Seamus Heaney’s Environmental Poetry: Conservation Causes, Deep Time, Shifting Scales, and Climate Change

This chapter delves into Seamus Heaney’s archives, unearthing manuscripts, limited edition publications, and environmental documents that reveal Heaney’s support for conservation causes. Although Heaney is often interpreted as an ecopoet, and there has been promising, recent work on his climate change poetry, no previous scholars have mentioned his support for environmental projects. This research thus aims to expand readings of Heaney as a poet of place, nature and environment, towards an understanding of his work as a public intellectual engaged with issues including bog conservation, resistance to a new road, and the protection of birds. The ‘deep time’ of the distant past and far future haunts Anthropocene culture, and this may give rise to an ethic of care that aims to protect fragile, ancient environments for the future. I analyse Heaney’s celebrated bog-poems through the lens of the Anthropocene’s preoccupation with ‘deep time’. The bogland is a highly significant focus for Heaney, and his poems examine vast systems of climate, the water cycle, glaciation and geology. Archival drafts reveal new insights into Heaney’s awareness of water pollution, peat as a fossil fuel, extinction, and that his conservation activities focused primarily on boglands. I build on the work of David Farrier, Brendan Corcoran and others, who read Heaney’s published work in the context of Anthropocene studies. The chapter also develops a line of enquiry that scholars such as Maureen O’Connor and Benjamin Gearey have raised; this complicates Heaney’s early celebration of peat cutting, by showing that Heaney came to understand that peat extraction could damage the bogland. I propose that this might be why he used his celebrated bog-poems to raise funds for later bog conservation projects. With reference to theories of environmental cosmopolitanism, earth systems and planetary ways of seeing in the Anthropocene, I then analyse his images of the planet, in conservation documents and later environmental poems.