Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

There was a sad story in the news this morning concerning the death of the last male Sumatran rhino in Malaysia. It is symbolic but it is impossible for us not to feel a sense of grief, particularly those of us who are of a certain age. My interest in ecology dates back to the late 1970s, when we studied it in school. I remember various things from that time, including collectible cards in cereal packets. At one point, they changed from featuring footballers to bearing pictures of animals at risk of extinction. It came as a shock last year when the World Wildlife Fund, which was behind those cards in the 1970s, acknowledged that we had lost 50% of all invertebrate wildlife in the world. We have not managed to change our ways, despite everything we knew at the time and everything we we learned from Rachel Carson about the use of pesticides and insecticides, from Donella Meadows in her book, The Limits of Growth, about the challenge we faced in this century to avoid mass extinction and from James Lovelock and his Gaia theory of how our whole living system is connected.

I have some personal reflections from the late 1970s. We used to go on holidays to Brittas Bay in County Wicklow when I was a child. I was there again this summer and it evoked some memories. Everyone of the same age will remember something similar to what I am going to recount. Our dad used to get us up in the morning and bring us out to collect mushrooms. I do not know if the Acting Chairman, Deputy Durkan, did that as a child. We were always guaranteed to get mushrooms back in the late 1970s when we got up every morning at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. to bring back breakfast. At the height of the drought last summer, I saw the same field where we used to collect mushrooms all those years ago. It looked like a lot in a holding in the Texas panhandle during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. There were a few distressed and bedraggled cattle in a field that was so dry it looked almost like rock. We all know that mushrooms are no longer collected in the same way. Our use of fertiliser and the ruining of the land means we have lost all of the microbial activity in our soil. All the nitrogen has killed the dense organic network. Our farmers are just starting to cotton on that microbial life in the soil is the key to good farming. All the fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides are killing the natural system and not serving our interests or needs.

I remember as well that we would go fishing when we were on holidays in Brittas Bay back in the 1970s, near where McDaniel's pub is located, if people happen to know that end of the beach. Dozens of sea trout would flash by in the water back then, flying at speed through one's legs as we fished in a small little brook leading to the Irish Sea. I remember hiring a boat in Wicklow and having great hassle because every time we dropped a fishing line in the water huge dogfish, a member of the shark family, wrapped themselves around our lines and it was impossible to take them off. We were looking for cod, mackerel and other fish. A fisherman from that neck of the woods, who is very interested in this topic, rang me last year. He was almost crying when he told me that what used to be a prize sport fishing area now only yields tiny fish, if anything.

One of my other memories echoes what Padraic Fogarty has written about in his brilliant book about the loss of nature in Ireland, Whittled Away. Coming home from Brittas Bay in those days seemed like a massive voyage. We nearly had to take sleeping tablets to survive the journey. On our way home, even in our drowsy state, it was possible to see the constant dance of insect life as moths were drawn to the car headlights. The windscreen of the car above the dashboard would be covered in such insects. I drove for about 12 hours in the country recently, including some time at night, and there was not a single insect on my windscreen when I got home.

As children in the Dublin suburbs, we would leave a jam jar out - Deputy Eugene Murphy might remember this as well - and it would be full of wasps within seconds. That was cruel and we do things differently now but the richness of insect life and the bird life that came with it is gone. This is not just about different fields. It is about our home, island, fields, rivers and sea, which have been completely denuded. We could count the loss in many different ways. Farming is one area where we can count it. The chair of the Committee on Climate Change in the United Kingdom, Lord Deben or John Gummer, warned against us going down the route the UK followed. He pointed out that we still have some family farming traditions left in Ireland. We can recover and prevent the complete loss of our soil. We need a national land use plan to achieve that. The critical work we did in the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate Change was the agreement to draw up such a plan. We will have to agree to farm in a completely different manner because the current method is not working. We are trading on the Origin Green brand and selling into international commodity markets where we do not get a premium price. This approach does not work for Irish farmers. We have to avoid making the mistake of trashing our country in a manner similar to that which occurred in New Zealand for the sake of selling more beef and dairy products into international commodity markets. Let us reverse direction and abandon the false Origin Green brand.

Let us turn our forestry model around. We are implementing an industrial model with rows of single species at high risk from invasive beetles and other threats, which are chopped down every 35 years. That causes further damage to our soil and water courses. The Minister is at the Cabinet table and a new whole-of-Government climate plan is due to be written. Let us completely change that forestry model to create a continuous cover forest that will be a joy to behold and walk through, one which will be full of biodiversity. Timber will be growing in those forests for 100 years and during that time we can employ thousands of young Irish people as expert foresters to bring out the particular trees at the right time. Such a strategy would also help us to manage flood protection, restore pristine water quality and replenish fish, insect and other wildlife species. We need to bring those back if we are really serious about protecting nature. We have to stop extracting peat immediately. It has stored carbon for 10,000 years. We have to bring back the equivalent of our Amazonian rainforests - our bogs - so that insect life, bird life and flora can thrive.

The land use plan is crucial if we are serious about doing these matters. It should also extend to cover our seas. Let us listen to the great ecologist, E. O. Wilson. We should act on his advice to set aside 50% of our natural areas for nature protection. Let us create marine protection areas for 50% of the North Atlantic. We can then sleep at night knowing we are turning back the tide in favour of nature. As we move from the Holocene to the Anthropocene era, the biggest change is that 10,000 years of stable environment is now becoming unstable due to activities that mankind is at the centre of. The strange thing is that new Anthropocene era will bring us to an understanding that we are not at the centre of everything. We are connected in community with each other and with nature. We are part of nature and not separate from it. Our future health and well-being are dependent on us making this leap. It is a well-being which relies on a spiritual sense of connection to nature.

It is as Hopkins said, "Glory be to God for dappled things [...] All things counter, original, spare, strange". I am sorry if that sounds a bit hippyish or out there, but it is about that sense of understanding that we are about to make an evolutionary leap. We are at an evolutionary changing point when science accepts that it does not know everything and that the division of all things down to the level of individual particulate matter is not wise or the whole truth. It has to make way for culture, spirit, art and the sense of wonder in the world around us and value that in our economy above all else. Starting to steer everything we do is going to give us a sense of connection, purpose, meaning and place that will help us to address the major fundamental challenges of our time. We are ready to do that in Ireland and it is a better place to do it than anywhere else. Ireland is just as beautiful and important. Every field, parish and county is important and every young person growing up must not grow up solely with a sense of grief, loss and the absence of hope but rather with a sense of purpose, fulfilment and connection to their place and the part it has to play in our role in protecting the whole planet for their future and the future of nature too.

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