Future Wild E-Book

Richard Nairn

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 311

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Ireland has little left of its original natural habitats. Many species, like the curlew, are under pressure due to intensive practices such as farming, forestry and fisheries and some are threatened with extinction. But given a little help from us, nature has the innate capacity to restore itself. Nature restoration is the positive management of the environment for the benefit of wildlife and people. It looks to the future, by steering natural habitats and wildlife in a better and more sustainable direction. In Future Wild: Nature Restoration in Ireland, Richard Nairn explores numerous active restoration projects around Ireland which show how natural habitats and native species can be restored sustainably for the benefit of everyone. From individual landowners and voluntary organisations to state bodies such as Bord na Móna, he meets the people who are dedicated to nature restoration. By turns shocking, hopeful and finally positive, Future Wild shows that the damage we have done to nature can also be undone by us, and that, with nature restoration, we can create a richer and more diverse environment for generations to come.

Leseprobe

Praise for Richard Nairn’s books

Wild Waters: The Magic of Ireland’s Rivers and Lakes

‘A vital exploration of our beautiful inland waterways.’ Fergal Keane

‘A timely and deeply felt contribution to Irish natural history.’ Michael Viney

‘A beguiling cocktail of personal experience, historical fact and the wonder of nature.’ RTÉ Guide

‘The latest in an extraordinary contribution to environmental literature in this country.’ Sunday Independent

‘Always a joy to read as he explores Ireland’s natural beauty.’ Westmeath Examiner

Wild Shores: The Magic of Ireland’s Coastline

‘Takes us into places we would never have the time (or sea legs) to reach.’ Catherine Cleary

‘Well-researched and beautifully written. An absolute gem.’ Zoe Devlin

‘An affectionate and timely celebration of Ireland’s richly varied coastline.’ Bryan Dobson

‘A great read – whatever part of the coast you visit.’ Éanna ní Lamhna

‘His description moves me. An engaging and ambitious new book.’ Michael Viney

‘An exquisite, thought-provoking odyssey.’ Westmeath Chronicle

Wild Woods: The Magic of Ireland’s Native Woodlands

‘A book to inspire anyone.’ Michael Viney

‘A story of dogged persistence and patience rewarded.’ RTÉ Culture

‘Read and be enchanted and informed.’ Small Woods Magazine

‘An exhilarating read.’ Woodland Magazine

Dublin Bay: Nature and History

‘A very keepable book.’ The Irish Examiner

‘A rich story, full of colour.’ The Irish Independent

‘Has encyclopaedic authority and the comforting accessibility of a classic.’ Sunday Times

Bird Habitats in Ireland

‘A truly remarkable book, highly readable.’ British Trust for Ornithology

‘An excellent volume that I can recommend strongly to all birdwatchers and ecologists in Ireland and elsewhere.’ Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy

‘Will be an invaluable tool for future ornithologists and an interesting read for anyone with a concern for birds.’ Biodiversity Ireland

Ireland’s Coastline: Exploring its Nature and Heritage

‘Should be in every library and school and, if possible, in every home.’ The Sunday Business Post

‘As much a photojournalistic poem as a glossily informative hardback.’ The Irish Independent

‘A marvellous guide – a definitive volume.’ The Irish Examiner

‘Succeeds in rekindling the wonderful fascination of the seashore.’ Irish Naturalists’ Journal

‘A major celebration of our island’s diverse shores.’ Irish Mountain Log

‘Breathtaking photographs and informative prose.’ The Midwest Book Review, Oregon

Wild Wicklow: Nature in the Garden of Ireland

‘Makes the nature of the garden county accessible and interesting for every reader.’ The Irish Times

‘Sets a high standard for a county natural history.’ The Cork Examiner

Also by Richard Nairn

Wild Wicklow: Nature in the Garden of Ireland

Ireland’s Coastline: Exploring its Nature and Heritage

Bird Habitats in Ireland (joint editor)

Dublin Bay: Nature and History

Wild Woods: The Magic of Ireland’s Native Woodlands

Wild Shores: The Magic of Ireland’s Coastline

FUTURE WILD

First published in 2024 by

New Island BooksGlenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Richard Nairn, 2024

The right of Richard Nairn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-83594-001-3

eBook ISBN: 978-1-83594-002-0

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in 11.5 on 16.8pt Sabon

Typeset by JVR Creative India

Edited by Sheila Armstrong

Indexed by Eileen O’Neill

Cover design by Anna Morrison, annamorrison.com

Printed by Opolgraf Printing House, Poland, opolgraf.com.pl

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my grandchildren, Ivy, Iris, Robyn, Phoebe and Lúcio. To help restore your country for the future.

Contents

Introduction

In search of wilderness

Has nature conservation failed?

Restoring the woods

Reimagining the hills

Farming with nature

Rivers running free

Peatland rehab

Rediscovering the sea

Losers and winners

Bringing them back

Restoring the future – a noble goal

Acknowledgements

References

Introduction

I am standing at the front door of the house where I live. It is a bright day in May. The sun creeps up above the ridge to the east as it rises from the sea. Immediately below me is a meadow that sweeps away down the hill, bright with wildflowers in the morning sun. At the bottom of a long hill lies the old woodland where I can hear a woodpecker drumming on a dead branch. Beside it is a burgeoning plantation of native trees that is beginning to merge with the old woodland. I can hear the rushing river in the wood and imagine its winding path through the ancient trees. In the distance is a craggy hill covered in heather and flanked by dark green forest. The sun is lighting up one side of the hill while the other remains in shadow. Over me drifts the first red kite of the morning, effortlessly soaring above the meadow as it searches for its first meal of the day. I am surrounded by nature and beauty.

A decade ago, I was presented with the opportunity to buy this small farm in the valley where I live in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. I had always wanted to plant trees, to surround myself with nature and to be able to observe the natural world changing from day to day. Within a year I suddenly found myself with the keys to the gate. It was pure exhilaration to wander at will, to observe the land in all its diversity. The pasture had been grazed by horses and sheep and was shorn to the length of a mown lawn. The patch of old woodland at the foot of the hill was a mysterious, magical place, but the sheep were wintering there and browsing the undergrowth. Deer were also browsing in the woodland and emerged occasionally to graze in the pasture.

Spring is my favourite time of year. All is new in nature after the long cold months of winter when the struggle to survive takes precedence over everything else. As I stand here in the brightening dawn, I celebrate the return of heat from the sun. Blackbirds are singing loudly from the trees all around and wrens belt out their incessant calls from the undergrowth. The meadow is filled with butterflies and bees all working to ensure the next generations will replace them in a short time. They feed on the abundant wildflowers that have returned here since the sheep and horses were removed. Just a short walk from my front door, badgers are sleeping underground, their growing cubs venturing out at sunset to explore the woodland and meadow that their ancestors have known for hundreds of years. A solitary deer stands in the meadow, its ears twitching to listen for danger, ready to race to the cover of the trees. Nature is alive here.

Although it is not a wilderness, but a landscape managed by humans for thousands of years, this is the place that I love. It is like a painting, a panorama that stretches from east to west. I never tire of gazing out to watch the clouds that drift across, sometimes bordered in gold, sometimes carrying the threat of rain that speeds in from the west. At night the moon follows the setting sun picking out the hillside above with a ghostly light. Then I listen to the calls of a family of owls and watch them dodging in and out of our growing plantations. I want to intimately know every wild creature and wild plant here. My aim from the start was to restore nature on this land and make it a refuge for wildlife in a rapidly changing world. The red kite, extinct in Ireland for 300 years, yet now gently drifting across the fields, is a sign that nature restoration can work. I want to give back to nature, as much as possible, the beauty and diversity that has been modified and simplified by landscape change. To live with nature instead of trying to exploit it.

Nature for me is both an inspiration and a refuge. It gives me endless pleasure to immerse myself in the wild places and find there the animals and plants that still live the way they have done for thousands of years. In hard times, such as the recent pandemic, nature provides a safe anchor, its plants and animals changing with the seasons just as they have always done. All through my life, I have worked to protect and restore nature. Half a century ago, I learnt the practical methods when I worked as a nature reserve warden. As a staff member of an environmental organisation, I focussed on birds which are such a beautiful and accessible part of our wildlife. Later, working with other environmental specialists, I strived to prevent damage to nature due to the rapid development of our country. Now, in my retirement, I spend most of my time managing my own small farm with nature restoration as the main objective.

Inspiration and peace are not the only gifts that this little patch of land offers me. It provides the wood for the fire that heats my house in the winter. I spend long hours in my woodshed splitting and stacking logs to season for next winter’s fuel. The sun powers the solar panels on the roof that provide most of the electricity that I need. Rain falling on the same roof drains into large tanks, a free rainwater harvest for the gardens in a dry summer. The soil in the gardens produces a variety of tasty and nutritious vegetables and fruit that will last for the whole year. Season after season, these gifts are generously given by the land that asks nothing in return except care and protection to go on producing. The American writer Aldo Leopold wrote, ‘When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.’1

The land surrounding my farm is not a natural landscape. From my front door, I can see intensive farmland and commercial forestry. I can hear the noise of machinery at a nearby quarry. Repeated ploughing and fertiliser applications have replaced the natural grassland in the valley with cereals and silage fields and confined the wildflowers to little corners that cannot be grazed or cultivated. Chemicals run off the fields into the river, threatening the aquatic life that depends on clean water. The ancient woodlands have largely been replaced by fast-growing ranks of conifers that are repeatedly clear-felled and replanted. Here there are uncontrolled herds of non-native deer, browsing the undergrowth and preventing the natural vegetation from returning.

Since acquiring this farm, I have set about managing it to restore the greatest natural diversity possible in an otherwise intensively managed landscape of farmland and forestry. ‘But why would anyone abandon land to nature on a good productive farm, with fertile, well-drained soils? Why not grow a crop or graze some livestock here? Why leave the meadow alone to flower and set seed when the hay is not used when it is mowed? Why not harvest the old timber in the woodland and plant it with commercial conifers?’ These are questions often posed by critics or doubters. I have made a personal decision to give priority to nature, one that is increasingly necessary in light of the biodiversity emergency that we face right now. I am attempting to restore nature on this small patch of land or, rather, to help it to restore itself. If the heavy pressures of modern land use are removed, natural succession will start to kick in.

Every gardener knows that if you dig a patch of garden and then go on your summer holidays, the ground will be covered in weeds when you return. Thistles, nettles, docks and many other smaller wild plants will reclaim this space. These native wildflowers are simply plants in the wrong place, opportunists that fill the space left by any disturbance of the ground. Richard Mabey described them as ‘part of nature’s immune system, of its instinctive drive to green over the barrenness of broken soil’.2 If you abandoned your home altogether, the disturbed patch would quickly sprout with brambles, buddleia or gorse. If nobody moved into the property, within a year or two, scrub would be filling the garden, closing off paths, scrambling over fences and blocking windows. Small mammals would move in, hedgehogs might shelter in denser patches and foxes might make a den beneath the old garden shed. After a decade of ‘neglect’, young tree saplings would be pushing through the thorny scrub, reaching for the sunlight. The tree seeds would have fallen in the autumn, blown from mature trees in surrounding gardens or hedges, germinating and pushing up through the soil in spring. If the garden was completely abandoned to nature, it would become woodland after 20 or 30 years. This is a form of natural succession that happens before your eyes. But we rarely want this to overwhelm our beloved gardens. The continual disturbance involved in gardening interrupts the process of natural succession and moves it back to an earlier stage. It reduces the diversity of wild plants and animals and ensures that only those species that we favour can establish.

If cultivation or grazing is abandoned on farmland, as sometimes happens when the land is unproductive or the farmer gets a job elsewhere, brambles push out from the surrounding hedges and, within a year or two, shrubs and trees begin to establish in the fields. Again, natural succession is moving the fields back to woodland, mimicking a time before humans began to clear the forests and farm the land. Similarly, if grazing pressure by sheep and deer on mountain land is reduced, first heather and then trees will start to return and the succession to woodland begins again. Many other modern land uses – drainage of rivers and lakes, exploitation of peatlands, quarrying hillsides, turning sand dunes into golf courses, dumping on coastal saltmarshes or building roads and urban developments – interrupt natural succession, removing wild plants and animals and impoverishing biodiversity. All of these land uses have led to a major loss and disruption of biodiversity over many centuries. Sensitive plants and animals have become rare or even disappeared altogether from the country. Habitats like forest plantations have become uniform and species-poor, removing the natural patchworks and favouring the types of landscape that serve our burgeoning population and its needs. If the pressures can be removed, the process of natural succession can begin again.

In my lifetime, nature in Ireland has undergone a catastrophic decline. The flower-rich hay meadows of my childhood are almost a thing of the past. The ancient woodlands have been whittled away and there are only a few tiny fragments left. Most of the midland bogs have gone, their priceless peat used for gardens or gone up in smoke. Only a handful of rivers remain in a pristine condition, while the salmon and eels which used to return from the ocean each year have been decimated. Overfishing has scoured the seas around our coast, and this has already had serious implications for seabirds and marine mammals as well as the fishing communities. A quarter to a third of all species that have been assessed by the National Biodiversity Data Centre are threatened with extinction in Ireland. No longer can I see the great variety of wild plants and animals that my parents and grandparents took for granted. Crumbling beneath the pressures of modern land uses and mismanagement of the seas, wild habitats are disappearing before our eyes, and some common species are becoming rarities or slipping away altogether. Nature conservationists have been struggling for half a century to stem some of these losses. But are they simply cataloguing the destruction or, worse still, moving the deckchairs around while the ship sinks slowly beneath the waves? It is time for a fresh approach to rescuing nature.

Until very recently the philosophy and practice of nature conservation in this country have been about hanging on to the patches of semi-natural habitat and some rare species that have been inherited from the past. In this sense, nature conservation has much in common with the preservation of historic buildings, protection of archaeological sites or rare works of art. This is why natural and cultural treasures are often referred to together as ‘heritage’. However, natural ecosystems are not historic relics but living and constantly changing entities. Protecting them is not about preserving specimens from the past but about helping them to evolve and change in the future. Conservation must look forwards rather than backwards.

Restoration of land for nature requires both a change in direction of land use and ongoing management to ensure that the negative human impacts on wildlife and habitats are suppressed. The more recent term ‘rewilding’, on the other hand, is a radical concept that also aims to remove the pressures of intensive land uses. It allows natural succession to take an unpredictable course with no clear objective except to allow change without our intervention. In a few cases, it involves reintroducing extinct or depleted species – predators such as eagles or wolves – and even old breeds of cattle and horses as functional equivalents for ancient herbivores that are now extinct. This is an attempt to replicate the complicated food webs that would have been present before their removal. Restoration and rewilding are often confused. Paddy Woodworth has written about the critical distinction, saying, ‘It’s common now to find the two terms used interchangeably, but they come from different contexts and carry very different implications.’3 The fundamental difference is that restoration requires continual management from people to ensure that nature can survive and prosper.

Internationally, rewilding has developed a popular following and, while this is welcome, it is not the best approach in some parts of the world. In vast areas like the oceans or the polar regions, where active management is not practical, it is meaningful to withdraw all exploitation and allow nature to take the lead. In a country like Ireland, where little remains of the natural ecosystems and where intensive land use for thousands of years has divided the country into small parcels with multiple ownerships, the process of rewilding would be difficult or impossible to achieve on a large scale. Farmers, foresters, turf-cutters and fishers have to make a living and they are slow to change what they regard as ‘traditional’ uses. They often see nature as something to be exploited or, at best, ignored. There is a fundamental resistance to ‘abandoning’ land that has been hard-won by farming or forestry. But restoration does not mean abandonment.

Nature restoration in certain habitat types requires intervention to restart the natural processes and restore ecological functions that have been interrupted. I organised the planting of over 7,000 native trees on our farm and, after a little initial management, I can now stand back and watch them growing to form a mature woodland. But the fences around them must remain, at least for the present, while there is a large population of invasive deer in the area, as these would quickly reverse any progress in woodland establishment. After the livestock were removed from our fields, the meadow blossomed with dozens of wildflower species that had previously been suppressed and thousands of butterflies and bees appeared to pollinate the flowers. But the meadow still has to be managed, the grass cut at the end of summer and the hay removed to ensure that the more vigorous grasses do not take over. On a larger scale, rewetting peatlands that have been damaged by drainage and removal of surface layers of turf can accelerate the process of moss growth that ultimately leads to peat formation. But the rewetted bogs need careful management, adjusting water levels to ensure that they are just right for the plants to grow. Actively growing peat bogs absorb rainwater, reducing siltation in rivers and preventing flooding downstream. This is nature restoration in practice.

Removing the barriers, such as weirs and dams, in rivers allows migratory fish to spawn in the upper reaches again. Restoring river meanders slows the flow and encourages the natural sequence of riffle, glide and pool favoured by many invertebrates and fish. Allowing woodland to establish on riverbanks prevents erosion and silting of the riverbed and may ultimately slow the flow as woody debris falls into the channel. It also provides corridors for secretive animals like otters to move through the landscape. Restoring nature on the coast also involves the removal of barriers such as rock armoury, piers and sea walls to reestablish the dynamic exchange of sand between beaches and sand dunes and the growth of saltmarsh in sheltered parts of estuaries. Ending the heavy trawling in some parts of the sea around Ireland would allow fish populations and the marine ecosystem to recover with ultimate benefits for fisheries. Restored peatlands, woodlands, saltmarshes, seagrasses and native oyster beds are now seen as nature-based solutions to climate change and as hotspots for biodiversity. The goals of nature restoration need to be subdivided into tailored solutions for different habitats and species. Only in true wilderness can nature now achieve its true potential without our intervention.

Today we know that human impacts have reached into every part of this small planet and in some places have modified our environment so fundamentally that it seems to be losing the ability to support us and all the other species that live here. Up to the mid-20th century, it was largely believed that there were no limits to our use of the Earth. After World War II, the modern age of chemicals, oils, plastics and mechanisation took over and fuelled this increasing exploitation. There is no doubt that human impacts on the landscape and wildlife of Ireland have modified it almost beyond recognition. Natural forests have been virtually eliminated, the natural fertility of soils has been dramatically reduced by intensive farming and fertiliser runoff has reduced river water quality. Most of the large native grazing animals have been replaced by livestock with many of the larger predators also exterminated by centuries of persecution. Rivers have been highly modified by dams, weirs and culverts and many coasts have been so altered by artificial constructions that the natural processes of erosion and accretion no longer work effectively. In some places urban sprawl has replaced the natural habitats which disappeared long ago.

Among the principal reasons for the loss of biodiversity is a group of species introduced over the millennia from all around the world to places where they never occurred before. Some are relatively benign, fitting in with the local environment with few problems. The red squirrel is known to have been introduced to Ireland by the Normans around the 12th century, but possibly became extinct due to the decimation of Irish woods and had to be supplemented from the English population in the 18th century. It seems to have adapted to new conifer plantations without any detrimental impacts although it has suffered due to competition from the more recently introduced American grey squirrel.4 The worst of these new arrivals are the invasive species, uninvited guests which spread uncontrollably once released into the new environment, threatening native species or habitats with destruction. Even in some protected areas such as Killarney National Park, the ancient oak and yew woodlands are infested with rhododendron, planted originally in the nineteenth century. If allowed to spread here it threatens the future of these important ecosystems and all the species that they support, largely by shading out any regeneration of native vegetation. If rewilding involves simply avoiding any intervention, then the rhododendron spreads everywhere, shading out and competing with the seedlings of native plants and leaving only ageing and decaying trees. If we simply allow invasive deer populations to multiply without control, then we may never see the return of native woodland to the hills and valleys. So, the control of invasive species needs to be given a high priority in nature restoration projects to avoid further loss of biodiversity.

One of the questions often asked about nature restoration is: what historic stage in the development of a constantly changing landscape is restoration attempting to replicate? It is the ‘re’ in restoration that suggests going backwards but, in truth, we can only go forwards, while being aware of what we have lost from the past. Unlike my children and grandchildren, I am old enough to remember a time before television, before computers and the internet, before mobile phones. In those days we communicated by landline or post. If we were on holiday, we sent a message home on a postcard, not by social media posts. Today, most people consider instant communication a normal part of daily life. We have almost forgotten what it was like in ‘the old days’. This phenomenon is called ‘generational amnesia’. In his essay ‘The Unraveling of America’, the author Wade Davis wrote, ‘fluidity of memory and capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species’. In the context of our memories of natural features, we call this ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. What we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would have thought degraded. What we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’.

Birds offer a useful example of shifting baseline syndrome. They are among the best and most consistently recorded animals as ornithology became a popular pursuit among members of the wealthy and idle classes as long ago as the nineteenth century. In his landmark book The Natural History of Ireland (1850), William Thompson detailed the status of the corncrake or land-rail as it was known in his time. He wrote, ‘Everywhere that we go in this island in the months of May, June and early July, except to the mountain tops or to the stony and heath-covered tracts, the call of the corncrake is heard, not only at its favourite times, in the evening and during the night, but throughout the day.’ But even 170 years ago, Thompson reported that, ‘this bird suffers sadly during the mowing of our meadows. If the young have recently “come out” they are often either maimed or destroyed by the scythe.’5 By 2022 there were less than 200 calling corncrakes recorded in the entire country with the majority found on offshore islands such as Tory in County Donegal where farming has all but been abandoned. Now the corncrake is on the brink of extinction in Ireland. We treat this as normal, forgetting that this bird was once a common feature of farmland in Ireland. Very few people alive today have ever seen or heard a corncrake. Each generation over the last two centuries thus has a different understanding of what is the ‘normal’ situation in the countryside. Our memories are limited to the human lifespan, and we find it hard to take into account what this same landscape would have looked like just 200 years ago. The baseline is constantly shifting, and we forget what has gone before.

The marine environment is no different when it comes to shifting baseline syndrome. Native flat oysters, which today are treated as a luxury food because of their rarity in the wild, were once so common that they were sold to poor people in the streets and exported in vast quantities to the markets of London. Overexploitation in the 17th and 18th centuries led to exhaustion of many natural oyster beds and these were later replaced by cultivation of imported Pacific oysters. If you visited any fishing harbour in Ireland in the early 19th century you would have seen hundreds of small fishing smacks landing huge quantities of herring, pilchards and other shoaling fish. An Irish fisheries scientist, John Molloy, wrote how many rural communities in Ireland at this time, particularly those along the more remote regions of the west and northwest coast, were greatly dependent on herring as food. Herring and potatoes were considered a staple diet and small farmers thought themselves inadequately prepared for winter unless they had a few barrels of salted herring stored away.6 Once again, the temptation to exploit this ‘endless’ resource was irresistible and overfishing caused the collapse of many once-common stocks. We have forgotten what an important resource herring were for coastal communities.

This comes back to the question of what we consider to be the ‘wild’ state of nature in Ireland and what we are aiming to achieve through any restoration project. Perhaps there is a need to accept that nature can never return to a past condition that is long gone. If we can nudge it in the direction of greater biodiversity and stability, rather than trying to recreate the past, this will be achievement enough, and will be ensuring a better future for people and the landscape. In 2022, the European Commission published its proposed Nature Restoration Law and this was finally passed by the Council of Ministers in June 2024. This was a historic decision which sets in train a new initiative to restore damaged habitats and species. The Irish government has already committed to preparing a Nature Restoration Plan by 2026. Every Member State of the European Union will have two years to publish a National Restoration Plan and set out how it aims to achieve the restoration targets that will be enshrined in law. EU Member States must then restore 30 per cent of the habitat types listed within the law to good condition by 2030, rising to 60 per cent by 2040 and 90 per cent by 2050. This is a positive move although it does not go much further than setting targets. It acknowledges that nature conservation on its own is no longer sufficient and that active restoration is required. While existing laws, such as the 1992 EU Habitats Directive, have been of value in preventing damage to certain internationally important areas, many of these places were already degraded and represent just a string of small fragments of nature that need active management to survive. In the marine environment, many of the Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs) are overfished or damaged by aquaculture. Drawing lines on a map and publishing ‘conservation objectives’ is not enough. Do we have to accept that a few ‘semi-natural’ but isolated sites are all that will remain in an impoverished general landscape or overexploited areas of the sea? At least the new restoration law will give some impetus to restoring these precious places.

Nature is not separate from human existence. It is not a luxury to be switched on like a television to entertain us. We are an integral part of nature, completely dependent on it for our present and future survival. We need fresh air, fertile soils, healthy vegetation and clean water. We need wild plants from which to breed our crops and we need insects to pollinate the plants that we eat. We need natural places such as the coast, mountains, lakes and woodlands for recreation and for general wellbeing. Without nature, we have no hope and no future. Despite decades of disappointing results from half a century of efforts in nature conservation, I remain optimistic. Nature-based solutions, such as rewetting peatlands, expanding forest cover or restoring seagrass meadows, offer some of the best hopes for averting climate catastrophe, the greatest challenge of our times. Here the objectives of climate action and nature restoration converge. In Ireland, there are already a number of nature-based solutions that are designed to restore habitats and species, but these are quite limited in time and space. This book investigates these innovative projects. Our current policies and practice in protecting nature are clearly inadequate to prevent the current loss and damage to biodiversity. Restoration is the urgent need now. The United Nations has declared the 2020s the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration which aims to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean. These high ambitions should spur more action to try to rescue nature across the world. But can the global restoration movement find support in this country?

This will not happen by itself. It will take vision, commitment and determination. It will require collaboration and buy-in by politicians, public bodies, commercial entities, voluntary organisations, private landowners and members of the public. But the prize is enormous. A healthy, self-sustaining environment, rich in wildlife, with real and permanent solutions to the biodiversity and climate crises. In this book I explore the ways that this can be done and talk to the experts, the people working to help nature recover. I pay tribute to those who dedicate their lives to this objective and the path that they have chosen. They demonstrate that wild places and species can be reintegrated into our landscape with benefits that all can enjoy. I don’t want to minimise the problem of biodiversity loss or pretend that it will be solved by a few people doing their best. Successive Irish governments have abjectly failed to grasp the importance of the threats we face. In 2019, a climate and biodiversity emergency was declared in this country. But this has made little real difference to the sense of urgency. There have always been committed people swimming against the tide, working to protect and now to restore the natural environment, but they are far too few, finance is very limited and the scale of their projects is tiny.

Their work shows us innovative ways in which it can be done so this book is primarily about the how of restoration rather than the why. It does not shy away from the threats to nature but, primarily, it is about solutions. It is also about the people who are working to restore the country that they love. It is time to ramp up the action to restore nature to our landscapes.

In search of wilderness

When I was young, I read avidly about explorers in the wilder places on Earth – tropical Africa, the Amazonian jungles and the polar regions. I believed that there were still unexplored areas of the world that were so remote they were untouched by modern society, by technology or exploitation. I was wrong. Today, I know that human impacts have reached into every corner of the globe. Habitat destruction, species extinction, overexploitation of resources, air and water pollution and now climate change have all brought catastrophic losses of biodiversity and simplification of ecosystem processes. Is there anywhere that true wilderness still survives today? What does it look like? And can it provide us with the inspiration that we need to try to restore some of the richness in the natural world?

Throughout most of western history, wilderness was considered something negative, a dangerous place and a moral opposite to the realm of culture and godly life. In the colonial period, when Europe was thought of as the centre of civilisation, wilderness was viewed as being evil and resistant to being ‘civilised’. The puritanical view of wilderness meant that, in order for colonists to be able to live in foreign lands, they had to destroy the wilderness to make way for their ‘civilised’ society. Today we have a more tolerant view, largely because there are virtually no unexplored parts of the planet left and the impacts of humanity are to be found almost everywhere. I have been fortunate during my life to experience nature in the wild, to draw inspiration and joy from simple natural phenomena as I return again and again to the open spaces that I love. Many of these places are highly modified versions of true wilderness. Tidal areas trapped within the walls of a port, woodlands that were planted to replace ancient forests or hillsides stripped of their natural vegetation by burning and overgrazing. I strive to understand the forces that power the natural world and the complexity which connects all living things to one another. The value of nature cannot be measured by any metric that we know.

In the early 1980s, I accepted an invitation to visit the unique Coto Doñana, in the south-west corner of Spain. I had read the classic book Portrait of a Wilderness by Guy Mountfort and was excited to experience at first hand a place that was apparently little affected by modern pressures. Mountfort wrote in the 1950s that there were still