A Flavour of Drummin Bog Volunteer Mornings: invasive species removal, with cheese 🙂

Eco-creative storytelling ignites social change

It’s worth reminding ourselves,
from one community to another,
from one habitat to another,

how eco-creative practices are transferable.

If you’d like a recent, very grounded example, have a look at my latest post for the Carlow Drummin Bog Project here:
https://drumminbog.com/2026/01/18/a-flavour-of-drummin-bog-volunteer-mornings-invasive-species-removal-with-cheese/?page_id=7191

As I was writing it, I found myself reflecting on how we began transforming Hollywood Forest back in 2008, and how my eco-social creative practice slowly emerged there.

Through a lot of reading of other eco-philosophers, advice from others and hands-on forestry management learning, and slowly forming attempts at sharing a story through this Hollywood Forest Story blog, I was able to share and develop an audience through a different story of forestry, one rooted in multiple social, ecological, and economic benefits, much more beauty and birdsongg, over time.

Those same skills, I’ve learned, can be carried elsewhere.

Being “sucked in” by Carlow’s Lil’ Drummin Bog

Around 2016, near the end of my PhD, in which I was reviewing my and others’ eco-social creative practices, an architect friend asked if I’d like to get involved in a small peatland restoration project. I said no.

I had far less knowledge of bogs.
I wasn’t born here in Ireland (although all my ancestors were).
I didn’t feel I had the same depth of affinity for peatlands as I did for forests.

Then my husband was asked. He’s a peat lover and peat-stability geo-tech expert, and later became a stone sculptor. He said yes immediately, especially as the invitation came from one of my oldest friends, Alan Price.

And so I found myself getting drawn in too. Quite literally.

On my first visit to Drummin Bog, I was happily bouncing along on the springy peat, among the heather, thinking, this is great, until I suddenly went thigh-deep into a hidden bog hole! Alan, from Co. Mayo and very used to bog-walking, roared laughing. Martin had to haul me out.

That was how Drummin Bog invited me in, and asked me to help tell her story.

The work I could offer

What I realised over time was this. My contribution was not technical peat expertise. It was storytelling through my creative practice skill in blogging.

Here, I’m deeply indebted to thinkers such as Thomas Berry and Gregory Bateson, both of whom emphasised how essential it is to tell a New Story about how we live well with the ‘community of life’ and Earth systems.

That applies just as much to peatlands as it does to forestry.

I employed a creative practice I knew well, blogging. A big shout-out here to my Australian friend Dr Glenn Lucas, also known as “Dr Blog”, who identified blogging early on in his doctoral research as an ideal creative practice for fostering and archiving new stories of communities and their places, through text, photos, and video. Importantly, blogging helps develop secondary audiences too, those who live in other parts of the county, country or world (I have often had queries and interviews from overseas about the Hollywood forest project).

So in 2017, I began telling the story of Ireland’s smallest eco-creative, community-led peatland restoration project, The Drummin Bog Project. (This seems to be a theme for me… telling the story of the smallest continuous cover forestry transformation in Ireland, the smallest community-led peatland restoration and the smallest ecoversity in Ireland- (and it feels good to live by the wisdom Schumacher’s ‘small is beautiful’, especially when the whole world is entranced in ecocidal, infinite growth)

Nearly ten years later, the story of Lil’ Drummin Bog has engaged nearby schools, local residents, and in recent years, the Carlow Arts Office, the wider County Council, the County Manager, and even two ministers. That amazes me.

New stories, new cosmologies

Last year, I was fortunate to receive funding from the Carlow Arts Office to develop a new online course, called Evening Thoughts: Dark Skies, Deep Time. The course is inspired largely by the profound US ecological thinker Thomas Berry’s work and is named after one of his most beautiful books – Evening Thoughts.

That funding gave me the time and space to invite remarkable thinkers, author- educators to help me and others think collectively about the new stories we all need to radiate, including:

• Niamh Brennan (Ire.), author of The Human in the Universe
• Drew Dellinger (USA), whose poetry collection A Love Letter to the Milky Way has been reprinted six times and is beloved by eco-social justice activists worldwide
• K Lauren de Boer (USA), whose new book Sacred Earth Rising Within: The Making of a Spiritual Ecologist in a Creative Cosmos, opens what may be a new genre, auto-cosmology (and we have another 5 speakers to go!!)

These conversations are threading new ideas about cosmology, deep time, and dark skies. They are nourishing new stories, not only for me, but for anyone involved in forest or peatland restoration, those who are facilitating others outdoors, or whatever form of rewilding your own community is engaged in.

Listening to the land

I also want to acknowledge Derrick Jensen, whose book Listening to the Land (1995) first encouraged my early interest in Thomas Berry’s work and helped deepen my commitment to the Earth Charter, which Thomas helped shape over three decades ago.

I had the great good fortune to spend a few days with Derrick on his first visit to Ireland last year (Thank you Bridget Ann and Ben). Standing beside ancient megalithic stones in West Cork, encircled by low mountains, I shared my hopes of creating an online course, inspired by a similar encircled rural peatland space in rural south County Carlow, ringed by forest and hills, where people involved in Drummin Bog Project and nature connection could engage with these ideas.

Derrick told me that on one of his later visits with Thomas, how Thomas wondered aloud whether his work would be remembered.

That has stayed with me.

I’m glad to help Thomas and others’ creative cosmic ideas ‘flare forth’ as much needed new stories for a wiser, flourishing Ireland.

A question of story

So, I’ll end with Thomas Berry’s own words, because for me it also really does come down to story – we urgently need stories and storytellers of all stripes to re-enchant us on how to live well.

“We are in trouble just now because we are in between stories.
The Old Story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, sustained us for a long time.

But now it is no longer functioning properly, and we have not yet learned the New Story.” (which led him to develop the Universe Story with others)

— Thomas Berry (see the Thomas Berry Foundation )

There’s a short audio below that gives a clear overview of why I’ve gathered speakers around Thomas Berry’s later work and insistence that modern societies need a new Universe Story. The audio comes from Awaken.org and is well worth a listen.

‘Thomas Berry was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, cultural historian of the world’s diverse wisdom traditions, a scholar, author and cosmologist -an “Earth scholar”. Among advocates of deep ecology and “ecospirituality”, he is famous for proposing that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species. ‘ Thomas inspired ecojurisprudence (Earth Law/ Rights of Nature and how we must re-enchant education too) and his wisdom echoes in the preamble of the Earth Charter.

PS If you’re in County Carlow, we have another Drummin Bog volunteer morning coming up on Sunday, 15 February 2026. There will be tea, excellent Carlow-made cheeses on the bog, courtesy of our jazz-loving cheesemonger friend Cormac Larkin, and all are welcome. Subscribe to the Drummin Bog blog here

Dogs will need to stay at home, as wild birds are nesting.
We’ll also be planting a new native hedge at the entrance, thanks to some gifted plants. It’s great to be doing some hedgework again, too.

But that, as ever, is another story (of my first eco-work in Ireland nearly 30 years ago- the Crann Hedgerow Local Project from 1995).

PPS My thanks to others connected with Haumea Ecoversity who, like me, have been inspired by Thomas Berry’s inclusive intergenerational vision – especially Caitriona Boyle, Niamh Cunningham, Sr Mary Carmody – An Gairdin Beo Carlow, Angelina Foster, Tanya LeCon, Thomas Duffy, and also to Peter Blaze Corcoran, Mirian Vilela (co-recipients of the Thomas Berry Award), Sam Crowell and Michael Bracken.

We are halfway through the Evening Thoughts course. If you are really keen to join us, you still can from wherever you are (people have access to the materials and guest speaker talks for a year).

Also, another announcement – the doors are now open to join Haumea Ecoversity for the new year – this is my soul heart work, being in community with others wishing to employ their hearts, minds and hands for a better world. Read more here (we are looking at taking things slowly, ‘making light’ and getting clarity for the new stories we are telling 🙂

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