Like the economy, wildlife must be managed

AS WE peer anxiously over the horizon into 2009, one of the few certainties seems to be that we will be in a recession.

A recession is largely an indoor phenomenon, but it does have implications for life outdoors.

It’s now accepted that wildlife must be managed. Benign neglect doesn’t work, particularly in the very artificial landscapes of the Irish countryside. We must do things, and that involves spending money.

Even during the boom years, we weren’t very good at this. We didn’t spend enough money, and we didn’t even do enough to fulfil our obligations under EU directives that we signed up to.

What will happen now?

If politicians and civil servants are desperately looking for the least damaging ways to cut budgets, will wildlife seem like an easy option?

Conservation never seems to do well when times are hard.

And there are other causes of concern. I live in the country and most of the Irish countryside is owned by farmers. Twenty-five years ago, the majority of my neighbours farmed full time and raised families by doing it.

There’s not a single one left.

The land around me is still farmed, sometimes by the same people, sometimes by their children.

But they all have day jobs and the farming is restricted to weekends, and a couple of hours in the evenings after they come home from work.

The decline of farming during the boom years was a very sad thing. But by no means all the side-effects of the decline were negative.

Nowadays, most farming is nothing like as intensive as it was; it has become a pastime rather than an occupation and the land is, by the standards of a previous generation, ‘neglected’.

As a result, some wild flowers that had disappeared from the fields round here are returning, some bird species are increasing in numbers, and the fox population is flourishing. But what’s going to happen in the future?

Part of me would be delighted if small farms regained enough profitability to support families. Another part dreads the thought of a countryside dedicated to the intensive cultivation of food and fuel, in a manner that’s insensitive to the wild things that also live in it. I don’t know if such a thing will ever happen, but I do think that our changing economic circumstances are likely to alter the way we manage the national asset that is our land.

That other great national asset that is the seas around our coasts is in a bad way, and commercial fishermen have suffered even more than small farmers.

Fishermen have suffered because the species of fish that people like to eat have been over-exploited to the verge of extinction, and the various forms of mariculture have not delivered on their promise to provide alternative livelihoods. But, ecologically, the damage is far more widespread than that.

We have also over-exploited species of fish that people don’t like to eat — sand-eels would be an example and krill, though that doesn’t affect Ireland directly because they live in polar waters. These small sea creatures are turned into fertilisers, pig food, or pellets to feed factory-farmed salmon.

But they are also a vital component in the ecological pyramid that supports all marine life. There is evidence, for example, that in many of our seabird colonies parent birds are not able to find enough small fish to rear their chicks. There is also evidence of malnutrition among our seal populations — though this is a result of a decline in larger fish species because seals do not, to my knowledge, feed on sand-eels.

The future of outdoor Ireland is full of uncertainty. I have very mixed feelings about 2009.