The Irish Times “Nature in Focus” series, concluding on Saturday, highlights two contrasting narratives about biodiversity in Ireland. The first is depressingly familiar: the web of living creatures, on which our own lives ultimately depend, is being destroyed by our practices and policies. The second, heard far less often, is that many people, from very diverse backgrounds, are making strenuous, imaginative and often successful efforts to avert this catastrophe.
The most troubling aspect of the first narrative is the collapse in abundance of species that were commonplace. Liam Lysaght of the National Biodiversity Centre says that our most common butterfly species has declined by 83 per cent since 2008 – an “alarming” trend as it reflects something strange happening in our countryside.
The second narrative shows that many citizens, and some overstretched public servants, are now well aware of such trends, and are working innovatively to reverse them. A Roscommon gun club is managing a bog to bring back red grouse and other recently lost birds and plants recently lost there. A €5 million project around Mayo’s Lough Carra is improving water quality, while conserving its surrounding orchid-rich grasslands.
Meanwhile, in Kerry and elsewhere, many other farmers now take pride in the reintroduction of the sea eagle, which they initially rejected so fiercely. Dublin suburbs along the Dodder have been “knit together” by local enthusiasm for its varied wildlife, especially its iconic kingfisher. Native oysters are being restored as ‘ecosystem engineers’ to cleanse Belfast Lough. Back in Co Mayo, finance entrepreneur Joe Devine has chosen to make an exceptionally ambitious investment – the full recovery of a 1,800 acre blanket bog.
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These admirable projects alone cannot turn the destructive tide driven by unsustainable growth, intensified agriculture, and shambolic public environmental policy. But they do demonstrate that there are already many minds in gear, and boots on the ground, to fulfil the EU’s Nature Restoration Law’s goals , if we can just find the political vision and courage to mobilise them.
