Eoghan Daltun, An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey Through the Magic of Rewilding (Dublin: Hachette Books Ireland, 2022) 384 pp. £45.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781399705271
An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey Through the Magic of Rewilding recounts Eoghan Daltun’s personal story of rewilding land on the Beara Peninsula on the southern coast of Ireland. Daltun is a sculptor and art historian by formal training, and a self-taught restoration ecologist and environmentalist. He is also a natural storyteller: the book is framed in an engaging memoir that begins in Daltun’s twenties, tracing his burgeoning interest in rewilding and the steps along a journey of decades to a piece of restored native forest on the Beara. Woven into the memoir is evocative nature writing as well as practical information about the history and restoration needs of Irish woodlands, and reflections on the nature-first framework of environmental philosophy underlying his efforts. This review will highlight Daltun’s practical and ideological contributions to the rewilding movement in Ireland.
Daltun is placed at the beginning of a groundswell of popular and academic interest in the restoration of Ireland’s native biodiversity. In the coming decade, it is very likely that the Irish rewilding movement will grow exponentially and gain political traction to execute more successful large-scale multi-stakeholder collaborations like the All Island Pollinator Plan. The contributions of this book to the rewilding movement in Ireland at its outset are twofold. Firstly, the book can be read as an accessible manual for those interested in getting involved in rewilding Irish native forests first hand. Daltun’s account of the rewilding process – the fulfilling parts on the land, and the more burdensome bureaucratic requirements – reads like an informative walk on the land with Daltun, taking in the view and discussing best practices. In its function as a manual, Chapter 5, ‘A Dying Forest,’ is the most useful chapter for other rewilders to read. It distills practical information on the removal of common invasive species in Ireland (feral goats, sika deer and rhododendron) into the narrative account, and links Daltun’s personal experiences navigating bureaucracy for his forest to larger paradigms in Irish land management policy as related to invasive species management, commonage, and agricultural permitting. Situated as it is within a narrative account, the practical ecological and managerial information in this chapter is easy for the reader to digest and take forward.
The second major contribution of the book to the Irish rewilding movement is to offer pillars of an ideological framework that will help to frame the movement here at its outset. These are as such:
- Daltun posits that the work of the forest rewilder in Ireland is to serve as steward and protector of the land and its natural regeneration process, rather than actively planting trees. Trees will generally self-seed – and they will self-select the most appropriate locations for their long-term needs, and spread in the most appropriate time frame, if protected from external threats. The rewilder should simply guard existing wild seedlings or trees in a would-be forest landscape from grazing by sheep and cows, from invasive species incursions, and from chemical runoff from agriculture. Thus Daltun casts the forest rewilder in Ireland as ‘protector’ or perhaps ‘forest shepherd’ of the forest’s own innate regeneration process in its own time. This framing of the rewilder’s role in Ireland is useful to the movement because it provides a script that can help to keep rewilders in line with Ireland’s own innate ecological timelines, for the long-term wellbeing of the forests and other neighbouring ecosystems. It can help the movement to avoid the temptation of well-intentioned but hasty, large-scale tree planting schemes, which elsewhere in Europe and globally have often backfired in loss of biodiversity, wildfire, or tree dieback due to inappropriate zoning of would-be forests in existing grassland or peatland habitats, or planting the wrong types of trees.
- Daltun argues that there is a need for a shift of priority in rewilding for Ireland; from the restoration of individual endangered species, to the restoration of entire forest landscapes. With their habitats restored, endangered species will return; without large swathes of native forest, species conservation efforts will always be piecemeal and will ultimately fail. Similarly, he argues that we do not need to understand everything about Irish native forests in order to bring them back – in fact we never will, as our forests are very likely more dynamic and the interplay between species more complex than we can ever understand or model. A forest is much greater than the sum of its parts; our goal should be to safeguard space for the regeneration of entire forest ecosystems. Cyloed scientific research on specific forest functions, and concerns about individual taxonomic diversity can at times fragment the larger picture; what is needed is whole forest landscapes, the more expansive the better.
- Daltun contests a false opposition between the interests of farmers and environmentalists in Ireland, and proposes a change in Ireland’s incentive scheme that would allow farmers the freedom to choose to put their land to food production or to habitat restoration, or a mix of the two, and to benefit from equal incentives. The current incentives maximise productivity in food production at the expense of the remaining stands of nature trying to return. Farmers who produce food must be protected and incentivised to do so, but those who see the benefit must also be allowed to act as stewards of rewilding, with the benefits of this to society (such as protection from floods, climate moderation, protection of essential pollinator species, etc.) met appropriately with equal reward. If we are to have a successful movement for native forest rewilding, we will need to ally ourselves with farmers: to support their needs, integrate our knowledge systems, and work together closely. Irish farmers are already lovers of the Irish landscape: we must advocate for policy that empowers them to act upon pro-forest and pro-biodiversity values and rewild parts of their lands when and as they see fit.
I had the opportunity to meet Daltun and tour his land on the Beara in 2021. We stood together at the edge of his healing rainforest, and listened to the chatter of birds inside. Daltun explained to me then, as he explains in the book, that he wants the forest to stand as an example that can demonstrate to Irish ecological scientists, policymakers, and the public, how much indigenous beauty and biodiversity has been lost from the Irish landscape, and how easily it can return – if it is only protected and allowed its own space and time. In the book Daltun cites a concern about a progressive loss of nature literacy in the Irish public, a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ that occurs as successive generations become accustomed to increasingly depleted landscapes, and the baseline shifts in our conception of what ‘nature’ looks and sounds like. Native forest now covers only about 1% of the Irish landscape, and most people, even Irish ecologists, would not know how to recognize one. Daltun believes in the power of example – small stands of healthy native Irish rainforest can demonstrate what has so largely been lost over generations – restoring Irish nature in the public imaginary.
Grania Power, University of East Anglia
