The paper proposes a conflict interpretation of environmentalism, seeing it as a vehicle through which the cultural politics of Irish development are reproduced and enacted. Contrasting two environmental movements in Ireland, one based around established conservation organisations and a developing environmental `knowledge elite', the other located within populist movements for rural community development, the author argues that these articulate opposed understandings of recent Irish history: as a process of cultural modernisation or as one of peripheral (under)development. The two movements are also characterised by very different attitudes to the part played in environmental matters by the Irish state. The paper ends by discussing how recent intervention into environmental management by the state itself may ironically be providing the ground on which some dialogue between the two movements is becoming possible.
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