From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Call of the Rewild: Restoring Ecological Health to the Emerald Isle   
   By Ed O’Loughlin, June 27, 2023, NY Times   
      
   The west coast of Ireland is famed for its wave-beaten shores and bare, stony   
   mountains, where only a few stunted trees grow in hollows and valleys, bent by   
   harsh storms blowing in from the North Atlantic.   
      
   The coastline, with its cold, clean winds and ever-changing skies, gives an   
   impression of unspoiled, primal nature. In 2014, the Irish government   
   designated a 1,550-mile tourist route along the coast, and called it “The   
   Wild Atlantic Way.”   
      
   Yet, where generations of painters, poets and visitors have rhapsodized about   
   the sublimity of nature and the scenic Irish countryside, ecologists see a   
   man-made desert of grass, heather and ferns, cleared of most native species by   
   close-grazing sheep    
   that often pull grasses out by the roots.   
      
   As climate change threatens even more ecological disruption, a growing Irish   
   “rewilding” movement is calling for the restoration of the native forests   
   that once covered these lands, both as natural machines to capture atmospheric   
   carbon, and to    
   preserve and extend what remains of Ireland’s dwindling biodiversity.   
      
   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.”   
      
   Ireland has committed to increasing the total proportion of forested areas to   
   18 percent by 2050, from 11 percent currently. Yet this would still be well   
   below the European Union average of 38 percent, and most of it would consist   
   of commercial spruce    
   and pine plantations that make up more than 90 percent of Ireland’s current   
   woodlands.   
      
   Grown to be harvested within 30-40 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.   
      
   Ray Ó Foghlú of Hometree, another rewilding organization, believes farmers   
   could be paid not to plow or graze strips land that border remaining pockets   
   of native woodland — often only a few trees and bushes — that cling to   
   inaccessible hillsides or    
   in the awkward corners of fields. Biologically rich, these microforests would,   
   if left to themselves, quickly recolonize neighboring areas, Mr. Ó Foghlú   
   believes. He himself recently bought nine acres of “scrubland” — home to   
   sessile oaks (   
   Ireland’s national tree), hazels, wood sorrel, blue bells and anemones.   
      
   “I pinch myself still that I own it,” he said. “It has a river running   
   through it, and I can’t believe it’s mine, for the price of a second hand   
   car these days.”   
      
   Irish rewilding enthusiasts look enviously at the highlands of Scotland,   
   ecologically very similar to the west of Ireland, but where the concentration   
   of ownership in the hands of a few hundred aristocrats and magnates allows   
   rewilding at much greater    
   scale.   
      
   Ecologically minded figures like the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen,   
   Scotland’s largest private landowner, with 220,000 acres, can clear deer and   
   livestock from tens of thousands of acres, allowing native growth to quickly   
   regenerate.    
   Eradicated native species, notably the European beaver, have also been   
   reintroduced to Scotland to restore ecological balance.   
      
   In Ireland, where the average farm size is 83 acres, such large-scale   
   rewilding would seem to be unfeasible. The big exception, so far, has been in   
   the unlikely setting of County Meath, in the flat, highly fertile and   
   intensively farmed east of the    
   island, and in the unlikely person of Randal Plunkett, a New York-born   
   filmmaker, vegan and death metal enthusiast.   
      
   Since Mr. Plunkett — better known, to some, as the 21st Baron of Dunsany —   
   inherited his 1,700 acre ancestral estate in 2011, he has cleared it of   
   livestock and left one-third to revert to unmanaged forest, complete with a   
   wild herd of native red    
   deer.   
      
   “Biodiversity is expanding dramatically,” said Mr. Plunkett, 40, standing   
   in thick woodlands humming with bees and other busy insects. “At least one   
   species has returned every year since we started. Pine martens. Red kites.   
   Corncrakes. Peregrine    
   falcons. Kestrels. Stoats. Woodpeckers. Otter. We think there’s salmon in   
   the river again, for the first time in my life.”   
      
      
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