When Two Hemispheres Collide: Where to Now for Rewilding in Ireland?

What does matter is this insufferably march “forward” into a world where we can’t allow such individual will for any number of reasons, effectively neutering any real cultural development.

I’ll paraphrase David Bowie—we should all be happy just picking nuts but here we are.

There is nobody qualified to take on “all” human beings and decide what is right on such a scale. No matter how many honours one adorns oneself with.

Case in point: the kingdom and culture of England doing what it did in the 13th to 20th centuries through the Isles and beyond. It needed to modernize and “bring prosperity” through the poor, rural, gaelic regions who just couldn’t “get with the times”. One should wonder if those “poor” rural folks were ever hard up or unhappy until armies trounced through burning their homes and spoiling their land in the name of modernity.

The questions we need to ask ourselves take the form of silly platitudes:

What would we really do and care about if we had it all and had no more labour and toil before us?

Culture, love, beauty. Things that dont really cost anything and nobody is really inhibited from enjoying as long as they are creative.

And if we are not creative, then none of the vices or devices in the world will ever save us from continually seeking to “fix” it all.

Keep looking for dividing lines in the external and you’ll always find them. But the problem is in the human heart.

(Ironically, trying to convince wealthy tech bros of that is like diving into an acid pit. I can definitely agree that I don’t want my future in their hands. The poets may be crafty but at least they seek truth)

It looks nice on its own, resilient miniature of pines, resin produces very nice smell. No issue crossing regular pine forests. The problem is, these inhabit cca solid band in cca 1400-1800m altitude (as in, all mountains in the area normally have them, sometimes big blobs but often uninterrupted). Interestingly I've never saw them in the neighboring Alps.

When coming up close, you realize that either you have pre-cut way through, or you better turn back or find somehow way around. Few times some old hiking path disappeared into it (more like they grew over it), getting 200m through could be easily 1-2h solid effort that left me physically wasted. Also they are rough and destroy even sturdy outdoor clothing easily, and I always have various scratches. Resin will cover you from head to toe, usually not washable from clothes completely.

Suffice to say, I hate it when I encounter them off major hiking trails. Also bears love hiding in them.

Alastair Driver (Director of Rewilding Britain) in the same talk summarises it as "The large scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself" though there's obviously many other definitions and perspectives.

I think part of the charm of the term, is the ability to apply it in many contexts, e.g. Rewilding people which would be harder if we narrowed the scope to say just natural habitats and landscapes.

This would also allow me to drag in one of my favourite short pieces on Rewilding - Thinking Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold. "The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolfs job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea." [2]

[1] - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-rewilding-with... original source (which didn't work for me) https://www.buzzsprout.com/2156617/episodes/13299588

[2] - https://ia600707.us.archive.org/6/items/ThinkingLikeAMountai...

Sure, idiots go into the wilderness and cause damage, and the residue from boating "enthusiasts" is terrible, but it's the machine itself that is the problem and those that can do something about it are too busy profiting from it to give a sh_t.

All the problems you describe are real, and they can all be addressed by better seeing through eyes of compassion with a heart tuned to care for others and our mother Earth, herself.

More succinctly, I've heard the saying, "Shit rolls downhill.", as it applies to the qualities of the leader percolating down through the ranks out to the leaf nodes of the culture. Most people are trying to emulate those power-hungry sociopaths, who are nearly always wealthy.

"No more turning away." --Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away"

I found this one of New Zealand, which has particularly unique habitats, trying to remove rats (and others) to save 200 bird species to be particularly mind blowing [1].

Having just done a Rewilding course, my position has shifted a bit and I'm now in two minds about both the NZ experiment and ones like you mention. Much as yours and the other comments say lazy people spreading accidently, or historically, more deliberately non-native species at face value seems really destructive.

But as the Rewilding course pointed out, weeds generally thrive in areas of bare earth and similar niches where ecosystems are degraded and often then are outcompeted as part of succession, but during that time can often provide great food sources for say pollinators (e.g. ragwort).

I'm going to make a bit of an uncomfortable leap here and say, does a similar argument apply to invasives? Nature is nothing if not both resourceful and determined and it also (for better or worse) created us. I've yet to see many compelling reasons as for why that happended (from a design perspective), but it has to be said we're nothing if not the ultimate (so far) extension to that, hopping around the planet spreading species everywhere.

Is this, ironically, how nature "addresses" climate change by having the same actors that helped create it, also be the best actors to mitigate it. If climate change is going to cause such massive disruption to ecosystems, is the human quick spreading of invasives much better at bringing species to places they might now thrive and build future resilience than the slower method non-human forces can manage?

I have to say I don't feel comfortable saying that and I'm not an ecologist, but maybe, bringing this back to the main topic, that's part of a wider Rewilding discussion?

[1] - https://www.science.org/content/article/new-zealand-s-mind-b...

Fun fact, they evolved to fill the niches normally filled by rodents. As such, they were once the most common prey of the native owl ruru/morepork. Life is cool.