Clouds and Bogs

In March 2021, FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Patrick Brodie shared work-in-progress from his project Clouds and Bogs, and provided following description of the project:

An aerial view of a bog in of a brownish field and surrounded by trees to the left.

Image of County Donegal peat landslide by Derg Media (2020)

Clouds and Bogs is an ongoing project investigating the cross-border implications of data and energy infrastructures across the divided island of Ireland. Since the 1990s, the border separating the six counties of Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland has been opened for free trade and movement as part of the Peace Process in the north, and this includes the creation of a single energy market and, more recently, shared data infrastructures like fiber optic cables. But there are more hidden and complex cross-border implications within data and energy systems. The Republic of Ireland has long been home to US technology multinationals, and today hosts dozens of internet data centers that store and circulate data across Ireland, the UK, the EU, and North America. These facilities require astronomical amounts of energy, which in Ireland is increasingly being provided by renewable technologies like wind, as the country transitions out of fossil fuels such as the peat that it has for centuries extracted from the bogs that make up much of the island. Peat bogs exist on either side of the border, and much new data and energy infrastructure will be built on or across these unique and fragile environments.

The workshop addressed a particular instance of these developments, when in 2020, a peat landslide in northwest County Donegal caused by the construction of an Amazon-linked wind farm destroyed an intact peat bog and polluted an extensive watershed on the other side of the border in County Tyrone. The event required responses from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland governments, a process which has until now shielded Amazon from responsibility for the event in spite of praising them for their renewable commitments in Ireland.

Residents of Donegal and Tyrone were left to navigate the losses of these habitats and the livelihoods they offered, as the machinery of large-scale capitalism moves forward unchecked.