In the wonderful two-part documentary Listen To The Land Speak, which the late Manchán Magan produced for RTÉ in his last year, he outlined some of the reasons why he could see an awakening among Irish people around the need to value and restore our natural world.
There is an unmistakable cultural shift under way, which can be seen in the number of farmers who are switching to organic, the communities organising their own weekend clean-up or the emergence of new pocket forests, ponds and rewilding projects.
More than anything else you can feel it in the pride of Bord na Móna workers, as they rewet and restore the same bogs they were draining and digging out only a few years ago. All are motivated by a love of the land and an instinctive desire to help make it beautiful again.
We desperately need such an awakening – because the natural world in Ireland is in a woeful condition.
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The fact that we live on a beautiful green island is a challenge in itself: because what has been lost to environmental degradation over the past 50 years is not readily visible, we are able to ignore it.
The EU’s State of our Environment Report, published last month, called out what we choose not to see: “[Ireland’s] biodiversity is under threat and the state of nature is very poor. Half of native plant species are in decline. Fifty bird species are of high conservation concern. Water quality is poor with no net improvements in river or lake quality.”
The report says we need not just individual effort but also an “integrated view of land across all the social, economic and legislative demands” to turn things around.
Such an integrated approach was what persuaded the last government to commission a land use review to consider how we can optimise the management of our land. The aim has to be to promote rural communities, sustainable food and timber production, the storage of greenhouse gases, pollution reduction, greater access to nature and the restoration of biodiversity, all at the same time.
[ Ireland’s natural environment in ‘very poor’ condition, EU analysis findsOpens in new window ]
The review started with a scientific assessment of where we are today and moved to a second phase, considering where we go from here and looking at the policies, measures, and actions which will need to be taken. The report from this second stage was completed and sent to the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment eight months ago.
It has been sitting on the Minister for the Environment Darragh O’Brien’s desk ever since, awaiting publication, only partially leaked. I imagine it is being held back for fear that those interested in preserving the status quo would explode. They are often the same interests which have so successfully raised scare stories about environmentalists and farmers being opposed to each other. This is a divide and conquer strategy that works every time.
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Fears around the report are misplaced because the review was conceived as a way of considering our choices and depicting different scenarios, rather than determining set outcomes or solutions now. It had to recognise that no one approach will fit every place, given the very different conditions that exist on different parts of the island. A more detailed nature restoration plan is due next year, but the law mandating that was also written to incentivise nature protection, rather than just prohibit what a landowner could do.
It is long past time for the report to be published and for respectful and informed dialogue about the future use of our land to take place.
This needs to be a debate in which every viewpoint is respected and all voices are equal. That’s the only way we can raise and encourage a new generation of farmers and foresters to bring nature back in our waters, air and soil.
In conversations with farmers, it is clear they have a great love of nature, animals and our countryside. Farmers know better than anyone else the reality of climate change.
They understand that their success is bound up with the health of the soil and can remember the pristine rivers and local lakes of their own childhood and will want to bring them back, so their children and grandchildren can swim in them once more. A silent spring, when all the insects and birds are gone, would be mourned on Irish farmsteads more than anywhere else.
This care and love for nature does not belong to any one community or constituency. We need to green cities and towns as well as rural areas and to develop more national and local parks. This transformation is especially needed in less affluent and leafy areas, where people disproportionately miss out on all the health and other benefits that access to nature brings.
In the closing scenes of his documentary Magan says that the awakening is inevitable but it may take decades to fully arrive. But perhaps nature might surprise us in this way. When given the chance it seems to come back quicker than anyone expected. Human nature can surely do the same.
