Rewilding Ireland

One thing I’ve found interesting marrying into a gigantic Irish family and thus talking about Ireland with them and going to Ireland is the idea of the beauty of the stark Irish landscape. My wife, for example, thinks the grass slopes of Irish hills is the most aesthetically pleasing landscape possible. But for me, I don’t see that. I see a massive example of deforestation thanks to colonialism. 500 years ago, Ireland had lots of forests. But the British cut them all down when during its brutal colonization of Ireland. It is one of the great ecological disasters of history. Of course, people can convince themselves of anything. One problem we have with climate change, for example, is that whatever you experience growing up, you think of as “normal,” and so even though it is not normal to grow up in today’s temperatures, it won’t be until current kids are in their 30s or 40s that they will notice how much warmer it is than when they were small. And of course those of you in your 70s or 80s can really tell the difference between today and 1960. So it’s hardly surprising that the landscape that has dominated Ireland for generations is seen as the normal one and thus beautiful. Harder for an environmental historian.

When I was in Kerry last summer, there were quite a few reforestation projects around, but they are industrial forestry operations, even if on a small scale. The planted trees have nothing to do with native Irish trees and there is no real interest in ecological restoration there. It’s just another way for farmers to make a living. Nothing really wrong with that, but Ireland is still one gigantic degraded environment.

So I am glad to see attempts to rewild Ireland get some attention.

Rewilding, the practice of bringing ravaged landscapes back to their original states, is well established in Britain, where numerous projects are underway. For Ireland, this would mean the re-creation of temperate forests of oak, birch, hazel and yew that once covered 80 percent of the land but now — after centuries of timber extraction, overgrazing and intensive farming — have been reduced to only 1 percent.

For some, rewilding began with a personal choice.

In 2009, Eoghan Daltún, a sculpture restorer, sold his house in Dublin to buy 33 acres of gnarled oaks and rugged hillside on the Beara Peninsula in County Cork, in the far southwest. Where local farmers had once raised a few cattle and sheep, he erected a fence to keep out feral goats and sika deer, two nonnative, invasive species that nibble undergrowth and saplings down to the roots, and kill older trees by gnawing away their bark.

One day in late spring, with the wind driving rain off the foaming ocean, he proudly showed off the results. Wood sorrel, dog violet and celandine were already in flower beneath the twisted branches of mature oak and birch, thickly draped in mosses, ferns and epiphytic plants. New shoots of oak, hawthorn and ash pushed up through the grass and dead ferns.

“The sheep and deer would eat those little saplings before they even started on the grass, so when the old trees eventually died, there’d be no new ones to replace them,” said Mr. Daltún, who wrote about his experiment in “An Irish Atlantic Rainforest,” a memoir. “But the native forest is returning here, all by itself. I don’t have to plant anything.”

The article goes on to note some challenges of doing this in Ireland, specifically that the tradition of small landholdings makes it hard to do this on any scale, as opposed to, say, Scotland. There’s little question that for all the evils of rich people owning huge chunks of land, it is easier to do environmental restoration that way, as we have seen in the U.S. with the gigantic ranches of Ted Turner throughout the West and his commitment to bison restoration and other less known species such as the Aplomado falcon on his New Mexico ranches. But there are some good solutions out there and environmentalists point to Costa Rica as a leader on this.

Grown to be harvested within 30 to 40 years, these nonnative conifers are treated with chemicals that pollute groundwater and rivers. Ecologists say little can grow on a forest floor carpeted with dead needles and a desert for insects and native wildlife. And much of the carbon they store is released again when they are harvested.

It would be better for biodiversity and carbon sequestration to pay farmers and landowners to grow native trees and leave them unharvested, according to Padraic Fogarty, the campaign officer for the Irish Wildlife Trust. He cited the example of Costa Rica, which has reversed the Central American trend of deforestation by paying farmers to preserve and extend the rainforest.

In truth, there is plenty of deforestation in Costa Rica too, but there is also plenty of jungle standing. And of course it pays off to the nation due to the tourism it generates.