An Irish Atlantic Rainforest
- An Irish Atlantic Rainforest by Eoghan Daltun (Hachette Ireland, 2022).
- 384 pages, 33 photos.
- ISBN: 9781399705271. Hbk, £18.99.
- Buy at BirdGuides bookshop from £17.99
The Earth today is a planet drastically altered by human activity. Although what we think of as wildernesses do still remain in some regions, even many of these have been impacted by our behaviours. Unfortunately, in the great majority of cases, these impacts have made things worse – at least from the perspective of functioning ecosystems and the biodiversity they support. In fact, it is quite difficult to wrap one's head around just how far-reaching our actions have been over the millennia – from megafauna hunted to extinction by our ancestors to fossil fuel-driven climate change of the 21st century and the chaos it is now delivering.
In An Irish Atlantic Rainforest, author Eoghan Daltun considers many of the issues that our malfunctioning planet faces and how these have manifested over the millennia. He simultaneously tells the story of his own life: his early inspirations from the renovation of a small cottage in Dublin and his studies in Italy, his work as a sculptor, his desire to relocate to the countryside and, more recently, the move to the beautiful Beara Peninsula in Co Cork, where his acquisition of a small patch of land at Bofickil sparked the restoration and recovery of a temperate rainforest – an incredibly precious habitat that Ireland (and indeed many parts of western Britain) has become almost completely deprived of.
As Daltun reminds us, the Emerald Isle would once have been covered in rich, impenetrable forests, full of life from a profusion of plants and insects to impressive beasts such as Wild Boar, Eurasian Lynx and Wolf. Today, such a prospect seems nothing short of a fairytale, for the country has been so drastically altered by humans and is now so ecologically degraded due to habitat destruction, agricultural intensification – 'sheep-wrecked' is a recurring term in the book – and introduced invasives, that it is barely recognisable from what it once was.
From ill-judged grant schemes to shifting baseline syndrome, the author explores how Ireland has ended up where it is, but also sets out an alternative vision for landscape-scale nature recovery. This is a book of contrasting emotions, confronting the many depressing realities of Earth in the 21st century yet concurrently celebrating the joys of all forms of wildlife and providing great inspiration for what could be achieved were we to put our minds to it.
The author describes himself as a 'rewilder'. The concept of rewilding is something he puts forward as a way to counter the great ecological losses that have taken place in the era of humans. What exactly 'rewilding' means is often debated, but Daltun believes in its purest form. As he puts it, a key parameter of the term is for “a near total absence of resource extraction by people … the term rewilding should not be applied where land continues to be farmed, even in a highly nature-friendly way” – he goes on to reference the celebrated project at Knepp Estate, Sussex, as an example of High Nature Value farming rather than true rewilding.
Despite the great frustrations that he understandably feels, Daltun writes with clarity of thought and a perpetual calmness. It is perceptible throughout the book that he is a profound thinker and has spent a lot of time weighing up the problems faced in the modern world – problems that are never easy to communicate, yet here he does so with great skill and succinctness. His perspective on many aspects of life is so refreshing and his writing conveys a sense of humility and gratefulness, borne through an appreciation for the natural world.
This is an absorbing book that provides a much-needed tonic to the bizarre tabloid- and social media-dominated world in which most humans now live. For anyone with an interest in rewilding, conservation, Irish wildlife – or indeed those simply concerned for the future of our planet – it is a brilliantly engrossing read.
