https://hakaimagazine.com/news/from-treeless-hills-to-emerald-woods/
"In the stark sheep pastures of Ireland’s Maumturk Mountains, just a few
gnarled trees cling to the hillside, twisted and bent by decades facing down
the raw Atlantic winds. Now this unlikely landscape, where native woodlands
have been gone for almost 1,000 years, is at the heart of a bold plan to bring
back long-forgotten rainforests.
The nonprofit Hometree, started by a group of surfers, wants to buy 800
hectares of land across eight sites in western Ireland to reforest over the
next four years. Then it wants to encourage neighboring farmers to pledge 800
hectares more—yielding a total area just shy of five times that of New York’s
Central Park. The hope is that bringing native trees back to parts of this
landscape will inspire a much wider reforestation. But the surfers face steep
challenges on a coastline where conservation and rewilding can provoke
suspicion and anxiety.
For Hometree cofounder and former pro surfer Matt Smith, bringing native
forests back to this coast is a logical response to the climate crisis and
biodiversity loss. “We’re going for it as if it was an emergency,” he says.
“We’re just responding with what I believe is a realistic response based on the
meaning of the word
emergency.”
Forests of oak, birch, and pine once covered the mist-shrouded hills of
Ireland’s west coast. But beginning about 6,000 years ago, waves of settlers
cut, burned, and sent their flocks to graze on the woods, transforming this
once lush, temperate rainforest into a terrain of treeless bogs, heaths, and
pastures. Rainforest fragments cling to the landscape where deer and sheep
can’t reach—in high mountain cliffs and deep-sided valleys. These woods boast a
huge diversity of moisture-loving ferns, mosses, and lichens.
Hometree bought its first site last year, a 113-hectare former sheep farm along
the salmon-rich Bealnabrack River in the Maumturk Mountains. Largely denuded of
trees, “there’s probably about 10 or 12 native trees on the whole 280 acres,”
says Hometree’s project lead Ray Ó Foghlú. A former teacher who returned to
college to study environmental science, Ó Foghlú met Smith through the surfing
scene. Their group funded the US $700,000 purchase of the site through a mix of
small donations and a loan from a philanthropist."
Via
Future Crunch:
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-clean-energy-aids-big-cats-africa/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
