Much of Ireland Is an Ecological Desert. Meet the Man Who Wants to Rewild It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[0] - https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
That more or less describes many areas depleted by industrial agriculture. There are also many people working on restoring and regenerating ecologies all around the world, some of it restoring from eroded bedrock and compacted dirt.
Not to diminish this person's work, my point is this isn't just an Irish problem, and the solutions are known.
The regenerative paradigm rests upon the principle that only living systems regenerate. Hardy pioneer plants -- what many people call weeds -- are constantly recolonizing spaces to prepare them for other plants in the process of ecological succession. The natural world is always healing and regrowing. Our role as humans is not to heroically save the planet or a forest, but to help accelerate the regeneration that is already happening in a way that still works well with human society. You do that by connecting with the immediate land and community around you. That power to regenerate lies within each person that breathes, eats, and sleeps.
I once rode from Carna to Galway on horseback. It's bleak, and there are many tiny abandoned farms, but that's left over from the days when Cromwell exiled the Catholics. Most of that area never got to industrial scale agriculture. East of Galway, towards Dublin, there's more partitioned farmland, much of which isn't growing useful crops. In County Cork, where the author is, the coastal area to the west is similarly bleak, but the interior regions have farmland. And sheep.
Sheep seem to be the big problem. They will grind vegetation down to nothing. If trees are cut down and sheep brought in, the land stabilizes as overgrazed pasture. Then it won't support many sheep, but what it will support will keep it overgrazed. The author seems to want to return more of the farmland to its natural bleak state. Maybe with more trees. The author is unhappy that there are "no big and wild areas that have bears and wolves and mountain lions." Bears have been extinct in the wild in Ireland since 1000BC or so. Hard to blame industrial agriculture for that. The last grey wolf was killed in Ireland in 1786. Somebody sighted a mountain lion in Cork County in 2018, and there was a major freak-out.[1] The population is used to a predator-free environment.
[1] https://www.irishpost.com/entertainment/ireland-unexplained-...
You're being glib but overfarming does drastically reduce ecological diversity, which has a downstream impact on the health of the environment as a whole.
In fact, Ireland's biodiversity collapse is one of the worst in Europe [0].
The British Plantation system really did a number on Ireland, as much of Ireland during colonial rule was converted into ranches and plantations to export beef globally.
Ever wondered why Corned Beef is a thing on St Paddy's Day among the diaspora? That's why - native Irish were too poor to buy Irish Corned Beef that was exported abroad to the UK, America, Canada, Australia, etc.
[0] - https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/climate-crisis/2023/0...
Sorry but that is wildly out of touch with the reality on the ground. Any farmer that allows overgrazing to happen would not be a farmer for long.
There are plenty of sheep flocks but they are by and large managed well. While there are certainly issues with biodiversity and habitat loss, overgrazing by sheep is not even near top of the list of causes
The thing with Ireland is that they have a magic phrase to deal with issues as described in this article:
"Ah it'll be grand like"
And then the problem is solved.
Actually probably not because humans have shown themselves as a group to put self interest over group interest even in the face of the end of civilisation as we know it.
I was reading about the Atlantic current collapse and impacts, it said Norway would drop 35 degrees and other North Atlantic areas would get colder like Ireland+Scotland, while many other parts will increase in temp due to global warming.