Save our blanket bogs: A better option?

‘Rewilding’ is one of the flavour-of-the-month tags used to cover efforts to save or rejuvenate nature or wildlife struggling to cope with humanity’s destructive and relentless impact.

Beavers have been controversially reintroduced to Scotland. Some ‘rewilders’ want to reintroduce wolves there too.

Golden and white-tailed sea eagles have been reintroduced with varying degrees of success on this island.

It is not wildly radical to suggest that the great effort involved in these programmes might be better spent protecting what we have, what we have not yet lost or destroyed.

A warning from the Peatland Conservation Council that we need to do more to ensure the survival of what remains of our blanket bogs falls into that category.

So too do calls to save Killarney’s oak forests from the advance of rhododendrons.

Our blanket bogs were once, when we knew far less than we know now, the focus of commercial exploitation but it is not too late to intervene to save the remnants of the habitats that supported huge quantities of wildlife. Let’s do it.