In 1964 when I decided to study horticulture at University College Dublin, I had a dream of a career linked to gardens of verdant lawns, flowers, rose gardens, kitchen gardens overflowing with ripe fruit and leafy vegetables, butterflies flitting through sunny glades, birds singing and nesting in the trees, ladybirds sunning themselves on warm stone walls, bumblebees amplified in Canterberry Bells, all ultimately dependent on rich loamy organic soil full of worms and other beneficial creatures. I was also aware of the darker side of this pastoral vision lurking behind every leaf: sucking aphids (green, black and wooly), munching caterpillars, blights, mildews, leaf spots, rusts and viruses and those aggressive weeds. But fear eased as I was reassured by our wise college lecturers in the Albert College that thanks to the genius of mankind there was a chemical on the way for every threat to my pastoral vision. Agent Orange, a cocktail of garden chemicals raining decades of death, agony, and destruction down on the verdant forests of Vietnam, was not then on the curriculum.
Have we moved on? The EU is slowly weaning us off our arsenal of garden chemicals, but my pastoral vision has now taken on a distinct plastic hue. The grass is still green but it no
longer needs mowing; in fact, it needs neither soil or worms or other little creatures. Just as well maybe, as the worms and little creatures are no longer in the soil. The Blackbird may be in the tree but it no longer sings. But fear not, Diarmuid Gavin has been here. He has installed a switch at the garden gate, and not only will the garden revolve and go up and down, but also a dawn chorus of birdsong will gush from discreet speakers in the trees and a plastic blackbird will catch a plastic worm on the plastic lawn!
HAS THERE BEEN ONE WRONG TURN TOO MANY IN A MERE 50 YEARS?
Reflecting on how to help us grasp the reality of deep landscape, I happened on the concept of the Ancient Acre, probably subconsciously suggested by the thought-provoking
song Ancient Rain by Cork’s own Jimmy McCarthy (best sung by the earthy Mary Coughlan).
Rain is very ancient, pouring down long before man arrived and as it will do long after Trump Man has burnt out his reign. The landscape under our feet consists of many ancient acres, each with a story to tell of the game of nature and man, and of man and nature.
Every ancient acre of land/water is subject to competing demands and the most overbearing, if not aggressive, relate to human land or water use. The history of the human race is a story largely spun around the use or abuse of the land/water resource of our planet. In its earlier millennia, the human bipeds used to be just one part of nature – another species,
“Agent Orange, a cocktail of garden chemicals raining decades of death, agony, and destruction down on the verdant forests of Vietnam, was not then on the curriculum” |
admittedly still exploiting nature but in a manner where nature had the reserve capacity and deep power to rebalance things. Nature is a believer in large safety margins, so if it wants to sustain a certain population of a species it reproduces at large multiples of the target population. Similarly, it has tended to have the numbers to bounce back in the face of natural and early man-made catastrophes.
Take a time machine trip. You are back in Waterford in 1955, dawdling along the Waterside. On the left of the street there are terraced houses, and on the right, there’s The Pill, a tidal tributary of the River Suir. The Gas Works are beyond. There’s a high spring tide almost close to the peak, and the water is clear. There is a curly headed little boy lying on his belly on the cut stone river wall. He senses your presence, turns his head and blurts out, “Look, look, there are loads of baby eels down there!”
I was that little boy and I can still visualise the continuous wave of elvers flowing along the river wall. Today the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is a species very much under threat with numbers in catastrophic decline. The EU-funded Eeliad project is investigating its marine migrations for answers. Within the last century, we would appear to have reached if not passed through a profound crossroads where the man-road is running amok and the nature-road is running out of reserves.
In 1974 The Hollies had a hit with the Albert Hammond song The Air that I Breathe. As they sang “All I need is the air that I breathe” they were not counting trees. Recent calculations suggest we might need to start counting. Today there are some 3 trillion trees on the planet, the human population is 7.3 billion, thus each of us has 411 trees to provide the air we breathe. By 2056 the world population is projected to be 10 billion. If the tree population (by some miracle) holds at 3 trillion then we will be down to 300 trees per person. Don’t hold your breath!
Back in 1989, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History whilst Bill McKibben published The End of Nature. Human society has since been more concerned about the end of history than the end of nature. In 2010 Professor Frank Fenner predicted the end of the human race within 100 years due to population explosion and unbridled consumption. In 2016 Stephen Hawking also gave us 100 years, in his case blaming artificial intelligence.
Those of us who have lived through the past 60 years in Ireland have certainly seen the possible end of nature coming down the track. In the words of Ray Davies and The Kinks, we are Dedicated Followers of Fashion, and a part of us needs the Gavin-style imaginative if disposable bling designs, but shouldn’t we also be delivering more sustainable designs informed by the realities of impending environmental disaster and the end of the human race? It is a global issue but we must act locally and also participate in global initiatives. You are unlikely to listen to Terry O’Regan – he has been crying ‘wolf’ for too long. Might you heed your elected leaders?
If we accept that we depend on nature, its care and protection should be widely integrated and deeply embedded in our legislative framework and our politicians should be patently aware of and responsive to the related issues, threats, and challenges.
DOES THE NOISE EMANATING FROM LEINSTER HOUSE GIVE YOU CONFIDENCE?
You will not find a specific mention of nature in our underdeveloped constitution. A visit to the EU environment nature and biodiversity web pages could do for your green hormones what Viagra does for others. But you will wilt again when you remember that it is up to the member states to legislate and act.
The European Landscape Convention should give you a lift, though the preamble and indeed the whole document leans a bit too much towards the cultural; but it does clearly reference the Paris, Berne and Rio conventions, all concerned with nature. The word ‘landscape’ means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors.
The Irish National Landscape Strategy is a bit vague on nature but it has the potential to provide us with meeting places and action ‘rooms’ where we might locally come to grips with the nature of nature and begin to provide for its needs in order that it not only survives but also thrives. We just might ensure that Stephen Hawking and Professor Frank Fenner were a little too pessimistic. But we will need to think well outside the very constrained and under-resourced NLS box. We may even need to think well beyond biodiversity, native species and so-called invasive aliens. It’s a very big picture and all too easy to end up in blind alleys.
The National Landscape Forum is one small drumbeat to help communities to march for nature and culture in harmony and balance. After a very successful forum this year in Abbeyleix it will move elsewhere in 2018 – venue and dates to be decided over coming weeks. Be there and together we will make a difference. ✽
 TERRY O’REGAN, B Agr Sc Hort(Hons), FILI, MIoH, founder of Landscape Alliance Ireland, has served the landscape industry in Ireland for some 45 years and promoted the intent and aims of the European Landscape Convention, Florence 2000, for some 22 years.In recent years he has divided his time between his landscape services/consultancy enterprise in Munster and working as a Council of Europe international landscape and heritage expert in Southeast Europe. He continues to promote and refine his ‘jargon-free’ landscape circle methodology and modified it for use at local and regional administrative levels in Kosovo, Croatia, and Cyprus. The LAI website www.lai-ireland.com will shortly be relaunched with exciting news of National Landscape Forum 2018. Contact Terry at terryjoregan@gmail.com or 021 487 1460. |
