10:30 a.m. Niamh Guiry.
11:30 a.m. Eoghan Daltun.
1:00 p.m. Jimmy Crowley & Eve Telford.
2:30 p.m. A Sense of Wonder (Rachel Carson)
4:15 p.m. Mother Jones and Her Children.
5: 15 p.m. Mother Jones: America’s Most Dangerous Woman.
7:00 p.m. Mary Crilly (at Dance Cork Firkin Crane)
9:00 p.m. Tribute to Victor Jara.
9:30 p.m. Songs of Protest: The Folk Music Revival.
“A Sense of Wonder”, a documentary by Kaiulani Lee about the life of Rachel Carson will be shown on Friday afternoon, 28th July at 2:30pm at the Maldron Hotel.
Rachel Carson, a marine biologist, published Silent Spring in 1962 which warned the world of the dangers of using pesticides on nature. The synthetic chemicals originally used during the Second World War were repackaged by some chemical companies for farmers to use on insects and weeds with little or no regulation. She highlighted the aerial spraying of DDT in particular.
Carson’s challenging and ground-breaking book resulted in a sustained and personal attack by the chemical industry on her findings and on her personally. However she faced down the industry, defended her work which subsequently led to a huge questioning by many scientists and citizens all over the world of the destruction of the environment through the use of pesticides and biocides in the natural environment. For her bravery, her work and her warnings Rachel Carson is regarded by many as the “Mother of the Environmental movement”.
Unfortunately in spite of growing scientific evidence of the impact of chemicals on birds, insects and vegetation the destruction has continued for the most part in spite of some governmental regulations. The ongoing loss of biodiversity and the growth of industrial agriculture is adding to the current mass extinction.
Carson quoted Albert Schweitzer as follows
“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth”
We are honoured to show “ A Sense of Wonder” which was written and performed by Kaiulani Lee, with the help and guidance of many of Ms Carson’s friends and colleagues.
Using many of Rachel Carson’s own words, Kaiulani embodies Carson in a documentary style film which depicts her in the final year of her life. As she battles the cancer, which was to take her life shortly afterwards, Carson tells the story of the attacks by the chemical industry, the government and the press as she tries to get the scientific evidence of destruction to be taken seriously by US legislators and people.
Kaiulani’s overreaching message in filming the documentary was to promote the interrelatedness of all life and the interconnection of all life. She says there has to be a shift in our consciousness and we have to know our place in the wider cosmos. We destroy life on the Earth at our peril.
Rachel Carson passed away on 14th April 1964, in Silver Springs, Maryland a few miles from where Mother Jones had died in 1930.
It is performed with humour, wit, sadness and anger by Kaiulani Lee, who has attended the Spirit of Mother Jones festivals in 2012 and 2015 and whose recent production of Fight Like Hell: – The testimony of Mother Jones is available to watch on Bullfrog Films.
The documentary will be introduced by Gerard (Ger) Mullally who is a sociology lecturer at University College Cork, specializing in the areas of environment, community, sustainable development and climate change. He also created the university-wide module in sustainability which is freely available to UCC students and staff as well as community members. This will be followed by an open discussion.
Eoghan Daltun will speak at the 2023 Spirit of Mother Jones Festival on Friday morning 11.30am about his recent book, An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding.
Eoghan was born in London, brought up in Dublin, lived in several countries and now resides on the Beara peninsula in West Cork. Sculptor and author Eoghan purchased the old Crowley farm of 33 acres with 40 acres of mountain commonage back in 2009. He talks of how the power of nature at Bofickil near Eyeries has regenerated the old woodland and helped to create a temperate rainforest on the farm.
The Bofickil woods came about as a result of neglect rather than design. The original owner, Phllip Crowley was a copper miner who worked in nearby Allihies, later emigrated in 1909 to Butte, Montana to work in the copper mines and never came back. While other family members looked after the farm, wild native forest gradually became established and when Eoghan moved in a hundred years later, he provided the protection needed to enhance the natural progress of regeneration. Eoghan had become a conservator and rewilder.
In his book he considers the state of nature in the wider context of the developing ecological crisis across the planet. He has some harsh comments to make about official European Union policy which destroys wildlife habitat and have become box-ticking bureaucratic exercises or fig-leaf solutions.
“….it financially penalises farmers who don’t remove existing wild patches on their land, while other schemes pay them to take token actions that are useless to wildlife. Strange as it might seem, what birds, bats, bees and everything else really need isnt boxes stuck on trees or fence posts, or piles of builders sand, but actual habitat.”
Eoghan cites the influence of James Lovelock and biologist Rachel Carson. Lovelock developed the scientific theory of GAIA about how the Earth’s natural ecosystems sustain the world’s conditions which are conducive and essential to life on planet Earth. By coincidence, Lovelock, a British scientist, once lived about 25 kilometres back the road at Ard Carrig in Adrigole during the period in which he developed the hypothesis of Gaia. The stunning natural beauty and raw nature of the Beara peninsula may have influenced Lovelock as it does Eoghan Daltun.
Eoghan Daltun appears at the 2023 Spirit of Mother Jones Festival on Friday 28th July at 11.30am at the Maldron Hotel in Shandon.
On Saturday 1st August the Cork Mother Jones Committee is privileged to present the film A Sense ofWonder with the kind permission of Kaiulani Lee. The film showing will take place at the Maldron Hotel at 2.30pm.
When biologist and author Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962, little did this quiet lover of the peace of the oceans and the tranquility of nature think she would be catapulted into a seething controversy which would make her name synonymous with the fight to defend the natural environment!Today she is regarded by many as the founder of the worldwide environmental movement.
Her book challenged the production by the multinational chemical industry of toxic chemicals for use in the countryside and which caused the widespread destruction of wildlife. She raised the fundamental issue of the “balance of nature” and how it had been altered by the use of fungicides, pesticides and herbicides. She asked specific questions about the DDT, which was used widely at the time, which does not break down in the environment and accumulates in the food chain.
The book was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, following the publication of a number of extracts in The New Yorker in June of that year, and had sold over 100,000 copies by December. There was huge controversy! The book was savagely attacked by the chemical industry and its many friends in Government and Big Science. Rachel and many of her colleagues defended her arguments and the debate convulsed America and the wider world.
The documentary A Sense of Wonder shows the private and human Rachel Carson in the autumn of 1963, portrayed by Kaiulani Lee, as she realises that the cancer she has battled so bravely cannot be beaten. She worries about her adopted son Roger and considers with a mixture of humour and resignation the many attacks on her book.
This film is heart breaking and poignant as she considers her final months, mired in controversy and yet she displays a steely determination to defend her book and the very future of the natural environment. It is shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler at Rachel Carson’s seaside cottage in Maine as she is about to depart for the final time.
Starring Kaiulani Lee, her performance has been described by Paul Brooks, Carson’s editor and biographer as “This is the Rachel I knew, brought to life with almost uncanny skill and understanding”. Ms Carson died on April 14th 1964.
In 1973 Rachel Carson became one of the first members of The National Women’s Hall of Fame.Mary “Mother” Harris Jones and Blues singer Bessie Smith were admitted as members in 1973.
Ms Lee will present the film A Sense of Wonder and will be available for a question and answer session afterwards.