"Ecological desert" is more sensationalist than technical. I think they meant "wasteland".
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.
It's not a "wasteland" in the usual dry sense. It's too damp. Peat bogs, not dusty plains.
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.
> The author is unhappy that there are "no big and wild areas that have bears and wolves and mountain lions." Don't let your children play outside.
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.
> 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.
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
It's connecting with the local community and ecology that will allow someone to really start making a difference. Given any place, there are people practicing permaculture and regenerative agriculture. These people are found in community gardens and in the wild. People are working towards r/nolawns, creating pollinator habitats, front-yard wildlife refuges, and perennial food forests. Foragers know things about food and medicine of the land. Mushroom cultivators know things about living soil and remediating contaminated dirt. There are punks sneaking around r/guerillagardening, seed-bombing abandoned patches of urban space with native plants.
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 do not like to "evangelize" people, and i truly dislike gurus, so i really hate to recommend books other than fiction or old, not actualized philosophy, but if you think what my parent hosh wrote is great but you either don't believe it can do something, or you want to do the same but don't have any idea how, Olivier Hamant books are great, pragmatic, actionable and positive starting points. It's a fantastic starter to think about what you can do. I disagree with him on some points (i started to expand but it's detrimental to my argument and anyway, most of those reading this did not read him, so it's like arguing with wind :/)
I can imagine a distant future in which humanity makes regreening the planet its number one priority.
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.
Well, if we warm the globe a tad more back to the Holocene climatic optimum of 10k-8k years ago, we just might do that, complete with having a humid Sahara again and everything. Though I'm not sure we'll like some of the other effects...
> Well, if we warm the globe a tad more back to the Holocene climatic optimum of 10k-8k years ago
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.
