Maeve Higgins: Ancient Irish understood interconnectivity of life and land

The World Wildlife Fund just reported that most major animal groups have declined by an average of 69% in the last half-century, and that’s been caused by the way we treat the land.

MEDIEVAL Ireland sounds so cool to me. I have to adjust my mind to understand how, back in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, the island was blanketed in forests, which were home to wolves, deer, and wild boars. The people there came from all over the world, and didn’t live in towns or cities. The population was small, estimates vary between 100,000 to 500,000 people who were widely dispersed.

Life then was precarious, but society was functional and cooperative, capitalism did not exist.

The World Wildlife Fund just reported that most major animal groups, including mammals, birds, and fish, have declined by an average of 69% in the last half-century, and that’s been caused by the way we treat the land: extracting from it and exploiting it too much.

As we barrel into this devastating ecological crisis that threatens our very existence, I wanted to learn more about our earliest ancestors and about how they managed to live in harmony with the environment, so I spoke to Dr Elva Johnston — an historian specialising in early medieval Ireland. 

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Maeve: How did the early Irish define themselves?

Elva Johnston: They made up lots of stories about their own origins. They describe themselves as coming from Egypt, coming from Spain, or coming from vaguely somewhere in the Mediterranean.

One thing that links all of that is there is never any feeling that everybody, ethnically, has exactly the same origin. They don’t think in those terms, they see Irishness more as sharing the culture of the island.

Maeve: Sharing the culture of the island, which they’re also creating?

Elva Johnston: Yes, the culture which they’re also creating, at the same time. One fascinating aspect is the way the island starts off in a sort of primordial state, and as different waves of people come to the island, the island itself comes into being. It reveals its topography, its ecology, its land use with each different wave that comes along; there’s a really intimate connection between the two.

Maeve: That makes me think of the Native Americans and their relationship with the land where they named it but didn’t exactly own it, and the land had agency.

Elva Johnston: Yes, very much so. There’s a really strong connection between the personality of the land, the personality of the people, and the personality of the governance. One of the most common images across early Irish literature is that if you have a just ruler who has been justly selected, the land will flourish. If you’ve a bad king, you’ll get storms, cattle plagues, and the crops will rot.

The landscape and the people are completely intertwined and interconnected — you can’t separate them out entirely. The other image that is used a lot is that the land is nearly always female — sort of a Mother Earth trope that’s associated with fertility.

That’s really pervasive, so when the king is chosen, he marries the land. So the people are linked to each other, and the prosperity of both are interconnected. And there’s no legitimacy without the legitimacy that comes from the land, but the land itself only exists because it has been named by people. It goes in a sort of a circle.

Maeve: We’re in such deep trouble today, rapidly losing biodiversity and losing species, I wonder what we could learn from the early Irish?

Elva Johnston: One thing that really shines through for me in nearly all of the material is that efforts are cooperative. I’m not going to pretend that the society was utopian because it was very far from that, it was based on a lot of inequality. But there’s the sense that resources have to be managed cooperatively, whether it’s through the extended family or through different kindred groups working together.

The best illustration of that is probably the management of freshwater fishing. They have good technology around the construction of weirs of different types, using stone or wood or baskets or a combination of those. They realise that somebody could overfish, so they lay in limitations around the size, the scale of the weir, and how much you can fish. If you overfish, you have to give some of the catch to your neighbours who lost out as a result. So there’s the sense that because resources are limited, they have to be shared and managed together in a way which is sustainable.

Maeve: And that was laid down in law?

Elva Johnston: It’s laid down in law. There’s a huge amount of detail on that in the legal material. If I was to take one word to sum up how that system worked, I would say reciprocity. Reciprocity is the key concept. So, in order to gain the bounty from the land, you also have to give back, and it’s the same with the wilderness. I distinguish this from modern ideas around ecology, and I think there is a huge insight there in terms of this; everything can only work within that web of relationships.

Some of these relationships are with people, some of them are with resources, some of them are with animals. This creates a web of reciprocity, which was the driving force of how society not only conceptualised itself, but also how it practically managed its resources.

Professor Johnston presented a short and brilliant summary on how the early Irish stewarded the environment at the recent Citizens Assembly on Biodiversity Loss, which is available here.