happens in the Global South, Ireland is experiencing an extractive boom driven by neoliberal economic growth, which matched with poor environmental governance has paved the way for heated environmental contestation. Extractive economic policies are paradoxically related to a European green deal based on principles of ecological modernization and on the contested idea of sustainable development.
Even within the global core, rural communities are being sacrificed in the pursuit of economic growth, however far from being passive victims they have been mobilising in defense of the environment with ingenuity and passion. They have put forward proposals to contrast the environmental and social crisis by appealing to coexistence with more-than-human beings, rights of nature, localization and rootedness. These struggles have also developed strong international solidarity networks, with knowledge flowing across the North-South binary, thus challenging this dichotomy. Their work moreover is making important contributions in highlighting the limits of processes of public participation and the representativeness of political institutions, thus contributing to question, challenge and revitalize notions of democracy and justice.
In this sense, local environmental protest in Ireland carry a huge potential to signpost a friction between diverse and competing world-views and discourses about the environment and the role of environmental imagination in shaping particular practices, and how various understandings and uses of nature are regulated by pre-existing power relations. Earth protectors across Ireland challenge taken-for-granted concepts of nature within environmental debates and show the heterogeneity of meanings of the environment in the core of the Global North.

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