Talk by Robert Allen

limerick | environment | event notice Wednesday April 21, 2004 19:19 by Eoin - UL EnviroSoc eoin.oleidhin at ul dot ie

A Sense of Place: Irish Community Resistance to the Globalisation of Hazard

Takes place at 8pm on Wednesday, 28th April

Room 4, SU Building, University of Limerick

All welcome

A Sense of Place: Irish Community Resistance to the Globalisation of Hazard
by Robert Allen (first delivered at UCC, March 4, 2004, published in Blue http://www.bluegreenearth.com)

Abstract:
Irish community opposition to the globalisation of hazard - industries that pollute and poison - has gone through radical change since its first battles against state and industry in the early 1970s. After two decades of conflict, which did not prevent the globalisation of Irish society, the atavistic nature of the protest has begun to employ new techniques and different strategies. Communities are locally committed but globally oriented and wise; the issues are no longer environmental or social, they are now about injustice - and communities are beginning to realise that their sense of place is more important than anything else, if only because there is no place left to go.

Robert Allen is the author of No Global: The People of Ireland versus the Multinationals, Pluto Press, London/Sterling/Dublin, published in April
2004.

Biography
Robert Allen is a Belfast-born author, journalist, researcher, publisher and media-activist. His books include Billy, Penguin, 1986; Guests of the Nation, Earthscan, 1990; Waste Not Want Not, Earthscan, 1992; No Global, Pluto, 2004; The Dioxin War, Pluto, 2004; (and forthcoming), Ricochet (short
fiction), 2004; Rendezvous with Rousseau (novel), 2005; Ireland Unbound [with Éanna Dowling], 2005 and From Byzantium to Beal Atha na Sluaighe, 2005. He has also written several specialist reports, including Water Pollution and Sea Dump Operations in Cork Harbour: a preliminary report, Greenpeace, 1988; Air Pollution in Ireland, An Talamh Glas, 1992; Stop Legal Pollution, Greenpeace, 1993; Air Pollution: An Overview, ATG 1996; Untitled report on the environmental and social consequences of a chemical factory explosion in England, TC Publications, 1996; and Respiratory Illness and Air Pollution, ATG, 1997. He was the co-publisher and co-editor of Pobal an Dulra, a weekly newsletter specialising in eco-social empowerment, in the mid-1990s. He works as a sub-editor with the Sunday Times in London; as a co-editor of Bluegreenearth; as a media activist with An Talamh Glas, an autonomous collective based in several countries; and as a director with Seanchai Media, an information resource, publisher and agency for authors specialising in radical eco-social and social paradigms.