Reintroducing wildlife - Sustainability on wings and a prayer

YESTERDAY’s reintroduction of about a dozen white-tailed eagles to the national park in Killarney is a thoroughly welcome attempt to undo some of the damage inflicted by man on some of the other species that inhabit the planet.

White-tailed eagles survived in Mayo and Kerry until 1898, golden eagles lasted for another decade before they were shot or poisoned to extinction.

More than a century later, in 2001, six Scottish golden eagle chicks were released in Donegal’s Glenveagh National Park and 40 more youngsters have joined them since. Last year, eggs were laid but did not hatch; this year, a chick was born. A similar project focusing on the red kite is under way in Wicklow.

These efforts have the potential to become the catalyst for, and the symbols of, a new attitude to the world around us, should we — finally — see the wood for the trees, as it were.

It may not always be comfortable for us to acknowledge it but our stewardship of the environment continues to be flagrant — so blindly flagrant that we may have sown the seeds of our own destruction.

At a time when climate change — everything from record drought in Australia to ravaging floods in India — is affecting mankind more profoundly than even the most pessimistic forecasts envisaged, it may be difficult to see redemption in a handful of soft-feathered, Norwegian eaglets thrown to the elements on a windy Kerry mountainside.

But, if we can rejuvenate even a single species, then surely it is not too late for us to modify our exploitation of the world around us. Maybe it is not too late for us to realise that rather than exploiting just the world around us, we are exploiting the future, the very wellbeing of everyone who comes after us.

If it is impossible to accept that we are unaware of the threat posed by our lifestyles, it is almost impossible to understand why we are doing so little to reduce our impact on that which sustains us all.

The politics of the environment have, among many other influences, been informed by fear or fashion. They have also been frequently derided by the industries with most to lose, they have been marginalised by indifference and probably by a sense of powerlessness.

In some instances that marginalisation has reached such a degree because those committed to working to help protect the environment have failed to find government support. Indeed, it is hard to have faith in any process, official or otherwise, that will allow a country’s water resources to become as threatened as ours.

There are many species we could offer a welcome to should they return: corn buntings and marsh harriers, goshawks and ospreys. Those possibilities are brought closer by initiatives such as the Linnet section of the REPS (Rural Environment Protection Scheme), the objective of which is to encourage cereal plots, especially in grassland, to provide food for wildlife.

Each reintroduction could become a milestone along the road to humanity in the world that will not destroy either it or itself.