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Chapter 1: What is the significance of land use in nature conservation?
Stay with me. We're about to go one better. You heard Ella put some of the points to Amanda and Oliver there that Bordnemona would make in any conversation. And it is important to note that Bordnemona says it facilitates significant biodiversity enhancement, peatland restoration and re-wetting and following the construction of wind, solar or energy storage infrastructure.
the surrounding landscape will always be restored to a mosaic of wetland, peatland and woodland habitats interspersed with energy infrastructure. Yes, Ireland is in this situation where we are the 34th worst in the world of 174 countries measured when it comes to nature conservation. And the country's leading ecologists say
say that the state needs now to play referee between all these demands for land and the ever-shrinking amount of habitat left in Ireland. I met with Jesmond Harding, the author of a magnificent book called The Irish Butterfly Book. He took me to Lullybeg Bog in Kildare in search of the endangered marsh fritillary.
Lullybeg is an area that he would like to see conserved as a national park, but Bòrd na Móna has plans to develop as a wind farm. So this is Butterfly Conservation Ireland's reserve. 9 o'clock in the morning, 21 degrees centigrade. Good butterfly weather? It's very good butterfly weather.
Butterflies are funny creatures in the sense that you can have very warm weather and you won't see any until a certain time of the day. We're a little bit early, but we should be seeing them. You can see a nice dragonfly over there. That's a four-spotted chaser. And we're on millennia grassland. So this is purple moor grass.
If we didn't have millennia grassland, we wouldn't have marsh fritillaries. So the marsh fritillary is our own. We have around 12,000 species of insect in Ireland. Only one is legally protected, and it's the marsh fritillary. And its food plant is this little thing here, Devil's Bitscabious. Beautiful flower. You see it in July and August and into October, actually.
But the larvae spend most of the time on the grass, not on the food plant. So find me a marsh retillery butterfly or I want my money back. Yeah, absolutely. Satisfaction guaranteed or refund. So I was here on Saturday and I saw some just up here. See where the scrub is, the willow, grey willow and birch up here? That's where I saw my first one. So we'll see if we can see if they're up and about.
In 2010, there were six butterfly species that were vulnerable or endangered. The new list about to be published this year will show that there are now 19 species vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered, mostly because they are losing places to live in an unplanned, uncoordinated countryside. I'm going to try and net this marsh artillery for you so you can get a better look at them.
Hold on. They're not brass fast flyers, but there we go. Did I get him? I did. So I'm going to jar him to give you a closer view how exquisite this little chap is.
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Chapter 2: How does the Marsh Fritillary butterfly relate to habitat conservation?
Because you saw the dragonflies around you. They pick up lots of them. Funnel spiders and crab spiders take a lot.
three days it really is such a short window of opportunity in which to do what he has to do they get a lot of business done in three days and what helps them to get that business done is that when the female lays her eggs she lays hundreds in one sitting i'm gonna let him out because he has he's lots to do and he doesn't need us interrupting him three days to do it absolutely get on with it fella yeah should the midlands have a national park doesn't
Well, everywhere else has, so why not the Midlands? And it's not like we don't have the high nature value land. Do we not have a national park with raised bogs? Plenty with blanket bogs, obviously, on either side of the country. None with raised bog. We have no deep peat national park. Plenty on blanket bog. Wonderful Glenveigh in Donegal, Killarney in the south-west, Connemara.
We have none on deep peat. And this is the tragedy of the situation. The Habitats Directive came out in 1992, and one of the priorities in that was to designate raised bogs. The state, through Bòrd na Móna, galloped ahead, exploiting bogs as fast as they could. In fact, 2003 was the year of peak, peak production for Bòrd na Móna, years after the Habitats Directive.
And in the last minute, the state was forced to stop peak cutting in 2020 through a court decision. So it's like anything else with the environment, it's generally where you're forced to stop that it stops. It hasn't stopped on non-state land and even on state land there are some people encroaching and cutting peat when they really shouldn't be doing it.
What difference would a national park make? A national park in this area would make huge sense. This is 550 hectares of joined up land. The marsh tillery can expand and contract within the landscape. It has room to breathe. There are some sites here, breeding sites, that don't have a population in some years and have them in others. So that's proof it's able to move around the landscape.
Can you reconcile that, though, with needing to reach 51% reduction of our emissions through renewable energy, through wind farms in sparsely populated, in human terms, places like this? I can more than justify it. I can applaud it. And I'll tell you why I'm applauding it. One of the big challenges to nature is pollution. Yes, I want clean energy. Our nature needs clean energy.
So, for example, in this area, we have a road that connects Eden Derry and Rathangan. The peatland habitats to the west of that road are severely degraded. We have suggested to Bòrd na Móna that that's where they concentrate their wind energy installations. And you think that they would have sufficient quantum of land there? Oh, it's a vast area.
What the plan is instead is to extend the wind farm over the entire estate. This is five square kilometres. And the plan is to have 47 turbines of 220 tip height in most cases across the landscape. We absolutely have to have clean energy for our ecosystems, not just to meet national commitments in terms of clean energy. Our ecosystems need to take global warming gases out of the energy equation.
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