Goodbye to the Hills Pádraic Fogarty 26th March 2023 At a conference in Galway dedicated to the management of Ireland’s uplands regions, speaker after speaker raised concerns about the ecological degradation caused by over-grazing, the low returns for farmers on their sheep as well as the need for diversification and more native woodland in the […]
The failure of fisheries science In 2013, as part of an overhaul of the Common Fisheries Policy, the European Union committed to ending overfishing by 2015 ‘where possible’ and by 2020 ‘at the latest’. Needless to say, this deadline came and went but a successful legal challenge by Friends of the Irish Environment in the […]
We need to protect the seas as if our lives depend upon it For a small island nation our connection to the ocean can sometimes feel tenuous. Yet – unbeknownst to most of us perhaps – the oxygen in every other breath comes from the sea. To be more specific, 50% of the oxygen produced […]
Restoring nature must be central to climate action By Padraic Fogarty, IWT Campaigns Officer Two reports in the past two months focussed the world’s attention – if only briefly – on the dire state of our planet. The first, from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) laid out in stark terms how there […]
Many Irish wildlife enthusiasts have been asking one question over the past year – what’s going on with the Wild Nephin Project? Lenny Antonelli digs a little deeper. Jointly announced three years ago by the State forestry company Coillte and the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), the Wild Nephin Project’s stated aim is to […]
Doorstep Wilderness: A Wilder Side of Dublin is a book by Paul Hughes, a full-time photographer and member of the Irish Wildlife Trust and Birdwatch Ireland. It details the life of a stretch of the River Dodder, mostly between Ballsbridge and the railway bridge at Lansdowne Station, between the spring of 2008 and summer 2012. […]
A review by Rónán McLaughlin. Many years ago as a child growing up in Malin head, Co. Donegal, I was surrounded by nature. It was everywhere and everything we did revolved around it. We farmed, we fished and we felt grateful for the arrival of the swallow and we had a somewhat somber feeling when […]
