Rewilding.

We talked about it before, many times.

We talked about it with scientists, with ecologists, with NGOs.

We also talked about rewilding with farmers and with hunters.

But today we are going to talk about what to do if you own a land and you want to rewild it, or maybe you already started rewilding and you have a good idea what to do, but you would like to speak with someone who is also doing rewilding just to have this sense of community, that you're not the only weirdo in a town that rewilds their land.

Not in a town, maybe in a village.

So that is what we're going to talk about today.

This is Conservation and Science podcast, where we take a deep dive into topics of ecology, conservation and human wildlife interactions.

And I'm Tommy Sierafinski and I always strive to bring you diverse perspectives on environmental topics that I cover.

And that means that you might hear views and opinions in this podcast that you might not necessarily agree with.

In fact, I think that with every episode, about half of you are exposed to views and opinions you might not agree with.

And that is okay.

That's by design, because I want you to listen to people you might not have listened to otherwise.

In today's episode, our guest is someone who most of you undoubtedly know very well.

And you might wondering what he is up to.

And in today's episode, you'll find out what he's up to.

Parikh Fogarty, welcome back to the show.

Thanks so much, Tom.

It's a pleasure.

It's been too long.

Oh, yeah, I know, I know.

You've been on.

We were talking before we started recording.

You've been on the episode 20 in 2018.

That's where it all started.

The good old days.

The good old days.

Yes, exactly.

Porig, listen.

This episode is something I was waiting for, probably since July 2023.

I knew that you're gonna have something going on and now you have the thing going on.

People usually leaving that till the end, but we're gonna just dive right into it.

Please give us the skinny what it is.

So, Tommy, when I was with the Irish Wildlife Trust, we were obviously promoting rewilding.

I think we were one of the few people in Ireland to actively promote rewilding.

And as a result, a lot of people were getting in touch with us to say, you know, I'm really in favor of all this rewilding stuff.

I have some land.

What do I do?

How do I do rewilding?

And unfortunately, you can't give a Very simple answer to that question over the phone.

So we had to turn a lot of people away or direct them to websites and so on, which is not ideal.

So after I left, I was of course thinking, you know, what would I do next?

And I thought, well, you know, this would be a very nice idea to help people who own land to do rewilding.

I thought as well, I mean, I've been working on policy issues for so long and there's been so many ups and downs with that.

I thought, well, this would make a very nice change.

You know, go and actually start doing the stuff that I've been talking about for such a long time, meet people, which I love doing, and traveling around Ireland, being outdoors and.

And all that stuff.

So it seemed like a very nice combination.

So, basically, I've set up a website.

It's called rewild your land, ie.

And it's for anybody who has a bit of land and wants to rewind it.

It's that simple.

And people who would, who would, you know, like, I know that some people are saying, wow, oh, this is great.

What would be the expectations, like, if they start working on rewilding with your help?

Because I presume this is sort of a consultancy.

What is the timescale when they can start seeing results, meaningful results?

Well, I mean, again, that is not possible.

It's not really possible to answer that question.

I mean, I have found from the relatively small number of people I've worked with so far that really what we're trying to do is get trees to grow.

And because the grazing pressure in Ireland, as you know, is significant.

And so I suppose we're looking for tree regeneration in a lot of cases, not all.

And I suppose if we're working, if we're taking the right measures, then we would expect to see trees growing pretty quickly.

You know, you're not going to get an ancient oak forest anytime soon.

But I'd be quite happy if we got to the stage where we are looking at tree growth on many sites.

Now, there's a lot of caveats to that, but, you know, and, but really what we're, you know, what our indicators of success will be will be individual to.

To every site.

And the other thing I need to emphasize, Tommy, is that, you know, we're all learning here.

I mean, I don't.

It's not a case that I rock up to somebody's land and say, you got to do this, this and this.

See it in 10 years.

I'm visiting people who are already rewilding and I'M finding that we're all experimenting.

There's no handbook for it, really.

And the climate is different, the conditions are different in different parts of the country.

So it may well be that I will come up with a plan with a landowner and in five years time we realize, look, nothing's really happening here, you know, it's not happening as we thought it might and we may need to change course.

So this is very much a collaborative effort.

And when I say collaborative, it's not even just me and the landowner, it's me and the landowner and lots of other landowners who are also learning as we go along.

Sure.

So is it focusing on the tree growth?

Primarily?

Because here's the thing, how do you square that?

On one hand, rewilding is to give nature space and time to do whatever it's supposed to do.

Right.

So this is like a difference between conservation and rewilding.

And then on the other hand, you said, like, you try to do something with landowners, so can you explain to us and to listen, like, where, how would you square that between, you know, one end of the spectrum where you're just like, oh, you're rewilding.

Just leave that land alone and don't touch it and come back in 10 years, it's rewilded versus here you are with the landowners with a consultation program with, you know, adjusting what you're doing.

Where, how does that work?

I mean, I know we can tie ourselves in knots sometimes with the terminology, but I mean, rewilding doesn't exclude traditional conservation, it doesn't exclude what we might call nature restoration and other things.

There's, let's look at it as a Venn diagram and there's, there's overlap, but there's always decisions that are going to have to be made.

And so, for instance, one of the things where we look at when, when I visit a site is that is rewilding a good thing for place?

Maybe it isn't.

So we're looking at, you know, are there reasons why we shouldn't be rewilding?

So I'm thinking if we have, it hasn't happened yet.

But if I were to arrive at a site where, you know, it's a species rich grassland, for instance, and it's already being grazed by cattle or ponies or whatever, and, and it's a, and it's a beautiful habitat, it's providing a lot, I might say, look, this isn't suitable.

This is, you know, you're better off continuing to do what you're doing, or maybe even if we See that it is rewilding and that important habitat is being lost.

Maybe the advice is to go back to the traditional forms of management.

So this is what I mean.

It's very individual to the.

To the site and also to the site owner, because some people are very keen to be doing things and other people are quite happy to do nothing.

I mean, I would say that.

Tommy of the.

As I say, I don't have very many people in the network at the moment.

I only launched it a couple of weeks ago.

But the people I have been working with, I've only had one so far, where I went down to his site in County Limerick, and he basically stopped cutting the grass two years ago.

And he doesn't have farm animals.

They don't have a high number of deer in their area.

And we could see there's already trees germinating from the hedgerows around.

And, you know, we looked at each other and said, well, look, I think all you need to do here is precisely nothing and just keep an eye on us and, you know, we'll come back in a few years and if we see that these trees are progressing and you're getting brambles and you're getting different types of trees, well, then great.

You, you mentioned that there you have already a few people who are working, working with you.

So you're aiming at creating a network of rewilding.

Right.

So what's that grand vision?

So, again, it's early days, Tommy, but what I thought was important was that a lot of people out there who have land and want to do the right thing in inverted commas for nature feel that, A, they're not entirely sure that they're doing the right thing, and B, they feel like they're completely out of step with what's going on in the country.

A lot of them have told me that they feel like they're oddballs because, you know, everyone wants to be a dairy farmer.

And I.

I'm here and I just want my land to.

To be good, to be good for nature.

So, number one, a network is very good for showing people that there are actually other people in the country who are doing this and who want to do it.

And secondly, a network is great for.

For learning from each other.

If we're part of a network, we can see that.

Well, actually, these two people on the, you know, are quite close to each other.

You know, we can organize visits between these people's lands.

If you have a network and they're talking to their neighbors and they're happy with how Things are going.

Maybe we get more people coming on.

And as you can see, it may be like we're dealing at the moment of very, very small plots of land.

But, you know, I'm hoping for a multiplier effect so that A, it makes rewilding socially acceptable and B, that it's showing that it's people in Ireland, that it's actually being done, that this isn't just theoretical stuff we're talking about, this is actually happening.

And, and thirdly then, that it will encourage other people to get involved and that we get a bigger effect.

Obviously, the more landowners we have on board, the greater effect we're going to have.

And do you folks have like a community meeting, sort of like online forums or whatever, between, you know, just to exchange the ideas and share?

Yeah, well, not, not yet, but in the future I would.

I guess I've been careful.

I've been working so far on, On.

On getting the, the website up and running and social media and all the rest of it.

So I've been taking it kind of one step at a time.

But I, I mean, I would like to see.

There's two things I'd like to see already emerging.

One is that I'd love to see some kind of a conference or get together where, you know, we're physically in the same place and maybe visiting somewhere and meeting each other.

Because, I mean, this is the glue for any social movement, I think, in Ireland, you know, maybe in other countries as well.

But in Ireland we love meeting other people and we love getting out and walking around fields.

So I think this would be really important.

Important.

The other thing is that I'm learning is that there's a lot of people who are already rewilding and they don't need advice from me and they don't need plans from me, but they still want to be involved.

So what.

I'm still figuring out the details of this, but what I think I would like to have is to broaden that so that we are including those people and those landowners.

And you said that everybody wants to be a dairy farmer, to be farming.

Like, who are those people?

If you can, you know, like the broad terms, are they people with a farming background or the people, you know, like a city folks who bought the land and want to rewild?

Like, you know, like, I'm just trying to figure out, do you have like a broad spectrum of people or are you aiming at the broad spectrum of people?

Yeah, I mean, it is.

It is mixed and I'm always surprised at how diverse Landowners are, you know, we've kind of assumed that landowners, a, they're all farmers and B, they're all, you know, on that productivist train.

And, and that's not the case at all.

I mean, farmers and landowners are a very diverse bunch.

So even in the small sample size that I have at the moment, I have people have urban refugees who have gone, you know, with the dream to buy a plot of land down the country.

I have farmers who are obviously still farming, but they have a field that they are happy to give to rewilding.

And I have, I have one farmer who has, you know, beautiful oak forest, existing oak forest on her land and, and wants to protect it and wants to do more to make sure that it's going to be protected into, into the future.

So people have different motivations and, and people are coming from different backgrounds as well.

So I mean, obviously what we want is that farmers are the biggest landowners in the country.

And you know, ultimately the, the prize would be to get, you know, government backing so that farmers are, are, are incentivized to do rewilding.

But in the meantime, I think it's important to show that people who do this are not freaks and they're not, you know, they're regular people living in these communities and they're doing normal stuff, you know, and I think it's very important to be able to demonstrate to people that this is real and it's happening.

We're going to come back to this, but I just want to at this moment, like how people can contact you, how people can reach out to you, provided you're, you're accepting new, new entrants to the program.

Are you?

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, fully open for business at the moment.

So if you have land, you just need to email me.

The email address is infoewildyourland, ie and I have a website and our various social media outlets.

So you know, I've got a lot of people emailing me since I launched.

Some people are looking for advice on land that they have.

Maybe they're not sure whether they want to go into this or not.

Other people seem to be really gung ho and want to get started.

One of the things I'm grappling with at the moment is how big of a piece of land can you rewild?

I have decided that you can't rewild your garden.

I think it's wonderful that people are not cutting the grass and are creating bee friendly gardens and planting native trees, but this is not the direction we're going with having said that, maybe people have a small bit of land, but it could be really important.

It could maybe be on a water course, it could be.

Maybe have mature trees.

That would be genetically important.

So I'm not ruling anything out.

But also the other thing is that, you know, a lot of people maybe don't want to rewild.

So I mean, what it's, what it's coming to is that it's not, it's not just, it's not just the, the land is individual, but also landowners are individual.

And landowners maybe want to do something for nature, but they also want to farm.

And, and that's perfectly fine.

And I'm not presenting any of this as being the be all and end all, you know, or even the only way that, that you can, you can do stuff for nature in your land.

There's lot ways of doing that.

But what I did find was that there was nobody in Ireland's, you know, really going after, rewilding in, in, in its full spirit.

And that's, that's what I'm hoping to provide.

So what's the, what's the smallest parcel of land that you would.

So far, it's one hectare.

Okay, okay, one hectare of a, of a guy down in Wicklow and he has one hectare.

But it's in, I mean, it's in an agricultural landscape, but it has very mature trees and it also has a bit of a swamp.

So I thought, you know, this could be, you know, there's a bit of work that he needs to do, but I think this could be really important.

And you see the other thing about the difference maybe between a hectare, you know, in rural Wicklow versus a hectare in a city is that in rural Wicklow you've got good opportunities to connect with the surrounding landscape through hedgerows and through other things and maybe neighbors who have a bit of a field.

And so there is that opportunity for, for expansion that you might, and you certainly don't have in your garden, but you mightn't have it in more urban or more fragmented landscapes.

Tell me, what's the difference in your approach?

Because, you know, like I met, for example, farmers who have a pond, right, and they're, they're happy to have that pond and the surrounding of that pond given to nature, like we said, right.

And I even heard an argument like, oh, if you, to your point of getting government grants that if they try to do the car park in a village, they would get and do like a wildflower verges, they get a grant for, you know, nature.

But if they want to do anything with their pond on the farm, there is no funding for it.

Arguably, that would be much bigger benefit for wildlife verges around the car park because it is still a car park.

Now.

You said that.

Yeah, but you're going with like a rewilding spirit.

So tell us, like, what is the difference between, oh, I have this pond and I, you know, I'm just gonna not do anything and do some nice friendly stuff for nature around that pond versus I would like to do the rewilding project.

I mean, what we're asking in rewilding is what does nature need in this, in this location or where is, where would nature go if the conditions were right?

So building a pond, I think is one of the most important things that anybody could do for nature.

There's huge benefits to it.

However, digging a pond and lining of a plastic and, you know, then having to plant things around us, to me, that's not rewilding.

That's.

That's something different.

Now, I'm emphasizing here, Tommy.

I'm not presenting this as good and bad.

I'm just saying these are different approaches.

So, I mean, I'm looking at the land.

Maybe I'm going, does this want to be a pond?

You know, are we on very dry, well, drained soil here or are we in a hollow where maybe it was a pond at one point and it was filled in to create more grassland.

And sometimes you can tell that because the, the ground is squishy and there's reeds and rushes and stuff.

So I am, I do find that you go, and people are really enthusiastic and they want to do stuff, go, I want to dig a pond and I want to put bird boxes up here and all about owl boxes.

And, you know, there's no end to the things you can do.

I'm kind of going at it from the point of view of let's, first of all, let's just do nothing and see what, see what's there.

And, and let's try to understand the land.

And by the way, I mean, landowners understand their land perfectly well and they will know whether a pond will work or not.

But to me, if you have to put a heavy plastic liner, dig a hole and put a heavy plastic liner on it, then the land doesn't really want to be a pond.

And to me, then that's.

That's not rewilding.

That's a good point.

Like the case I was referring to, it was actually, like you said, actually a pond.

Actually the land wants to be a pond in this, in this place.

So it is all working with the land.

Borg let's switch gears a little bit.

Tell me, like, how Ireland is specific.

Is there any specificity to Ireland and Irish landscape and Irish community in terms of rewilding initiatives, you know, big and small versus what you know of and what you heard of from different parts of Europe?

So, I mean, I think Ireland is, is, is behind.

We have no initiatives in Ireland that are describing themselves as rewilding.

And you look at other countries, the Netherlands, for instance, Britain in particular, they're well, they're well ahead in this regard.

You've got very substantial networks of landowners in rewilding coalitions and, and so on.

Which is not to say that rewilding isn't happening.

I think rewilding is happening in Ireland, but I think there's a reluctance to use the word.

And I mean, that's fine.

I mean, I'm, I'm not here to bash people over the head for, you know, people are working in different areas.

They have to decide, you know, what, what the best way is for them to, to move forward and, and so on.

But, but I do think we're missing out because there's a lot of wealthy people and wealthy institutions.

Funding, I'm talking about, really, that we could be availing of for people who want to do rewilding.

And we see that funding going into other countries and we're just not seeing it come into Ireland.

So I think there is a missing, I think we're missing out on that front.

I think the other thing is that rewilding is really popular and people want to see it.

People, people, I think, intuitively understand what we're talking about and they want to see it.

So I think that by not using the word, by, you know, shying away from the concepts, I think we're all missing out.

And this is something that I don't even want to go into right now, but we said it many times that sometimes I feel like it's too much focus on the actual word.

And it's like, oh, what is that really means and starts well, let's look at the concept in general, what we're trying to do, and who cares how you call it?

There's always two sides to it, right?

There is, and there's always, I think obviously the words we use matter.

How we use them matters.

But also I have found that by trying to weave your way around words, by studiously avoiding their use, in many ways, it's avoiding the real issues.

It's Avoiding the issues that we should be talking about.

And I'll give you an example that isn't rewilding.

I mean, when we had the debate, the ferocious debate over the Nature Restoration law.

Ah, that one, which, which had nothing to do with rewilding, by the way.

You know, there was no mention of rewilding in any of it.

We ended up getting totally bogged down, excuse the pawn in rewetting.

And you know, maybe about a year into this debate, I was, I was at a field event in County Offaly on this subject of peace wetting.

And you know, a lot of people are saying, oh, we were wrong to use the word rewetting.

You know, we should have used a different term because now rewetting has a bad name and we're not allowed rewettes, so on.

So like, I mean, to me this is totally missing the point.

You know, there's stuff we have to do.

If landowners are concerned that their ability to farm is going to be diminished, that's something we need to talk about.

If landowners are worried that their rights to their land are going to be taken away, let's talk about that.

But you're not going to avoid those concerns by just finding a different word.

I think that's it's, it's just dodging the issues.

Yeah, that sounds manipulative, right?

At some point because on one, like there is a fine line between.

Oh, if, if some words like you're saying is triggers you.

Right.

Because you of a preconception you have.

Let's not use that word.

Fine.

But there is a fine line between like.

So I cannot say the word now.

Yes, because like you.

So that's, that's unhealthy.

That's unhealthy on the, on the other.

Side of the spectrum and it leads to self censorship.

And we've seen like way before rewilding.

We've seen the environmentalists in Ireland have censored them themselves because they feel they don't want to trigger certain groups of people.

And I think that's really harmful.

We have to be able to talk about these issues.

And I would be the first to say that farmers and landowners in Ireland were shafted through Natura 2000 designations, through the way that the food system has been designed to marginalize the farmers.

Not, you know, not.

It's not the land that's marginal, it's the farmers that have been marginalized.

And, and I think they, they have every right as a community to feel hard done by.

But you know, trying to find the perfect term that doesn't upset them is not dealing with the issue in my view.

That's, that's very good point and it's very interesting because it seems like a lot of ecologists pro nature people, rewilders, even whatever term we want to use are completely on the same page with farmers up to the point where like you've been screwed over by consecutive governments.

It's like from that point onwards where it seems to be the, you know, disagreement of what, what's next, and that's usually as farmers would argue is because they have way more at stakes than people who just want, you know, nature thrive and so on.

That's a different story.

But speaking about the terms, you talked about nature being one of the most depleted countries, nature depleted countries on Earth.

I want to talk about this for a second.

As far as I know, the term originated from state of nature report.

It was like 30 or 40 NGOs do it and they coined that term for media, nature depleted.

Right.

And originally what was in the report, it was like Nature Intactness Index or something like that.

And there were countries like Botswana, there were countries like Tanzania in that thing.

So surely when we compare Ireland and any of the urbanized countries, well, they're looking like nature depleted.

Tell me, how do you understand this term and are we really that nature depleted?

Because you go out and you hear birds chirping and you see deer and other things happening, badgers.

What's your take on this?

So I, I know what you're talking about.

And there's this map that does the rounds periodically and Ireland looks like a pimple.

It's just scarlet red and there are green patches in other parts of the world.

I mean, I think, you know, I mean that, that, that upset a lot of people.

And because you're right, people, maybe people don't feel like, you know, you go outside for a walk and it doesn't really feel like the biodiversity desert that, you know, we're sometimes talking about.

But there's no doubt about us.

I mean, if you go to, let's say France and Spain, which would be our nearest neighbors apart from Britain, both countries have large areas of natural or, you know, natural ish forest.

We're talking 30 to 40% of their, of their country.

Both of them would be, would be forest.

Both of them have bears, wolves, you know, the list goes on wild boar, you know what you might say, the reasonably full complement of the animals that should be there.

So compared to that, there's nowhere in Ireland where we have that level of semi natural Vegetation, I mean, at a global level, you know, we notice when it comes round to, you know, these cops that are organized by the UN and we talk about biodiversity, there's a lot of talk about forests.

I mean forests are one of the most important ecosystems globally because they, they, they, they're just so important for so many different reasons.

And we know that in Ireland our forest was once 80% of our entire country.

And, and that, I mean the fact even that I don't even have a figure to give you because we've never fully worked it out.

I know there's work at the moment trying to do this, but you know, people say it's between 1 and 2% what's left of our natural forest.

That's what I heard, 1%.

But we don't actually, we've never had a proper survey of all of our native woodlands, you know, but that is going at the moment.

So I mean, if I was to say to you that, you know, Brazil is on Track to have 1% of its forests left, you know, there'd be absolute, and rightly so, there'd be, you know, global outrage and we'd be thinking to ourselves, my God, what is that country doing at the moment?

80% of the Amazon is intact or you know, 20% has been totally destroyed and already it's leading us to tipping points.

So this is what I mean in terms, if we're going to compare ourselves to other countries, you know, extent is our natural vegetation still there, whether that's forest or whether it's bogs or whatever.

And the answer is very, very low.

Yeah, but how do you deal or how do you answer to the argument of specificity, right?

Like when you compare Brazil and the size of the Brazil and compared to the population and density of a population, etc, etc.

And then you talk about Ireland, which is a very highly well modified landscape, then you inevitably running into quote unquote problem of oh, you want to run people off the land and rewild everything, right?

So yeah, I'm just genuinely curious of your view on this.

How to find a balance without raising concerns of like, hey, one of the arguments against the rewilding that I hear often is like that it is like, oh, it's a fundamentally anti rural, right?

And they say, oh, this is nonsense.

Like how is it fundamentally anti rural?

And the answer is like, well if that land is farmed and supports community, rural community, and you want to change it to something else, then it's not going to be supporting that community anymore.

That's anti Rural.

Right.

So it surely must matter that, you know, what is the current land use in Ireland, the size, this, you know, all those specificity.

So there's two different points there, I would say.

One is that there's nobody campaigning to return Ireland to 80% natural oak forest.

I mean the fact that we're so low, you know, if we were to double, triple the amount of native woodland, you know, which would be a great thing to do, you're still at a very small number.

So there's no risk of us going to 80% woodland.

We do know that because the Environmental Protection Agency has done the calculations.

You know, what does Ireland need to look like by 2050 in order to be net zero?

So this is very much a carbon calculation or greenhouse gas calculation rather than biodiversity necessarily.

But there's a lot of overlap.

But the EPA have said basically we need about a third of Ireland to be forest.

We need to repair all of our wetlands, all of the bogs need to be rewetted and we need to reduce the number of farm animals.

Now this, this report came out, it was accused of being.

Ethnic cleansing is the term that one rural TV TD described it as.

But if you go back and look at what they actually said.

Did they say there will be no farming in Ireland?

No, they didn't.

They said that we need to reduce the number of farm animals that, that we have.

Did they say that we need to cover the entire country in forests?

No, they said we need to be about a third of the country in forests and we need to fix our bogs.

So I think the science is there about how we need to.

And we're not going to do that by planting trees or planting plantations of sick of spruce.

That's just not going to happen.

So the only way to do that is by rewilding in my view is to start kick starting natural ecological processes to get these things up and running.

So that from that kind of scientific point of view, I think the argument there is really strong.

The other thing you were, you were mentioning about rewilding is anti rural.

Let's take a look at what has happened to rural Ireland over the last say 50 years.

The traditional industries in Ireland, the traditional commercial activities in Ireland, let's say fishing and farming.

Fishing number one has, I mean it's an absolute shadow of what it used to be.

There are virtually no inshore fishermen making a full time living from fishing anymore.

There's a few, but very, very few.

All the fishing now is in big industrial boats and that's absolutely in freefall at the moment Brexit took more boats out of the system.

So basically what the rural policies we have pursued have been disastrous for fishing and it's been a similar case in farming.

Fewer and fewer people are farming.

The earnings from farming are basically not sustainable because only dairying last I looked was, you know, making anything resembling a decent living for people.

And so most farmers now are part time and they're only doing it through subsidies.

So I don't think as a, as an economic sector, farming apart from dairying is, is washing its face, it is contributing.

I mean I, I understand the argument that people, you know, feel the cultural attachment to farming and they, you know, it's in their family.

Many younger people feel the pressure to keep it going because you know that's, it's just that, that kind of peer pressure, I should, it's something I should be doing to uphold the family name or, or may, for a lot of people it's something they really love doing.

And I think that's, that's, there's no problem with that.

I don't think that is under attack the way that some of the lobby groups have said it is because we know that we can farm in a nature friendly way.

I think what we're missing really at the end of the day is a plan for our food system, for how we use our land and sea that allows for these multiple activities to go on at the same time.

Because over the last 50 years we've basically just thrown it open to market forces to decide where the investment should be and where the return should be.

And we have gone down this export led model that has put rural Ireland under tremendous pressure.

So I mean I would say to people in these areas, and I do say it when I'm in these areas, I mean, what would you want us to keep going the way we're going?

Is the answer.

Just more subsidies to increase the amount of taxpayer money you get per head of sheep.

Because that's what the farmer organizations say or do we want to build something different that allows for farming to go on, has clean water, has healthy natural habitats and to me is a much more healthier place to be, particularly given the dangers we're seeing from extreme weather and so on.

I mean just fine on going on now, Tommy, with the final point about the storm awyn that we just went through, the people who most suffered from that were the people who were without power for weeks because trees and a lot of them are Sitka spruce and conifers that have very shallow roots and fall over very easily destroy the power system.

And so these things have very real consequences.

And that's why, I mean, I always go back to it.

I mean there's such an urgency to act and do stuff that we need to be really getting on with it.

So do you think that there is reality to rewild 30% of land?

Is that even on the cards?

Because that's the number that being thrown around.

Well, it's funny because a few years ago there was a global movement to protect 30% of land and sea.

By the end of this decade it was called 30 by 30.

And at the time we were developing our next biodiversity action plan.

And when the first draft of that plan was circulated, it included the 30% on land figure.

And I thought this is great, this is really brave of the government to do this.

And the minister at the time, Malcolm Noonan, signed Ireland up to what was called a high ambition coalition for nature.

And I thought, well, this is great, this is really progressive, this is where we need to be going.

And then the next draft that appeared, it suddenly vanished, it was gone.

And we were never given any explanation for why it was taken out.

And the final plan, which was published just over one year ago, I mean there's an ambition there to expand the area for nature, but the 30% is gone, it's still at sea.

But so there's no ambition.

The only thing that has happened which I think is very positive, the Climate Change Advisory Council in its last report on biodiversity and land use said that we should be doing this, we should be aiming to protect 30% of land by the end of this decade.

And I thought that was very, very positive.

And so how do you, if that happened, like how do you see the change in the land use in terms of, you know, those, those communities, those rural communities, farming.

Do you think that would inevitably mean transition to more tourist based, more services based economy or how would that work?

I know it's a hard question.

It's, you know, like probably we can just, you know, speculate on this.

But I'm just curious, like how would you see that playing out?

Should it play it out?

Yeah, I mean it is a hard question.

And the last government commissioned a land use strategy which still hasn't appeared, which may give you an indication as to why it's hard.

You know, a lot of people, you know, I think politically the kind of things that are being talked about are still very sensitive.

But I mean, the outline of how that would be done I think is kind of clear.

I mean, if you look we have water quality problems, we have biodiversity problems, we have carbon greenhouse gas emissions from our land.

We want to solve all those things in a coherent way.

We should be looking at the river catchment basis.

So you look at a river catchment, what are the things in this catchment that are important?

Let's say some catchments have freshwater pearl mussels, so you need a very high level of water quality.

Other catchments don't have freshwater pearl mussels, so they don't need the same level of water quality.

Some areas will have soil that would be perfectly suitable for commercial forestry and other areas won't.

So, so we need to break it down.

What we don't want to be doing is like drawing lines on maps to say that this area here now is going to be all forest.

Because that would lead to a revolution in the morning.

And we've made that mistake in the past and we know that's wrong.

But what we do, what we should be able to say is that, okay, this catchment, we need to be getting up to X amount of forest in this catchment.

We need a lot of it to be native forest, some of it can be commercial forest.

We need to have there's this amount of peatlands.

We need to be working on peatland restoration in these areas and this is the kind of farming that, that can go on alongside all of this.

I think if you were to present a plan on that basis, I mean it's not the end of the world we're talking about but you do have to then put the, be able to direct the public funding into that so that you are transitioning to a nature friendly economy, which I mean the just transition.

I think already to a lot of people, if you say though I'm in favor of a just transition, what they're hearing is okay, I get to get my head cut off and somebody else is going to put money into something else.

That's why I'm very reluctant to talk about tourism or you know, you know, the tourism makes a lot of money for rural areas.

I don't want to see Ireland just turned into a place for tourists.

I want to see diverse economies where there's tourism, there's farming, there is other activities going on and, and so that's what we're aiming for.

So there's no silver bullet.

We want diversification.

But what that diversification actually looks like will depend on the areas and the people in those areas I think are probably best placed to decide then what they should be doing.

Yeah, provided they have options.

And options is the real the key words there, because many of the debates that we were having around enduring during the Nature Restoration Law were providing options for farmers.

But, you know, we saw even a lot of opposition to that.

The farming organizations ensured that a lot of the targets would be met on public land up to the end of the decade.

So basically that's what they're saying, is that farmers won't have the option to participate in this, that it's all going to be on public land.

Money that's spent on nature restoration is basically going to stay in the state.

It's going to go back to quail, it's going to go back to Bordemona, and it's not going to go to farmers.

And the farming organizations campaigned for that, which to me was like, totally counterproductive.

If what you're saying is that you want investment in rural Ireland and you want investment in.

In giving people options to transition to other ways, that, that that path has been cut off by farming organizations.

It's interesting.

It's interesting because, you know, like, everybody knows that the diversity is resilience.

And that's, that's coming from systems theory.

It's a hard science, like a hard science that the more diverse the system is, the more nodes in the system, the more resilient it is.

And if it's more homogeneous, more nodes that call them whatever the system is, are the same, then the system becomes brittle and it's easy to disrupt.

So that's interesting because on one hand, farming organizations are for farming, but they also for rural communities, they're all two things.

Understandable.

But then I think this is like a tension that some might not even realize that, you know, if you, for a rural community, you might not be so much for farming as you think you should be, because at some point that diversity element in the rural community is missed.

That's it.

Parik, I just want to switch gears once again and talk about you, about the constitutional rights of nature.

We had the conversation, two of us on the, on social media.

I think we exchanged fewer opinions on this.

I had a episode of a podcast where we were talking about biodiversity rights, which were taking the nature rights, maybe similar concept, maybe a little bit different, but we talked about the rights of nature as well on that.

On that episode.

I'm curious.

I don't think I have like a very open question.

Just want you to elaborate on this.

I'm just gonna throw one thing here, is that on one hand, it seems like this is a very good idea because then if someone destroys piece of habitat or destroys the grassland or pollutes the river, then that carries a heavier weight in terms of the law.

What happened?

Right, we all heard about, you know, river being polluted and then the penalty for that was just laughable.

It was like a fee for polluting the river rather than penalty.

On another hand, and I'm sure you heard those conversations, right?

We have an issue like, for example, predator control, which is like where we are right now.

It's completely, absolutely needed to not lose certain very vulnerable weather species.

Yes.

Everybody knows it's a temporary solution, it's a stopgap.

The reasons are different, but we need that.

And obviously people are like, oh, but that would be then like how you're going to do those essential conservation work when you introduce the rights of nature.

And we have two sides kind of outlined here.

So please tell us, what are your views on this, how this would look like in your view, so it is workable and how to deal with those difficult edge cases.

So this is a recommendation from the Citizens assembly that we should have a referendum to, to recognize the rights of nature and also to stress us the other side of the coin is to recognize human rights to a healthy environment.

So these are kind of separate but very much joined together.

I would distinguish between that and animal rights and let's say the, you know, the individual rights of a particular animal, you know, a pig in a factory or a cow in a field or something like that.

That's not really what we're talking about, although the animal rights thing is, you know, absolutely worthy of conversation as well.

But it's not really what we're talking about when we talk about rights for nature.

Rights for nature as it has been rolled out in the few countries where it exists is really at a very high level.

We're talking about the protection of ecosystems.

We're talking about the rights of individual species to perpetuate and to evolve in their natural habitat.

The question for me is that why, and I'm sure it's a question for a lot of other people, is why after 50 years of legislating for environmental protection, would another law be any good?

Because all of the laws that we've been accumulating over 50 years basically have gone ignored.

You know, if we had actually complied with the laws that we have, we would not be in the situation we're in at the moment.

We may have problems, but we wouldn't be anywhere near where we're at at the moment.

But maybe the best way would be to give it a kind of a practical example as How I would see it working, working.

I go back to the freshwater pearl mussel, which is a bivalve and lives in some rivers and used to live in their billions in some of the very big rivers in Ireland like the Nore, the Barrow, the Blackwater in County Cork and so on.

Now we have special areas of conservation now for freshwater pearl mussels.

And yet there's only one population in the country that is believed to be breeding.

So, and that's because of water quality.

That's because the water quality has diminished.

They're so sensitive to pollution, they can live for a very long time.

They can breed, they can have their young, they go into the water column, they get attached to salmon or trout, but when they drop off from the fish into the bed of the river where they're going to spend the rest of their lives, they.

The quality of the river is too poor.

It's full of silt and mud or the oxygen levels are not right or whatever.

So they've stopped breeding.

Now the laws we have to date have not done anything to stop that.

We saw a big inflection in our water quality when dairy quotas were lifted.

And there was a decision at the time, particularly in the river Blackwater in County Cork to basically and others to basically allow the freshwater pearl mussels to go extinct.

They said that, okay, there's populations in the north and west of Ireland where we're not going to have dairy expansion and we can probably improve the water quality up there.

But in the Southwest it's just not going to be possible because we're going to have be making so much money from dairying and all that muck is going to go into the river.

It's just not going to be possible to have the dairy expansion and the freshwater pearl mussels at the same time.

And so we got the dairy expansion and the papuran mussels are on the verge of extinction.

Had we had legal constitutional rights for nature in Ireland, we could have taken a court case to the highest court in Ireland, to the.

I think it's the Supreme Court to say that this plan for expansion is not constitutional because it's basically saying that it's okay for the purpose mussels to go extinct in half the country to allow for this economic expansion.

So that's how I would see it being important and that's how I would see it actually working.

And that's how we've seen as we don't have many examples, but that's how it seems to have worked through the courts in other countries which already have it.

Do you think there is a chance of this happening?

I have to believe that there's a chance of all of these things happening because there's so many things that seem completely unlikely.

You know, that.

And particularly these days when everything seems to be furiously going backwards, you kind of go, you know, why are we even talking about this when, you know, we can't even, you know, we can't even remove a barrier on a river without being accused of, you know, flooding a town.

There's huge challenges, but I always believe that these things are possible.

I think, I think the challenge at the moment is to create the nature friendly economy at the moment.

If we were to launch a campaign now for rights for nature, I mean, we know exactly what would happen.

You know, there'd be the usual voices would be triggered and, you know, and I mean, I don't mean to be glib about it because I know farmers are under pressure.

That bit is real.

But they would see this as just another, you know, another stick to beat them with and put them out of business.

And, you know, I would, I wouldn't be in favor of holding a referendum under those circumstances.

But I do think if we can design a nature friendly economy and, and we can show to people that this means, you know, healthy rural communities and economic activity and the diversity that we were talking about a moment ago, then all of a sudden this stuff is not insurmountable.

Speaking about changes and environmental changes in your experience so far, vast experience, may I add, what is the best way to create environmental change?

Like for all those folks who are listening to this and they would like to do something to make a change, to move the needle, what's the most effective way?

Well, I mean, your question implies that.

I have the answer, Tommy.

I mean, if I knew the secret, I would have been doing it for the past, past 20 years.

So, I mean, I think at this stage we've been told what we're doing wrong.

Environmentalists should be this, that and the other.

I think in fairness to the, the environmental movement, they've tried a lot of things over the years.

They tried going all corporate and, you know, sitting down with industry and business and saying, we're on your side, you know, and that didn't work.

We, we tried, you know, the Sophie, Sophie approach by not talking about all the bad news.

I mean, surprise, surprise, that just makes people ignore it.

And then if you do go on too hard with the reality, people, we're told that people just turn off in nature conservation I think we know what works on the ground because luckily we have a lot of good examples in Ireland and around the world at all kinds of levels of what works.

And we do know that it's basically three legs of a stool.

We need the scientific basis, we need to know what we should be doing.

And I think in that regard we're very lucky.

In Europe and in Ireland we have a very good scientific understanding and we broadly know the kinds of things that we need to be doing and how to monitor it and all the rest of it.

We're very good scientists as well.

Are we say we're very good ecologists in this country.

The second part is that we need community buy in.

We see for instance, some very successful peatland restoration projects in Ireland where the local communities now are really the guardians of that bog and are very proud of it and feel that they own it.

And you know, they are the eyes and ears that are protecting it.

That's essential.

The third leg of the school stool is state support.

So you need the subsidies to be going in the right direction.

We have examples in Ireland where we only have two of those stools in place and it fails because the third one is missing and maybe because we're talking about three things and not two things, that's what makes it harder to do it.

But I don't think, I don't think it's a mystery combination.

It's happening in Ireland with, particularly on peatlands.

But getting the government support to align with the science is proving very difficult because of the imbalance in the economy.

And what I mean by that is that if you have a lot of money, a lot of people, or at least some people making a lot of money out of doing things that are contrary to what the science is telling us, then that brings lobbying, that brings the kind of influence of government level that prevents the changes happening.

And that's the logjam.

That's the, you know, that's why the focus, I think, above all the other things needs to be on that nexus between the political influence and the economic forces that maintain the status quo that has to break down if we're going to make progress.

Folks, if you're enjoying the conversations that we're having on this podcast, don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter.

The link is in the description, also the link to Ps Rewildly Allrand IE and the link to the newsletter.

Newsletter.tommisoutdoors.com so subscribe not only notifications about the latest releases of the podcast, but also other information about conservation and science.

Parig, if we were to talk in seven years time, hopefully it's not going to be seven years before you show up next time on the show, but if we talk about five or seven years, how would you like your initiative?

How would you like the network that you're building to look like?

So what I I would love to have landowners in every county and I'd go for 32 counties while I'm at it, to be honest.

I would like to have a decent number of people.

I'm not going to put a number on it, but I'd like to have a substantial community.

I'd like to have NGOs on board who own land and who are rewilding.

I'd like to have them on board.

I'd love to have community groups who can control land.

I think there might be an opportunity there with local authorities who have land in their control, basically giving it in trust to local communities to manage as nature reserves and rewilding zones.

And I'd love it to be in a proper community where, you know, we're getting together every now and again and celebrating rewilding, because I think it's really when it happens and it's successful, people feel like celebrating.

It's a joyful thing.

And lastly, I'd really love to see a big landscape scale rewilding project in Ireland that has land rewilding in big letters over the door.

Parik, I wish you all the best and all the success with your initiative.

I think it's great and you're doing great work.

Thank you so much.

Thanks a million, Tommy, and best of luck to yourself.