Troublesome Ground: Farming Trees and Green Policy in Rural Ireland

Troublesome Ground presents an ethnographic account of the relationship between land and Irish upland farmers in north County Cork, Ireland. Amid the colliding influences of agricultural professionalization, forestry expansion, a global environmental crisis, and the subsequent implementation and rotation of various politically motivated projects meant to spur economic growth and simultaneously better the environment, Asselin tells the story of challenges farmers in one region face in the conflicting worlds of program payments, shifting policy initiatives, and the joint cultural and economic requirements of farming. Like many marginal regions, the uplands of north County Cork serve as a catchall geography for nation-building dreams and economic development schemes. Asselin argues that this landscape has become conceptually stretched and oversaturated, containing numerous possible futures and their inherent contradictions. Recent pressures to address climate change and declining biodiversity have further saturated these areas with potential, resulting in unrealistic expectations for both people and land.

Through ethnographic description, Asselin illuminates how ephemeral worlds of green discourse and development plans manifest in rural areas, demonstrating the lived consequences of today’s competing demands on marginal regions. Troublesome Ground is a significant contribution to the anthropology of rural Ireland while offering insights into the wider realities of conflicting development and conservation strategies in global contemporary rural landscapes.

Jodie Asselin is an associate professor of environmental anthropology at the University of Lethbridge. She coestablished the Forest Anthropology Working Group of Europe and Beyond and was a 2025 research fellow at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that examines the cultural role of forests in Irish rural landscapes and contributes to a number of Canadian rural resource-oriented research projects.