Rewilding advocate Eoghan Daltun was unsatisfied with life in Dublin, so he sold his property and bought a farm on the Beara Peninsula of southwestern Ireland. His plan was simple: remove the invasive plant species and then put up a fence to keep out the goats and nonnative sika deer. The land did the rest, rewinding time rapidly toward what is beginning to look like a temperate rainforest in just 14 years. Even rare native creatures like pine martens have discovered the regenerating habitat.
Daltun joins the Mongabay Newscast to share his story and rewilding insights, which are detailed in his book, An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey Into the Magic of Rewilding.
Ireland, along with the U.K., is among the most ecologically denuded nations of the world. The island nation historically had 80% forest cover before the advent of modern agriculture. Today, less than 2% of the land is native woodland, despite reforestation schemes, which have struggled in recent years. Daltun advocates rewilding as a better approach.
“[A]ny pieces of land that have been left on farms for a significant length of time very often have reverted naturally back to wild native forests,” he says. “[O]nce I started seeing this, I started to realize that something like that would be so much better than actually planting trees.”
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Banner image: View of Eoghan Daltun’s land on the Beara Peninsula, County Cork, Ireland. Photo by Farming For Future (CC BY 4.0).
Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found at 𝕏 via @CrisisReports and at Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.
Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.
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