ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the ways in which the agricultural community in Ireland has been trying to solve the problem. Investigating the way in which agriculturalists in Ireland are responding to increased environmental regulation of their activities may help us understand the direction that environmental policy in general is taking in Europe. That European Union policy is moving towards a strategy for managing rural areas that is in a sense post-productivist, or beyond productivism, has been widely accepted in rural studies. As a concept developed specifically within rural studies, post-productivism reflects broader debates in social science around the characterization of contemporary society as post-Fordist, post-industrial or post-modern. Hajer and Redclift suggest that ecological modernization pays no attention to distributive and equality issues that are intertwined with environmental ones, whether as a cause of environmental degradation or as the consequence of attempts at environmental conservation and regulation.
