Rachel Carson

  We all have our heroes and it’s not surprising so many of mine belong in one way or another to the world of plants. They include gardeners, de(...)

On a stormy autumn night, sometime in the early 1950s, the conservationist Rachel Carson took her 20-month-old grandnephew to the seafront. She wrappe(...)

The passing of a controversial Heritage Bill in the Dáil that will ease restrictions on the burning of heather and gorse and cutting back hedge-rows h(...)

Between the mowings of summer winds and wrenching storms of winter, a huge mass of seaweed, rich in sugars and minerals, is cast ashore. Nature doesn’(...)

★★★★★ Spike Island, Cork These days dystopia is a cliche, and finding new interpretations for its horrors might challenge any production company. Ex(...)

In 1961, the legendary city planner Robert Moses returned a manuscript to the publisher Random House with a short, sharp note: “I am returning the boo(...)

“Which is the most ugliest?” a boy of around seven says to his friend as they breathe on the glass cabinet of a bird display in Dublin’s Natural Histo(...)

“There are no other Everglades in the world,” writes Marjory Stoneman Douglas in the opening of The Everglades: River of Grass, her very readable 1947(...)

Rachel Carson, whose great honour for her book Silent Spring somewhat overshadowed her gifts as a writer about the sea, once found a Portuguese man-of(...)

In Europe the story of Zika virus has been dominated by golfers and the Olympics. But where Zika is a more immediate health threat, in North and Sout(...)