Dear Reader,
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Martin (my husband) and I have very special news to share. This Tuesday, 27 October, we'll be at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) for the sold-out launch of an important new book: Dúchas: Responses to Amitav Ghosh's Seamus Deane–Field Day Lecture (edited by Dr Peter Doran, School of Law, Queen's University Belfast).
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Although the launch is sold out, the book itself is not. Its title and contents carries an important emergent, yet ancient, Irish holistic worldview: Dúchas is a rich, culturally loaded Irish word whose meanings revolve around inheritance, heritage and belonging: the property, rights and customs passed down through Ireland's lineage, but also the folklore, holistic laws for trees, lands, rivers, women the language, songs and collective memory arising from a land and its people; the sense of being from somewhere, of rootedness of Indigenous place wisdom; and the responsibilities toward family, community and place that arise from all we inherit from our ancestors and the wide community of life.

It is hard to imagine a better word for a book about what the land of Ireland herself might mean to us now.
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🎟️ The launch programme:Eventbrite: Dúchas at IMMA​
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I first discovered this new book while sharing news of, and inviting others to sign up for, the Irish Rights of Nature campaign — if you haven't signed yet, please do so here:rightsfornature.ie​

Why Dúchas matters

This gorgeously illustrated hardback (with artwork by Scottish-based Franco-American mythic illustrator Aurélie Beatley, who worked with the late Manchán Magan) gathers the island of Ireland's responses to the 2024 Seamus Deane–Field Day Lectures, held in Derry and Dublin and delivered by the eminent Indian eco-cultural writer Amitav Ghosh, the bestselling author of The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)​
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It is a book of short, potent essays rather than a beginner's guide, but anyone working in this area will benefit from knowing it exists. It shares the currents of thinking behind so many people working quietly in the background on:
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• What can today's lawyers learn from Ireland's Brehon Law system? (At last!!! Though much more is needed on this topic. I've also long thought that the holistic ecological vision of the Earth Charter echoes the holism of Ireland's ancient oral and Indigenous worldview, as Indigenous contributions from around the world are central to the Earth Charter's holistic vision too)
• A new interview with Amitav Ghosh, and 'The Wisdom in Water'
• 'The Open Island?' by Michael Cronin (I'm currently enjoying Michael's new book too, Ireland: Why it matters to be an island (2026), and coming, as I do, from another set of islands that make up Aotearoa New Zealand, my birth country, it is giving me perspectives about my home and ancestors' islands.
• A note on the rise of the all-island Irish and EU Rights of Nature movement
• 'Athaithne / Renewal' — the concluding chapter by eco-filmmaker Dónal Ó Céilleachair

Dúchas is essential reading for anyone wishing to appreciate the depth of thinking developing around the wider community of life in Ireland. Coming from a New Zealand family of Irish immigrants, I believe it will be valued across Ireland's great diaspora too, as we navigate the harms and history of colonial Ireland toward present-day efforts to build a Rights of Nature movement and more support for accompanying ecocide law across this whole island.

As Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey, Civil Rights and Rights of Lough Neagh activist and writer, puts it, Duchas is 'Essential reading in recovering a lens through which to better analyse our environmental crisis, and a compass to help find our way back from the brink, to belonging in the living, breathing planet.'
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The book is €25 (Mayo Publishers), and please do suggest a copy for your local library. You can order it here: rightsfornature.ie/duchas​

The nutmeg thread

As I got an early copy of Dúchas, over the last week I've been marvelling at how many responses in the book circle back to Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse, the very book that inspired a series in my husband Martin Lyttle's current solo stone sculpture exhibition Cornucopia? at the O'Connell Fine Art Gallery in Clonakilty (now extended until 31 October).
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I think few realise how political this series of Martin's is: he was fascinated by how Amitav traces the West's rush for humble nutmeg in the 17th century from inhabitants of Indonesian islands, pointing to the beginnings of our modern era of extractive capitalism, the machine of globalised ecocide, genocide and social injustice. Martin carved his nutmeg series in Kilkenny limestone, slowly contemplating the tragedy of globalised capitalism, entirely independently of the book's growing influence. A lovely mystery of synchronicity. See his Nutmeg Seed here.
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And if you haven't yet read The Nutmeg's Curse, I recommended it in my last newsletter, and I'll recommend it again. As Naomi Klein says, "do not miss this book".

The growing eco-cultural wave in Ireland: also co-visioned by Haumea Ecoversity members

What moves me most is that the Dúchas book doesn't stand alone. It rests on an emergent eco-cultural wave, and Haumea Ecoversity members are co-visioning significant bodies of work within it:

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• Joanna Kidney's The Future Has an Ancient Heart film (2026), foraged refreshments with the Moss Collective, and devotional talisman-making, which premiered to a sold-out event at the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, last month, and screened again just yesterday at Tinahely Courthouse, Co. Wicklow, with a talisman-making workshop. It has been an honour to mentor Joanna's brave, animist-embodied, life-affirming place-based practice over the past year.
• Grace Wells, award-winning eco-poet, essay-filmmaker and Haumea Ecoversity's first poet-in-residence, has co-visioned the important Creative Ireland / Arts Council Dinnseanchas programme through Hometree in recent years, which has this summer toured along the West of Ireland. Grace invited me to lead a discussion on art in ecology at Hometree's Summer School in 2023, and has helped me enormously in bringing essential ecoliteracy, Irish language, eco-cultural values and the Earth Charter (now translated into Irish) into six local authorities in recent years. These local authorities are in turn beginning to support creative practitioners in their regions, who in turn are using the inclusive social power of creativity to instil a holistic worldview far and wide.
• Kathy Kirwan, whose eco-social creative enthusiasm (and singing) has lit a fire across the island of Ireland, helping us all reflect on the natural and cultural heritage and community wellbeing bound up in the communal planting and harvesting of flax, and the making of linen.
• Philip Ryan, socially engaged visual artist and co-founder of Nocht Studio, explores seasonal creative activities, griet, ownership and the limits of community woodland stewardship. I first got to know Philip when he invited me to co-mentor a wonderful year-long seasonal programme of eco-cultural events celebrating Glenbower Woods and the Dissour River near Killeagh. I'm also pleased to share that Philip is my new colleague for this local authority work.
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There are many more examples of the emergent eco-creative cultural practice that is Haumea Ecoversity and the 400 people we have supported since 2019. I find myself thinking back to around this time in early November seven years ago, when I hosted our very first Haumea Essential Ecoliteracy workshop in the village hall down the road, here in County Carlow - and how the Ecological Turn is evolving.

The Great Work: Our Way into the Future

The eminent US eco-cultural historian and 'geologian' Thomas Berry foresaw this great cultural shift for modern societies. He called it the Great Work (and wrote a book of the same name). In the 1970s, he called for a 'New Story', and then realised that the new story is both new and ancient, and that modern industrial societies need a new cosmology to awaken humanity to our interdependence with our ancestors, the community of life and the cosmos, and future generations. Importantly, he saw that we would need to completely re-imagine education, the law, and economics so all serve the thriving of the whole Earth community and future generations. This is the holistic transformative learning shift at the heart of Haumea Ecoversity's work, and it is relevant to all of us in Ireland and its great diaspora.

Dúchas, alongside IMMA's significant Earth Rising events in recent years, the all-island Creative Ireland Climate Action programme that has financially supported professional creatives now threads through all Local Authorities, NCAD's Field art & ecology programme, We Are the Ark, Hometree and Haumea Ecoversity (which has supported 400+ creatives in foundational ecoliteracy since 2019), and the work of many other organisations, are all proof that the Great Work is quietly, joyfully underway on this island of Ireland.​
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It's more than fitting too that the last lines in the Dúchas book are from an Indigenous Environmental Ambassador, Casey Camp-Horinek, of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, who, like many other Indigenous people from around Earth, is inviting us back to remember our older, wiser ways:
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"A time of Prophesy has united the children of Mother Earth. Indigenous Peoples' cosmologies align in the understanding that our species is not separate from Nature, but part of an intertwining relationship that galvanizes the action to honor and recognize the inherent rights that Nature embodies. We can no longer plunder what is called "natural resources:... instead, we must protect those sacred Sources of Life fiercely. Humankind is made of Water, Air, Fire and Earth. We are Nature protecting itself"

Comhghairdeas - congratulations to everyone involved in the Great Work. We carry each other's work forward.

Cathy, Nikos and Martin at Haumea Ecoversity
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​PS: Upcoming 2-Day Conference: Becoming Terrestrial at The National College of Art & Design, Ireland (NCAD).
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​I'm honoured to be presenting my near-seven years of establishing Haumea Ecoversity,
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​'Re-enchanting Creativity for "The Ecological Turn": from regenerating Hollywood forest to fostering Haumea Ecoversity', following on from my PhD (NCAD, 2018),
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at the special two-day NCAD conference 'Becoming Terrestrial: Sites of Reworlding in Creative and Cultural Institutions'. ​
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I'm particularly remembering the prescient work of my teacher and PhD supervisor at NCAD, now Research Fellow, Dr Paul O'Brien, who was writing about art and ecology back in the early 1990s (to his more and equally important books on basic income and totalitarianism), and of so many more people since who have helped me along the way.
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If you are close by, I hope many of you can attend: bookings are open here (Eventbrite).
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​Huge congratulations to Seoidín O'Sullivan and Gareth Kennedy of NCAD's Field art and ecology certificate & diploma programmes for organising this important international event, and I'm delighted that friend and Haumea member Philip Ryan will be presenting there too.

PPS: Do hit 'reply' if any of this speaks to you. I read every message.

PPPS: Past and current Haumea Ecoversity learners: do keep a lookout for future newsletters, as there will be more occasions to celebrate Haumea Ecoversity's 7th anniversary into 2027.

Thank you!
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​Remember, Haumea Ecoversity is an independent endeavour. We'd love it if you might support a learner, become a monthly backer, or give a one-off donation.

Click here, and thank you!