Home Page  Biodiversity Wild Offaly - Past, Present & Future
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Wild Offaly - Past, Present & Future |
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Written by John Feehan
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Tuesday, 30 November 2004 |
This is my county: this is the place I was born, and where my home is. This is
the place where, 50 years ago, constellations of lesser celandines dazzled my
child’s eyes in every hedge. They still do, every spring. But 50 years ago
I had no name to call them by, and there was nobody to ask. It’s where I
saw my first bee orchids, all of 45 years ago. They too are still abundant in
Offaly, though not in the places I first saw them.
Fifty years ago every other field was flowery meadow, and in some years there
was a corncrake in every second one of them. On summer evenings the nightjar churred
in the pine and willow scrub at the edge of the bog where we cut turf for the
fire, and from which you could still hear the corncrakes in the fields beyond.
And the small river that threaded its way through this typical corner of rural
Ireland outside Birr teemed with the brown trout peculiar to the Camcor that we
called croneen. The croneen still make their way upstream to the headwaters of
the Camcor in Slieve Bloom every autumn, but not in the prodigal numbers of 50
years ago.
In this last half century Offaly has lost some species, including those charismatic
birds. And of course it is increasingly the case that when people of my age speak
with regret of what we have lost, it is to an audience ever younger than we are,
who do not feel the loss of the corncrake or the nightjar, because it was never
part of their personal experience.
The sixth extinction
On one level you could say we are experiencing in our small, local way, the loss
of biodiversity which the world is suffering at this time, and especially those
parts of the earth where biological diversity is at its richest: in the rainforests
of the tropics.
I expect most of our readers are well-acquainted with what is happening. We
are enmeshed in biodiversity on a scale really beyond our comprehension. Our
best guesses put the number of species on earth today at somewhere between 3
and 100 million: different kinds of living things, different species (the most
popular estimate being somewhere around 13 million), of which less than 2 million
have actually been identified and described and given proper names (75% are
insects). Equally incomprehensible is its sheer abundance. It has been calculated
that in every square kilometre of land there are as many as – how many
individual insects would you say? 10 billion.
And in our lifetime we are experiencing, we are bringing about, the greatest
mass extinction of living species there has ever been on the earth. Plant and
animal species are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, even if there continues
to be much scientific debate as to the extent of this reduction in nature’s
diversity. Some botanists calculate that 2,000 species a year are becoming extinct
in tropical forests. Estimates of total global species loss range from 4,000
to 300,000 species a year, the vast majority of which we don’t even have
names for: extinct, gone for ever. Much of this loss results from the destruction
of tropical rain forests, which are disappearing at maybe 150,000 km2 a year,
which is around 2% of the standing cover. At that rate it would all be gone
within a century.
It was concern over this appalling loss that led to the Convention on Biological
Diversity at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, to which Ireland signed up in 1996. In
signing the Convention we took upon ourselves the obligation to halt the loss
of biological diversity in Ireland: and beyond our shores, to do what we can
to address the global loss. Allied to this, the EU has now set itself the target
of halting habitat loss by 2010. Ireland produced its National Biodiversity
Plan in 2002, and as part of that each local area is now required to draft its
own Biodiversity Action Plan.
Why is it so important?
There are many reasons why the hemorrhaging of biodiversity from the earth is
so serious. There are economic reasons that have to do with its practical importance
in our lives, such as regulation of climate and rainfall. For example, cutting
down forests in northern China has led to devastating floods in winter and the
drying up of rivers, leading to drought, in summer. And there is the fact that
as yet undiscovered species are a genetic treasure chest from which medicine,
farming and human welfare generally may benefit in all sorts of ways when they
are discovered and their genetic potential is tapped by means of the incredibly
sophisticated tools increasingly available to us. There is the increased understanding
of how the living world works that science derives from the study of new species.
But over and above all of this there is the sheer wonder of it, the awesome complexity
and diversity that indeed is the deepest reason most of the people who study these
creatures do so in the first place. The great French mathematician and philosopher
of science Jules Henri Poincaré expressed it very elegantly when he wrote:
‘The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it
because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful.’
It is experience of Nature’s transformative value that is the real, the
deepest, reason most ecologists study biodiversity.
And beyond this again, there is another reason why we need to be concerned about
the dimming of life’s rainbow which we are witnessing. It is wrong. Most
of us are religious people at some level, some of us deeply so, and this is
certainly true of the wider community. If you believe in God, whatever your
faith may be, you have to see in the living creation (and you can take that
as a synonym for biodiversity) the first, the most fundamental Book of Revelation.
The more deeply we grow in our understanding of the creation, the more deeply
we understand the reality, and the extraordinary closeness of our kinship with
other species. We have all read of Francis of Assisi, who spoke of Brother Wolf:
and we approve the metaphor. But we now know (thanks to the advances of the
biological sciences over the last century and a half) this is not a metaphor.
We may like to think of ourselves as being a little less than the angels, but
we have been swept along by precisely the same exhilarating evolutionary maelstrom
as all the other species which people this moment of life's time with us, 4,000
million years of life having been spent travelling with them, and before that
we have shared the same remote origins in the dust of exploding stars. We are
brother and sister, elephant and wolf and man and woman, oak and dandelion,
frog and dragonfly. We cannot think otherwise once we bring our intellect and
spirit to bear fully on the diversity of life, all these manifestations of the
kaleidoscope of the Great Being 'in whom all potentialities already exist as
a plan of action,' the contemplation of which so thrilled Thomas Aquinas:
God cannot express himself fully in any one creature: and so he has produced
many and diverse life-forms, so that what one lacks in its expression of divine
goodness may be compensated for by others: for goodness, which in God is single
and undifferentiated, in creatures is refracted into a myriad hues of being.
That was way back in the 13th century, by which time we were only beginning
to appreciate the scale of the diversity of life, so this is not new theology:
but our modern scientific understanding gives an altogether new depth to our
penetration of what it all means. What I am getting at here is the fact that
there is a profound ethical imperative to care for the diversity of life: first
of all because it is the primary revelation, through which God expressed himself
for unimaginable epochs of time before our species appeared on the evolutionary
scene. And secondly, we are its custodians and its kin.
This means what we are about in the biodiversity action planning process has
very important implications for ethical behaviour and more immediately for religious
education.
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Fivealley
Birr
Co. Offaly
Ireland
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MA in Ecology & Religion |
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- Ecology & Economics with Richard Douthwaite
- The Ecological State of Our Planet and Country with Sean McDonagh
- Ecology and The Bible with Sean Freyne
Further information from: The MA Admissions Office, IMU Institute, Dalgan Park, Navan, Co. Meath. Tel. 046 9021525 (ext. 332)
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