In the opening pages of Setting the Land Free, Eoghan Daltun’s urgent new manifesto for living with nature, the author describes the difference a fence can make.
The scene is the boundary line of his rewilded land on the Beara Peninsula. On one side of the line lies commonage, the landscape denuded and shorn of trees: “as ecologically defunct,” writes Daltun, “as your average car park”. On the other side of the fence spreads a riot of growth: “bluebells, wood anemone, lesser celandine, dog violet, wood sorrel, primrose, pignut, sanicle, herb Robert, bog asphodel”, and self-seeded native trees, to say nothing of the array of animals that depend upon a healthy ecosystem for survival.
As Daltun has pointed out repeatedly in his career as an advocate for rewilding, these differences in landscape depend purely upon the effects of policy and management, and in particular upon whether the land is grazed by sheep, goats and deer; or whether these animals are removed, and the land enabled to recover. Take a few fundamental steps in one direction and nature will do the rest.
In this new book – a successor to An Irish Atlantic Rainforest – Daltun shows how such policy shifts can work in practice across Ireland; how they can bring about a similarly cascading re-emerge of natural abundance, given half a chance. This book’s descriptions of these changes, these cascades, are uplifting.
But such examples are rare, and Daltun pulls no punches in demonstrating in particular how the State’s ongoing mismanagement of its, of our, own landscapes – of our national parks and reserves – is a scandal in plain sight.
He is similarly frank in assessing some of the challenges bound up with rewilding: the widespread culling of sika deer, for example, would enable a landscape to recover, but such a spectacle would hardly find favour with a public disposed to look kindly on a charismatic species.
This unsparing bluntness is in fact one of the great strengths of this book. Daltun’s close, cogent and in the end unanswerable arguments are delivered unsparingly – and of course they match the moment. With a climate disaster now upon us, the imperative to change our policies, to redesign our systems, and to take on vested economic interests, has never been so clear.
Neil Hegarty is an author and critic