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Is Ireland really all that green? Ecologically speaking, the answer is no, says Eoghan Daltun, a sculptor who restored a patch of native rainforest in the Beara Peninsula, on the country’s rugged southwestern coast.
“Ireland really coasts on its reputation as the Emerald Isle,” Mr. Daltun said in a recent interview at his West Cork home. “There is this perception that because it rains a lot in Ireland, and everything is green, and everything grows easily, that nature is doing great here.”
But nature in Ireland is not doing great. Earlier this month, the country’s Environmental Protection Agency published a report that rated Ireland’s environmental health as “poor.” Thousands of years ago, 80 percent of Ireland was forested. Trees now cover just 11 percent of the country, one of the lowest rates in Europe, and are predominately nonnative Sitka spruce. Native trees cover just 1 percent of the land.
Biodiversity is also suffering. Ireland may have millions of acres of brilliant green fields dotted with cows and sheep, but that land is largely grass monocultures. “These places are biological deserts,” Mr. Daltun said. “There is nothing there for nature.”
What’s more, he said, fault can no longer be laid at the feet of the British.
“The thing about Ireland is, we’ve had this long tendency to blame the English and colonialism,” Mr. Daltun continued. “That just doesn’t wash anymore, because Ireland has been independent for more than a century and things have gotten worse.”
Mr. Daltun is trying to change that. He chronicled his rewilding of his 73 acres in his 2022 book, “An Irish Atlantic Rainforest,” and just published “The Magic of an Irish Rainforest,” a photographic compendium of rare pockets of wild nature found on the island.
In a recent interview, Mr. Daltun said that the ecological fixes he had applied to his own land, namely stopping overgrazing by fencing out invasive deer and feral goats and removing nonnative plants, should be adopted nationally. And farmers should be given the option of being paid to rewild their land, he added. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.
You say that Ireland is in the Dark Ages ecologically. Why?
There’s a very low base line in terms of people’s understanding of nature and what a wild ecosystem looks like or how it functions. But it’s not Irish people’s fault. It’s largely down to the fact that there is so little wild nature left in Ireland, no big and wild areas that have bears and wolves and mountain lions. So people don’t realize how bad things are in Ireland for nature. They don’t realize how ecologically trashed the place is.
How much of Ireland’s ecological precariousness is rooted in its colonial past?
If you go back to the precolonial period, people did have a more intimate relationship with the natural world. But it’s really important to not romanticize the Indigenous Gaelic culture. Forests were disappearing for thousands of years before the colonial period. The English colonists saw the forests, the bogs, the wild native fauna like wolves as something that needed to be subjugated and crushed. Irish people were dispossessed of the land and suffered horrendously, from mass mortality events to forced emigration. So you ended up with this extreme attachment to the land. That continued up until around the late 19th century. People who were tenant farmers had a mass resistance which ultimately ended in them being able to buy out the land that they farmed. In places like Beara, where the land is rough and holdings were small, there was a real struggle to survive through farming. That meant pushing out nature.
You’ve been a critic of modern Irish farming practices as well as the way Ireland’s national parks are maintained.
We now have this model of farming in most of Ireland that has become highly industrialized. It’s all based on dairy and beef, and there’s huge money in it. Meanwhile, Killarney National Park is by far Ireland’s most important and largest remaining piece of native forest. But it’s overrun by invasive Sika deer; trees can’t reproduce because all of the native tree seedlings get eaten. Nothing has been done to change that kind of downward traction.
The concept of rewilding is gaining traction in Scotland and England but seems to be lagging in Ireland. How are you trying to change that?
I’m always advocating and pushing for giving farmers the option of being paid to rewild their land, in the same way as they’re paid to graze their land with sheep. Sheep farming in a place like the Beara is totally uneconomical. Even with the subsidies, most of the time, you barely break even. If you gave farmers the option of being paid the same money, it’s not going to cost the taxpayer or anything extra.
What’s the incentive for farmers to sign on?
The biggest threat to the future of farming is climate and ecological breakdown. The one thing that makes farming possible in the first place is a stable climate, and a stable climate depends on natural ecosystems. It’s not just by burning fossil fuels that we’re destroying the stability of the climate. It’s also by erasing natural ecosystems which regulate the climate. We need to start looking at the big picture here, which is that everything depends on nature. And we’re not just talking about farming here. We’re talking about civilization itself. It really is the elephant in the room, that by continuing to destroy the natural world and prevent it from returning, we are cutting off the branch we’re sitting on.
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