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A collection such as this is without question a communal accomplishment . I cannot believe that all editors are blessed with contributors who are as patient and dedicated as those of this collection. I thank each of them for their continued enthusiasm and perseverance in writing trenchant and meaningful scholarship and for trusting me to hold their words in my hands. This book belongs to them. The impetus of this collection was a desire to wed two paths of scholarship that heretofore have not found purposeful convergence. Since the initial conception of this study, a great deal has changed in Ireland; most significantly, amidst a faltering global economy, the financial prosperity to which many of these essays allude has suffered a noticeable downturn. In such a climate, questions of environmental sustainability become complicated by immediate economic instability. It is my hope that these essays will ground us in the lessons of writers and thinkers who have taken the time to listen and to ruminate on how we might mindfully proceed in face of these anxieties. First and foremost, I am thankful to Cork University Press for embracing the value of this project. Specifically, I wish to thank Mike Collins, Sophie Watson, Catherine Coughlin, Maria O’Donovan and Pat Carroll for their incisive readings and endurance through all stages of this publication process. I am especially grateful to them for granting me an inspiring balance of guidance and autonomy, always in a tenor of professionalism and kindness. This book would not be possible if not for the collegiality and support of the leaders and members of the American Conference for Irish Studies and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. I am humbled by the encouragement of respected scholars whose work xiii Acknowledgements inspired this book from the start. I thank Jim Rogers of the New Hibernia Review and current President of the American Conference for Irish Studies whose support of my professional work has been abundantly generous, and who when I emailed him about such a collection responded with a subject line ‘Go for it!’ I am grateful for the astute contribution of John Elder, a founding scholar of ecocriticism and narrative criticism whose gracious engagement with this project is testimony to all the ways it has surpassed my hands. I thank Tim Robinson who sacrificed valuable time to help a novice scholar of place learn how to listen to why words matter to how we live and dwell. I thank Rachel Brown for agreeing to allow her photography to grace this cover. Her vision of nonhuman nature reminds us of its depths and its grandness and thus offers a fitting lens for this study. I thank Interdisciplinary Study in Literature and the Environment, The Gallery Press and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism for permissions to reprint their works so that we might continue important conversations. Though removed by time and space, the influence of my early mentors is a daily part of my imaginative space. Nearly a decade ago, scholars Linda Kinnahan, Magali Cornier Michael and Anne Brannen of Duquesne University nourished my explorations of these converging paths of Irish literature and ecocriticism, and nearly two decades ago, through example and conversation, the faculty of the English and Philosophy departments of St Bonaventure University first inspired me to pursue reflective social change. I thank my administration, peers and students at Seton Hill University for providing me with a thoughtful and supportive professional community in which to pursue my research and teaching, especially my colleagues in the English Department and the Division of Humanities. Among them, I feel that I have found my academic home. I am grateful for cherished friends who are too many to name but who amidst their own busy lives thoughtfully asked me about ‘that project you are working on’. I thank my father, James Cusick, whose lifelong dedication to the marginalised is my daily reminder of our obligation to defend the voiceless, human and nonhuman alike; my sister Beth Ruff, who inspires me by her tireless work in animal rescue and who allows me to learn from her three young boys what Rachel Carson perfectly named ‘a sense of wonder’; and my mother, Barbara Cusick, whose love guides me each day through memory and spirit. My sustenance for this project comes from all the breath and memory of my own places. I am indebted to the modest hills, sinuous rivers and storied pavement of western Pennsylvania just as I strive to...

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