Chapter 4 - Narratives of Arboreal Landscapes

Summary

This chapter provides us with a rich historical trajectory that begins with the catalogue of trees found in Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth-century epic poem The Faerie Queene, in which Irish forests, following a well-established English rhetorical tradition, are politicized as hiding places for Irish rebels and threaten the sanctity of the English plantation. The chapter is especially interested in analyzing the complex history of Irish deforestation in literature. Anna Pilz notes that “For Spenser and his contemporary planters, the reality of Ireland’s woods presented a threatening wilderness, precluding any form of surveillance, resulting only in chaos and danger.” She then traces later narratives about deforestation through the writings of Lady Morgan, Maria Edgeworth, and Emily Lawless, which strike new avenues for Irish Environmental Humanities scholarship, before culminating in an astute critique of the Irish government’s “Climate Action Plan” published in August 2019, which announced that “it aims to mitigate [aspects of] the climate crisis by planting 22 million trees per annum over the course of the next twenty years.