Another life: The cultural bracketing of the Irish and their bogs may be worth a PhD thesis or two, now that the historical origins are fading. There are, after all, some four million square kilometres of other people's peatland spread around the globe, mostly in the northern hemisphere but even in south-east Asia and up the Amazon.
Destruction has already been massive, mainly for farming and forestry, and not always productive even for people. In Indonesia, for example, the Mega rice-growing project of the late 1990s, meant to aid landless farmers, was abandoned after two years, with the drainage and loss of more than a million hectares of peatland and swamp forest.
Ireland's modern conflicts over peatland conservation can seem dwarfed by such events, and by the vast expanse of Arctic tundra and northern peat-forest. But the long and various Irish experience of peat comes into play in trying to decide what is "wise use" of the bogs remaining on the planet, especially in countries which have little peatland left.
Controversies have stepped up dramatically as uses ranging from power stations to horticultural peat-moss have clashed with growing ecological concerns. The two sides, represented in the International Peat Society (of commercial users) and the International Mire Conservation Group ("mire" is the term many scientists prefer for peaty wetlands) met in the late 1990s to see if there was an alternative to confrontation.
The result, after three years of consultations and joint meetings, is a book called Wise Use of Mires and Peatlands. It was compiled and written by Dr Hans Joosten of the IMCG, who leads a mire ecology group at Greifswald University in Germany, and Donal Clarke, who is head of corporate affairs in Bord na Mona and the IPS chairman on industrial uses of peat. It is a deeply interesting and readable document, even on such technical topics as the carbon and methane locked up in peat, and sets out a step-by-step framework for making decisions on peatland issues.
The term "wise use" can raise the hackles of many environmentalists, suspicious of the licence it can offer to continuing encroachment on nature.
No amount of wisdom, after all, is likely to restore much peatland, once it is destroyed in highly-developed countries. But "wise use" is already enshrined in such texts as the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the new document takes it to be "uses of peatlands for which reasonable people now and in the future will not attribute blame". What "reasonable" people may think in the future could be a matter for argument, but for the moment they are clearly expected to share in the document's basic premise that only people matter.
In conflict situations, however, it urges respect and "moral pluralism" in dealing with the many people of less anthropocentric conviction - those who allow intrinsic moral value, or right to exist, not only to non-human species, but to natural ecosystems and even the living planet as a whole.
This fundamental clash of values, basic to many conflicts over peatland, is here teased out in a crash course on ethics and moral philosophy that is quite as surprising and welcome as the initial coming together of developers and conservationists. It reviews the current range of non-human-centred values, such as "deep ecology", partly to sophisticate the discussion, but also to help businessmen, public-sector officials and politicians, among others, to understand where the other side is coming from.
Such decision-makers do, indeed, generally favour "wise use" on the side of development, but this clear and intelligent encounter with unfamiliar value-systems can't help but improve their sensibilities, and may even create more room in their decisions for the less utilitarian points of view.
But simpler notions, such as "doing the least harm", and "serving the greatest good of the greatest number", seem more likely to shape essential compromise.
Many peatland conflicts have to choose between different rights. One of the book's examples sounds all-too-familiar: "the right of a local community to cut turf from a bog against the right of a government to preserve a rare and important mire".
And as Ireland has discovered, rarity and importance can suddenly sneak up on a country that is careless of a seemingly abundant resource.
Some countries are blessed with peatlands that yield a substantial, infinitely renewable, economic return. In good years for wild berries, for example, about 12 million kilos are picked from the bogs of Finland. In Ireland, the sheep not only grazed away the berries of the hills (remember fraughans?) but went on to create severe damage to surface vegetation and biodiversity in many parts of the west.
This happened quite independently of any conscious, informed decisions about the use of peatland. Nobody - understandably, perhaps, in Brussels, quite inexcusably in Teagasc - paused to consider the impact of thousands of subsidised ewes on the fragile, nutrient-poor skin of blanket bog. As a case history of totally unwise, unconsidered, unsustainable use of peatland, it certainly deserved a place in the new book (but doesn't get one).
Its framework of principles, criteria and checklists for decision-making generally coincides with green aspirations as expressed in most international conventions and resolutions, and as a blueprint for better decisions on peatland it is a remarkable attempt at consensus (Donal Clark, I notice, did spend 12 years in the Irish diplomatic service). But human needs still essentially rule okay: "One cannot be blamed," as the book remarks in passing, "for killing the last bear if it is the only way to stay alive."
Wise Use of Mires and Peatlands costs €30 plus postage and can be ordered from the Natural History Book Service at www.nhbs.com.In the second week of January, about three miles from Galway at Murrough House, I saw around 30 herons standing motionless in a field on the seaward side of the railway line. No doubt the extremely cold weather was a factor with frozen streams forcing them from their usual habitats.
Brendan Geoghan, Mervue, Galway
Although herons are generally solitary feeders, they also feed in groups; they roost and nest in colonies, and often rest in fields. The field in which you saw the birds was south-facing and probably more sheltered than other sites. They do not feed exclusively on fish, but also take small mammals, frogs, snails, worms, insects and even small birds.
A nearby small pond, which is refilled by every spring tide, teems with small fish. A kingfisher, nesting on one of the river banks, dives in for a catch and is off again. Last summer, I noticed egrets were feeding in the same pond, and also a pair of little grebes. The lagoons on the edge of Midleton are visited by almost 20 birds throughout the year.
Cathal Smiddy, Midleton, Co Cork
Letters suggesting an early spring recorded the following in early and mid-January: lesser celandine in a wood near Leixlip; primroses in bloom in Carlow; a pair of collared doves and a pair of fantail pigeons which have already laid eggs and are sitting on them in Wicklow; a pair of bumblebees at large in Castleknock; and a ladybird in a bathroom in Cork.
E-mail: viney@anu.ie