In this new series of four podcasts host Gill Plunkett explores the long view of climate change by interviewing the authors of 'Climate and Society in Ireland'. We talk about hunter gatherers, disease, poetry, weather events and consider our future vulnerabilities. In episode 1, John Sweeney considers the challenging interaction between climate and society from the nineteenth century to the present, arguing that while throughout most of its history, Irish society was a prisoner of climate as mediated through the necessity of a harvest surplus, the relationship is now reversed: in a global context, climate is now the prisoner of people. John Sweeney is Emeritus Professor in the Geography Department at Maynooth University. 'Climate and Society in Ireland' is a collection of essays, commissioned by the Royal Irish Academy, that provides a multi-period, interdisciplinary perspective on one of the most important challenges currently facing humanity. Combining syntheses of existing knowledge with new insights and approaches, contributors explore the varied environmental, climatic and social changes that occurred in Ireland from early prehistory to the early 21st century. The essays in the volume engage with a diversity of pertinent themes, including the impact of climate change on the earliest human settlement of Ireland; weather-related food scarcities during medieval times that led to violence and plague outbreaks; changing representations of weather in poetry written in Ireland between 1600 and 1820; and how Ireland is now on the threshold of taking the radical steps necessary to shed its ‘climate laggard’ status and embark on the road to a post-carbon society. The book is available from our website: www.ria.ie/climate-and-society-ireland

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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