Liam Heneghan, a Dubliner, is an ecosystem ecologist working at DePaul University in Chicago where he is a Professor of Environmental Science and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and Culture. His research has included studies on the impact of acid rain on soil foodwebs in Europe, and on inter-biome comparisons of decomposition and nutrient dynamics in forested ecosystems in North American and in the tropics. Over the past decade Heneghan and his students have been working on restoration issues in Midwestern ecosystems. Heneghan is co-chair of the Chicago Wilderness Science Team. He is also a graduate student in DePaul University's philosophy program, a part-time model, and an occasional poet. Email: lhenegha [at] gmail [dot] com
by Liam Heneghan In Memoriam Tim Robinson (1935 – 2020) and Máiréad Robinson (1934 – 2020) In Connemara: Listening to the Wind (2006), the first volume of cartographer and writer Tim Robinson’s trilogy of books about that rugged part of Co. Galway, Robinson records an illuminating and slightly fraught exchange that he had with landscape…
by Liam Heneghan When I was a child growing up in Dublin, a friend dropped her pet hamster on the kitchen floor. The animal survived but thereafter he could only walk in circles. As the hamster got older, the circles got wider but like a ship permanently anchored to shore it never got particularly far.…
by Liam Heneghan Once upon a time, in a beautiful but endangered forest far far away a prince and princess met, fell in love and married. They were blessed with a hundred children. “I wonder,” said the princess, somewhat exhausted from her exertions, “how best to raise our dear ones to care for each other…
by Liam Heneghan The Art Institute of Chicago is unremarkable in this one respect: like every world class art museum its galleries teem with works representing indefatigable artistic industry besieged by the entropic desolation that all the works of humankind are heir to. Our lot is to amass and assemble; the universe responds, dispassionately, with…
by Liam Heneghan The traffic had been slow all day but by four pm, it was reduced to a trickle. Those cars that passed him on the street did so in two and threes as if they were sticking together for safety like lumbering animals caught out in a storm. It was, in fact, a…
by Liam Heneghan Battered by thoughts of finitude, by thoughts of decay, my confidence ebbs. I come now to this place; I come to this cemetery. Mere weeks before was I not as light as a seed-filament, I who am so preoccupied by unknown fates, by sepulchral dreads, by nostalgic aches for the rose-scented…
by Liam Heneghan No one warned me that after my children finally left home when I secured the doors at night I would, in effect, be locking them out. People deal with the mild trauma of being an “empty nester” in different ways, I suppose. Some handle it with quiet grace, some move cocktail hour…
by Liam Heneghan A celebrated altercation between Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), the Florentine artist, and fellow sculptor Bartolommeo Bandinello (1493-1560) resulted in the latter exclaiming “Oh sta cheto, soddomitaccio.” [Shut up, you filthy sodomite!]. The accusation had merit in the legal sense at least since Cellini had indeed been accused of the crime of sodomy with…
by Liam Heneghan A writer’s path is paved with the flagstones of their unread essays. Years ago I wrote an essay entitled “Soil and Myself” for the collection Irish Spirit (Wolfhound, 2001). I was attempting there to come to grips with my youthful loss of religious faith and my growing enchantment with the earth as…
by Liam Heneghan It says something about a city, I suppose, when there is heated debate over who first labeled it a dirty place. The phrase “dear dirty Dublin”, used as a badge of defiant honor in Ireland’s capital to this day, is often erroneously attributed to James Joyce. Joyce used the term in Dubliners…
by Liam Heneghan In the early 1980s wanting to be a naturalist — a coleopterist, in particular, that most Darwin-like of naturalists — I spent a couple of summer months in Killarney National Park, in Ireland, making a collection of chrysomelid beetles. This was the first of many such collecting trips, part of a series…
by Liam Heneghan “Metempsychosis. They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief” (Ulysses, James Joyce) The following pictures were mostly taken at Calvary Cemetery, Evanston, Illinois, or on the approach to the cemetery.
by Liam Heneghan Like a Noah in reverse St Patrick kicked snakes off the rain-drenched ark of Ireland. So complete was his mystical sterilization of the land that seven hundred years later in his Topographia Hibernica (1187) Gerald of Wales could write: “There are neither snakes nor adders, toads nor scorpions nor dragons… It does…
by Liam Heneghan Walking is a foundational practice, amounting in natural history to methodology. Charles Darwin in his Journal and remarks 1832–1836 more commonly known as The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) used the verb “walk”, or variants thereof, almost twice as frequently as the verb “sail” (walk, 94; sail 50). Darwin’s was more a…
By Liam Heneghan More than 75 years ago Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865 –1953) wrote of the Pied Wagtail roost in Dublin’s O’Connell Street describing it as “undoubtedly the most interesting zoological feature that Dublin has to offer”. The birds moved into the capital’s central thoroughfare in the winter of 1929, settling into the plane trees…
by Liam Heneghan Click diagram to enlarge Context: One of the newer biological conservation strategies, ecological restoration, attempts to reverse the degradation of lands set aside for conservation purposes by reinstating, as closely as possible, the species and environmental conditions that existed before recent and large scale disturbances by human activities. A newly emerging framework…
by Liam Heneghan More than any at other conferences I have attended, participants in the annual Mars Society meeting, which was held this year in Boulder, Colorado (August 2013) — their 16th such meeting, my first — like to nod their agreement. In contrast, attendees at the meetings I more regularly visit concerning the ecological…
by Liam Heneghan 1. On 16 June 1904 before leaving his home at 78 Eccles Street, Dublin, Leopold Bloom sat and took one of most momentous and leisurely shits in literature. Joyce reported: “Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper.” Bloom browsed a while, then “midway, his last resistance, yielding he allowed his…
by Liam Heneghan Male Torso (Wikipedia) Every year, for a number of years, I received a letter about my body from a man who was neither a family member, nor an especially intimate friend. Invariably they started: “Dear Liam, thank you for your recent visit. I am happy to confirm that you are largely in…
by Liam Heneghan If I asked you to choose from among the several notable Irish William Kings who might possibly serve as first formulator of a hypothesis on the development of bog vegetation you might choose wrongly. The three candidates: William King soldier and politician, William King, geologist and natural scientist, and William King, Church…