Dr Liam Leonard Senior Editor: Ecopolitics Online Journal

http://www.ecopoliticsonline.com/
Liam Leonard is a Lecturer in Sociology at Sligo Institute of Technology, Ireland, and was formerly the Visting Scholar with the SSRC & Environmental Change Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has been a Contracted Lecturer with the Department of Political Science and Sociology NUIG. His research interests are: Social and Environmental Movements; Case Study Methodologies; Environmental Politics, EU Environmental Policy and Responses; Political Theory and Policy Formation; the Politics of Communications Technology and Protest; Environmental Policy and Management; Rural Discourse and Community Interaction with the Landscape; Resiliency Building through Participation: Community Access to 3rd Level. Disabilities Rights & Activism.

Dr. Liam Leonard is a lecturer in politics and sociology and environmentalism, author, journalist and political activist and has published articles in academic journals and the news media in Galway, Ireland.
His main interests include social and environmental campaigns, access and social inclusion, community development and local politics. Originally from Philadelphia in the United States, he has lived in London and Dublin but has resided in Galway for the last seventeen years. A lecturer in environmental politics and social movements at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), he has also participated in the University's Access and Disabilities programmes. Conferred with a Phd degree at NUI Galway in 2005, where he completed his doctoral thesis on anti-incineration campaigns in Ireland. He has worked as a researcher for the Environmental Change Institute at NUIG, through the HEA's Social and Economic Research Group. Dr. Leonard is the Visiting Scholar at the Social Science Research Institute. Dr Leonard is the Founder and Senior Editor of the Ecopolitics Online Journal http://www.ecopoliticsonline.com/ which aims to highlight interdisciplinary studies which focus on environment and community in the following fields: environmental and rural studies, social geography and social capital, social movements and civil society and utopias and ecotopias. Volume 1 Number 1 of Ecopolitics on ecotopias and green living was published in November 2007. He is also editor of Greenhouse Press, the Galway based social and environmental outlet for academic peer reviewed publications.
Dr. Leonard is the author of numerous academic articles, and books, including; Politics Inflamed (Greenhouse Press/Choice 2005), Green Nation (Greenhouse Press/Choice 2006), and the Environmental Movement in Ireland (Springer 2008). Each book has contributed to the development of Dr. Leonard's theory of 'rural sentiment' as a contributing factor in environmental disputes where rural communities resist the infrastructure of modernization. He is editor of a special edition of the Environmental Politics Journal on this topic, due for publication as a journal and book by Routledge in 2009.
Books:

1. Politics Inflamed: ISBN-10: 1905451024 Over the last decade, the crisis in waste management in Ireland has led to a number of disputes about incinerators, landfills and recycling centres. In recent years, the state’s regional waste plans have been contested by local communities concerned about health risks on one hand, and the democratic process on the other. Politics Inflamed: GSE and the Campaign Against Incineration in Ireland looks at one such regional dispute, that of the campaign of Galway for a Safe Environment, which challenged the inclusion of incineration as an option in the Connacht Waste Plan. This study places GSE’s campaign within a wider context, identifying that dispute as part of a larger conflict between communities and the state which has its origins in the anti-multinational campaigns of the 1970’s and 1980’s. This book traces the emergence of a second strand of anti-infrastructural protests which have emerged in the post ‘Celtic Tiger’ era of boom and mass consumption, following GSE’s campaign from its inception through to its major points of political leverage such as influencing the rejection of the CWP, and their attempts to extend that influence during the 2002 general election. Politics Inflamed makes a significant contribution towards the development of an understanding of the mobilisation of an environmental protest in modern Ireland, tracing the key moments of that campaign, while identifying the opportunities and constraints faced by protest groups and political figures due to the nature of the Irish political system. In so doing, it opens up a debate about the relationship between local populist discourse and the formal political sector.
2. Green Nation: ISBN-10: 1905451113 Ireland’s recent social history has been characterised by a series of environmentally based community challenges to multinational plants or infrastructural projects. These community responses are formulated from a populist rural sentiment or localised sense of place, that has been mobilised over the decades in which Ireland has undergone a dramatic transformation from a primarily agrarian and rural society to that of an industrialised economy obsessed by rapid growth and development. Green Nation: The Irish Environmental Movement from Carnsore Point to the Rossport Five examines a number of the community-based campaigns that have come to make up a grassroots environmental movement in a changing Ireland. Starting with the “No Nukes” protests at Carnsore in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Green Nation traces the emergence a nascent ecopopulist movement that has witnessed a number of campaigns including anti-mining protests at Tynagh, Donegal and Croagh Patrick, anti-toxics activism in Cork, the heritage dispute at Mullaghmore, the campaigns against incineration in Galway, Meath and Cork, the anti-roads protests at the Glen of the Downs, Carrickmines and Tara/Skryne and the ongoing campaign of “Shell to Sea” in Mayo which gave rise to the incredible story of the “Rossport 5”, who were imprisoned for seeking justice for their community in North Mayo. Green Nation examines the mobilisation and framing processes undertaken in these disputes, locating them in the context of a wider rural identity that has shaped grassroots environmentalism in the Irish case.
3. The Environmental Movement in Ireland ISBN-10: 978-1-4020-6811-9 Collective responses to Ireland’s dramatic transformation from a primarily agrarian and rural society to an industrialised economy obsessed by rapid growth and development occurred in two phases: Phase One took place between the "No Nukes" protests of the late 1970’s when campaigns targeted multinational plants or infrastructural projects perceived as a pollution threat during years of economic stagnation. Phase Two occurred after economic buoyancy was achieved, as the demands of rapid growth threatened communities, the environment and Irish heritage in the face of major infrastructural projects such as roads, incinerators and gas pipelines. Starting with the Woodquay protests in Dublin, the "No Nukes" protests at Carnsore Point, the "Shell to Sea" campaign in Mayo and the campaign to save Tara from destruction, these significant ecological campaigns, based on the community’s localised sense of place or rural sentiment, have formed the response to these challenges which are analysed here using social movement theories such as resource mobilisation, political opportunity, framing and event analysis.
4. Environmental Movements and Waste Infrastructure ISBN-10: 0415458692 As rates of consumption grow, the problem of waste management has increased significantly. National and local waste authorities seek to manage such problems through the implementation of state regulation and construction of waste infrastructure, including landfills and incinerators. These, however, are undertaken in a context of increasing supra-state regulatory frameworks and directives on waste management, and of increasing activity by multi-national corporations, and are increasingly contested by activists in the affected communities."Environmental Movements and Waste Infrastructure" sheds new light on the structures of political opportunity that confront environmental movements that challenge the state or corporate sector. A series of case studies on collective action campaigns from the EU, US and Asia is elaborated in order to illuminate the similarities and differences between anti-incinerator protests within different states. Several contributions share a concern about cross-border or transnational waste flows. Each case study looks beyond its initial local frame of reference and goes on to interrogate assumptions about nimbyism or localism, demonstrating the wider linkages and networks established by both grassroots campaigns and state and multinational agencies. This book will also be published as a special issue of "Environmental Politics".
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Publications:

Leonard, L. (2007) The Environmental Movement in Ireland Dordrecht: Springer http://www.springer.com/978-1-4020-6811-9
Leonard, L. (2005) Politics Inflamed: GSE and the Campaign against Incineration in Galway. Irish Greenhouse Press Ecopolitics Series Vol.1. Drogheda: Choice Publishing.
………… (2006) Green Nation: The Irish Environmental Movement in Ireland from Carnsore Point to the Rossport Five. Irish Greenhouse Press Ecopolitics Series Vol.2. Drogheda: Choice Publishing
Leonard, L. 2002 - ‘Politics of Protest: GSE’s Campaign against Incineration. Review of Postgraduate Studies Vol.10, NUI Galway
____2003 - ‘Communication Technologies’ Review of Postgraduate Studies Vol. 11, NUIG
____2006 – “The Moral Framing of a Resource Dispute:” Studies Irish Review. Winter
Leonard, L. 2007 ‘Towards an Understanding of a Territorial Resource Dispute’: The “Shell to Sea” Campaign in North Mayo’. Irish Journal of Sociology, Dublin: UCD. August 2007
____2007 - “Environmental Movements and Internet Technology” Irish Communications
Review. Dublin: DIT

____2007 - 'The Galway Water Crisis' Studies Irish Quarterly Review Winter 2007
____2007 - Review of the Blame Game (2007 Irish Academic Press) by Flynn, B. in Studies Irish Quarterly Review Dublin Autumn 2007

____2007 - Profile: 'Dancing with the Devil or Playing for Power: the Irish Greens in the 2007 General Election' Environmental Politics Winter 2008
____2007 - Green Nation Online: the Irish Environmental Movement Ecopolitics Online Publication 1 Galway: MicroMarketing & Irish Greenhouse Press

____2007 (ed) 'Ecotopias, Utopias and Alternative Living' Ecopolitics Online Journal Vol. 1 No.1

____2007 'Ecotopias, Identity & Place' Ecopolitics Online Journal Vol. 1 No.1 Winter 2007
____2007- " Environmentalism in Ireland: EcoModernism versus Ecopopulism" Environmental Values Winter 2007
____2007- Review of Social Movements & Ireland (2006 Manchester UP) Connolly, L & Hourigan, N. Ecopolitics Online Vol. 1 No. 1

Leonard, L. & Rootes, C. (2009) 'Waste Management & Infrastructral Disputes'. Environmental Politics Special Edition (forthcoming)
2008 Leonard,L & Doran, P. "Cross- Border Burning Issues: Irish Anti-Incinerator Protests North & South" Environmental Politics (forthcoming)
Leonard, L. 2008- " Environmental Movements in Ireland" Proceedings of the Conference on Social Movements & Environmental Protest Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona, the Institut de Govern i Politiques Publiques (Public Policy and Government Research Institute)(forthcoming)
Read about Shell's Raid on the Irish Coast in the
following from COUNTERPUNCH: AMERICA'S BEST NEWSLETTER
at: http://www.counterpunch.org/leonard02212008.html
'Fear & Loathing in the Emerald Isle' by Liam Leonard