The Emerald Forest

Check one two, one two, one two, check one two. Hey, this is Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgie. And right now I am surrounded by a bunch of sheep. So about a year ago, I was standing on a hill in Northwest Ireland. And it was like everything I expected the Emerald Isle to look like. Soft green grass, a rainbow at one point. And of course, a farmer tending to his flock. Sometimes it can be tedious, but it's lovely when the first lamb arrives. You know it's all worth it. This muddy, steep hill is Justin Warnock's backyard. He drives up here every morning on a quad bike. That's what the Irish call a four-wheeler. And shovels out some pellets for the sheep. It's a nice day today, but we've been up here blowing snow and sleet and rain, wind. We get a lot of that here. But it's beautiful. You can see the Atlantic Ocean, the Donegal Mountains. So you have a great view from here. This is a view that Irish farmers like Justin have been looking at for a very, very long time. There are Gaelic surnames and traditions that date back to the time of the Roman Empire. People have been tending livestock here since before King Tut ruled ancient Egypt. These iconic rolling hills? They're not just for Instagram. They are a part of Ireland's soul. Our DNA is here. There's no doubt about that. My family have been around here for over 300, 400 years in the Canuck area. So we're well bedded in. Well bedded in. I like that. We're going nowhere. But the landscape of Ireland is changing. For years, the government has had an ambitious plan to turn nearly a fifth of the Emerald Isle into an emerald forest. Right next to Justin's property, there was another old family farm. But his neighbor sold it to the state. And now, instead of those iconic rolling hills, there are rows and rows of tall, dark American trees. Sitka spruce. Sitka spruce, we do call it. Sitka. To Americaneers, reforesting farmland might sound like a positive thing, a return to a pre-colonial landscape. To the Irish, this effort has been controversial. Some see it as a symbol of economic independence. Sickness proves it's the best producer of wood that this country could have got. But others see the trees as a sign of oppression. An outside land grab that's ruining the soul of Ireland's rural communities. My people and my ancestors fought for a better Ireland, and it was never to be exploited the way it's been exploited. Never. That's today on Outside In. Thank you. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. I'm taking up here now. It's a bit of a climb. You don't mind? No, don't mind. That's all right. Sheep farmer Justin Warnock wanted to show me something on his property. We were wearing thick waterproof jackets and wellies, which are tall rubber boots. And it was a tough, muddy climb. Test your test, an old man. The bike makes you lazy. When we got to the top, we were out of breath and sweating. But there it was. There's a circle there in front of us. Oh, I see it right there. There's the circle. A Neolithic rock circle, which dates back thousands of years. Do you know at all what that circle was used for? They reckoned that they camped inside it. but I wouldn't like to be up here in November or December or January but they'll probably just come up here for the summer months now Justin can't trace his family back that far but you can tell he connects to this landscape in a very deep personal way you know it's amazing the amount of history that's attached to just one small piece of land but you can imagine the amount of history that's spread out from here all across what we have lost, but thank God there's a few of us we'll hold on and we'll hold out to the bitter end. Justin Warnock belongs to a group of Irish folks who think that there is a particular way that Ireland is supposed to look and that these new forests popping up are not a part of it. Of course, what you think Ireland is supposed to look like depends on how far you go back. And when the folks who made this circle were up here, way back in the B.C.s, Ireland looked very different. There would have been vast woodlands full of oak, ash, and scotch pine. There were wild boar, red deer, wolves, and even back then, domestic cattle grazing underneath this canopy. The island was as much as 80% covered by forest. Jodi Asselin is an anthropology professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. And she spent a lot of time studying rural Ireland. There is some evidence that deforestation just occurred by virtue of the island becoming settled by people. You know, they needed firewood and they had to build implements and they built canoes. And by about 1000 AD, only 20% of the island still had woodland. It stayed like that for about 500 or 600 years, until the British violently conquered Ireland in what's known as the Tudor Conquest. Which is an attempt to impose English law, English language, English culture, Anglicanism as the state religion, and basically destroy the old Gaelic system and clear the way, really, for land confiscation. What Manifest Destiny was to the Native Americans, the Tudor conquest was to the Irish. Big chunks of land were given to Englishmen who acted as absent landlords, subdividing the fields and making Irish farmers pay rent to raise animals on smaller and smaller patches. They also started chopping down what was left of the Irish forest, both to root out rebels who were hiding in the woods and because the English were constantly at war and needed timber. So there was a massive export of Irish timber to Britain. And a huge domain of that was just ships because this is kind of a time of intensive maritime rivalry and England had used most of its own wood Over the next couple hundred years, the British whittled down the last of Ireland's woodlands. By the 1700s, all but the least accessible forests had been cleared. There were quite a lot of poets who wrote about the forest. This is Donal Magner. He's an author, a retired forester, in his 70s now. We were walking along this beautiful lake about an hour south of Dublin, called Glendalough. Glendalough is really glown, da loka. Da meaning two, glen of the two lakes. Donal speaks Gaelic, and he is extremely well-read. Not just on forestry studies and the like, but fiction, literature. Lately, he's been obsessed with Irish poetry lamenting the loss of the island's last trees. Probably the biggest one of all is, what shall we do for timber? The last of the woods is down. An Irish car, ye enemid faste, ganimid, ta' deran aqueel to our lord. By the 1900s, Ireland was one of Europe's least forested countries. Less than 2% of the island still had trees on it. And this worried the British crown, because its empire still needed wood. So botanists traveled to all corners of the globe to find new species of trees, ones that could grow really fast in a maritime climate and produce timber. One of our great botanists called Augustin Henry decided, let's look at a similar latitude and another corner of another continent, i.e. America. And they looked at about five or six species. Species that I am very familiar with. Douglas fir, western hemlock, lodgepole pine, and Sitka spruce. They took seeds from all of these trees, and others from rainy countries like Norway and Japan, and planted them on a vast estate in Ireland called Avondale. And they watched them over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. As these seeds grew, so did the seeds of revolution in Ireland. The southern part of that country shrugged off the British crown and fought a bloody civil war for independence. and when the Irish won that hard-fought freedom. They still had the same problem that the British did. They needed timber. So they went back to Avondale. They could see in Avondale what was actually going tallest, straightest, and one after the other. And the guy said, yeah, we'll go for Sitges-Pruce. Sitka spruce. It's the tallest species of spruce in the world. Think of it as a Christmas tree on steroids. Even in crappy soils, it can grow up to five feet per year. So beginning in the 1920s, newly independent Irish foresters got to planting, rebuilding their national lumber source. Donal wanted to show me some of these first trees, so he huffed and puffed up an old logging road in Glendalough. And there, near a raging brook, was a grove of Sitka spruce. They were planted less than 100 years ago, and they were massive. We've got a guy here called Aubrey Fennell, who measures trees all over the island. I don't know how many thousand he has got at this stage. But he finally said that I think it's that one there is the tallest tree in Ireland. That's the tallest tree in Ireland? Yeah. This sicca spruce was almost 200 feet tall and younger than my grandpa. It's a monster. Over the past century, those efforts have radically transformed Ireland's ability to produce wood. The country's trees are used to build homes, shipping pallets, panel boards, biofuel. The industry adds more than 2 billion euros to the economy every year. But here's the problem. Ireland isn't like the United States. There aren't vast tracts of public land that the government can just start planting trees on. It's mostly private, owned by farmers whose families fought and died to take back control of that land from the British. Now, some of these farms are very profitable. I mean, have you ever heard of Kerrygold Irish butter? But in the more rugged, mountainous areas, farmers have struggled to get by. And so that's where, for the past 50 years, the state has been planting a lot of its trees. And it's where Sitka Spruce has gotten its less-than-flattering nickname. Sitka Spruce, we do call it. Sitka. That's after the break. My wife knows that my happy time is at night cooking dinner. 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You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Hey, this is Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgie. We'll see the border with Northern Ireland, and all the roads here were closed. They were bombed by the British So about a year ago I was on a drive with Brian Smith zipping along these narrow farm roads in his home county Leitrim Brian was raised here in the 1970s and 80s when Leitrim was rocked by the Troubles, a long-simmering conflict that erupted over the status of Northern Ireland. You know, you were a terrorist or a freedom fighter, depending on the view you took. And that was very, very recent here, yeah? Yeah. And very close by. Like, that school was bombed here in 1973. It was a little bit of a tree. Nobody died there, but... Leitrim was scarred by the troubles. And Brian says the small towns, villages, and farming areas here never really recovered. These communities have been left behind and now just gradually been closed in under this blanket of Sitka spruce, if you know what I mean. You can see it through the valleys. The government first started planting Sitka spruce here in the late 1960s, and it targeted Leitrim because the county was struggling. There were the troubles, sure, but also it's just tough to scratch out a living as a farmer here. The growing season is short. The soils are pretty bad. So most folks raise sheep and cattle, but not a lot because the farms here are often very small. So many people have second jobs. They're doing contracting. They're doing all sorts of other bits and pieces. All of this means that land in Leitrim is among the cheapest in the country. Now at first, the state bought that land from farmers and planted trees. But later, they paid landowners to do it themselves. And that attracted outside investors, who started offering top dollar for farmland in County Leitrim and planting sickest spruce. Brian remembers being a teenager in the 1980s. My father at that stage was looking to expand a small farm. that he owned and was competing with investor funds at that time that were buying the land to plant. He and others kept getting outbid. And this really riled up some locals. There was machinery that had moved in on a site to plant and the machinery was burned. So somebody took action and burned the machinery. And then the troubles were, I suppose, not in their height, but certainly ongoing. So there was, you know, the talk of subversiveness and terrorist activity and this kind of thing involved in the campaign to stop the forestry. But it was just locals that were very annoyed and didn't want the land planted. Burning up logging rigs didn't stop the expansion of forest in County Leitrim. Nowadays, nearly half of all farmland here is covered in conifers, mostly sick of spruce. And when it's time to log those trees, it's the locals who have to put up with the mess. Can you just describe to me what this looks like? Well, it looks like a scene from Armageddon, really, with the stumps of the trees, with the damage down to the soil, like the soil is totally turned over. We may drive down where the mountain let us there. All this wood will rake in tens of thousands of euros. But the people chopping down these trees often aren't the ones who own the land. It's industrial and it's very fast. They operate six, seven days a week. And I've seen them at night, you know, with the lights on on the machines, the forwarders and the harvesters, working maybe 16 hours a day. But it's not just the logging that Brian takes issue with. It's also the trees themselves. As we were driving around, he kept telling me how they felt claustrophobic. You know, they grow to a significant height, and sometimes they're right in on top of your home or your farmyard or whatever. You can see here how much the trees, you know, really close in the landscape. This was a little hard for me to wrap my head around. I mean, a lot of people I know love having trees on their property. Makes them feel like they're more integrated with nature. But here, these forests are seen by some as psychologically oppressive. I'm just going to put this bag in the back seat. After talking with Brian, I went with Justin Warnock, that sheep farmer, to go inside one of these forests. As you can see, there's no vegetation on the ground. It's just, the ground is just black. Now, I have been calling them forests, but a lot of locals like Justin call them plantations. And now I understood why. A forest, in my mind, is something wild and diverse. But this, this felt more like a Christmas tree farm. There were rows and rows and rows of the same tree, sick as spruce, all at about the same exact height. Have you noticed one thing? The only noise we can hear was the water. There are no birds. Oh, there are no birds, no. No birds. They don't live in these. Justin was probably being a little hyperbolic. I'm sure there are at least some birds landing in these trees from time to time. But it was very, very quiet. And Justin didn't mince words. How does it feel physically to be in a forest like this? Like, explain to me what it looks like. A dead zone. You look, all you see is just this dark, foreboding cloud around you. You know, there's no life. As I said, there isn't a bird. These are just a monoculture. As we were walking back to Justin's car, he pointed out a bumper sticker. It said, Save Leitrim. And it had a sickest spruce tree on it with a red circle and a slash. He co-founded that group with a bunch of other locals, including Brian, a few years ago. We're the most random bunch of people that you could... You will never find them all at a football match, in the church, in the one building together, except at a meeting for Save Leitrim. They've been fighting to stop any new plantations from getting approved by the government here in Leitrim. And they have all sorts of arguments against it. That they are destroying biodiversity. That logging is polluting the water. But the biggest one is that these plantations are a community killer. As we're driving around, Justin keeps pointing out the ruined foundations of homes surrounded by sick as spruce. For him, they each tell a story of a family who decided to sell their land and move away. My father was the local postman. Oh, really? So when we were kids, my mom would always throw one of us in with dad to get us out of the house. So we knew every house. We knew every lane. And unfortunately, a lot of those lanes, there's nobody living on them anymore. And they were laying so there were two or three families on it. But they've all gone and it's all forestry that has replaced them. Some of these plantations are owned by retired farmers who moved away. Others by wealthier folk in Dublin. And then there's the pension funds and corporations, who see this land as a sound investment. Because not only do they own it, but they also get a grant to plant the trees, and then annual payouts worth thousands of euros from the state. They also get cash when those trees are harvested. But they aren't living on that land. Sending their kids to local schools or drinking a Guinness at the local pub. It's simply a page in their portfolio. And this is what really gets under Justin's skin. Because if you don't have people, you don't have communities, you don't have life. Do you know, like if it were to be a wilderness, well, I'm sorry. My people and my ancestors fought for a better Ireland. and it was never to be exploited the way that it's been exploited, and especially our county, Leitrim. Never. Whether or not Ireland Gaelic population counts as indigenous can be a loaded conversation But like I said many of these folks can trace their families back hundreds of years through rounds of colonization oppression and hardship And on Save Leitrim's website, they don't shy away from the term. It says the group is fighting the, quote, continued exploitation and decimation of the indigenous people and their environment by the government's subsidized conifer program. And Brian Smith told me that they can trace back this will to fight for the land to a very dark chapter in their history. The famine. Huge numbers of people died in the famine here. You know, they just died on the sides of the road. The famine happened in the mid-1800s, back when folks in Leitrim were still under British rule, renting this land from English landlords. And some of them were very, very bad landlords. They treated the tenant farmers abysmally. And I suppose the famine was the limit of that. Most of the crops and livestock they raised were sent over to England. Meanwhile, they survived on potatoes. Until a blight destroyed that crop and plunged the country into mass starvation. A million people died and millions more left the country. And County Leitrim was among those hardest hit. And that's built into the memory of people, you know, that they were reduced to living on potatoes because the land had been taken. So that created, I suppose, over the many generations, the view that the land is ours. We want that land. We want to keep that land. And that's built into people's DNA, you know. And, you know, land, it's protected with life and limb. And they see these Sitka spruce plantations as the latest attempt to take away their lands. You know, the corporations are just planting it in a different way, planting it with Sitka spruce, but to just earn a few pounds and that the local people are being just pushed off and out. Of course, the wrinkle here is that not everybody is being forced out. There are willing sellers who are moving away. Maybe they want to retire, or their kids don't want to take over the farm, or maybe they just want to earn some money. So they sell to the highest bidder. Bottom line, there are bigger economic forces at play. But Sica Spruce has become a symbol of that, which is a shame for tree nerds like Donal Magner, that retired forester I spoke with. Those who kind of pioneered this are being told, okay, it's the wrong species, it's trees in the wrong place. But as a state venture, I thought it was noble in the sense that we created a resource which was where none had existed. The Irish timber industry, which was created from scratch using these plantations, employs 12,000 people across the country. And yeah, in retrospect, Donal says they overcooked the forest with wall-to-wall spruce. But the problem isn't just the way Ireland is planting trees. It's who is doing the planting. Donal says that needs to evolve. I've been doing this for years. I really believe that we need to get farmers actually planting rather than investment companies. Because you're going to have land abandonment if you don't actually go that route, you know. Essentially, what he wants is to make trees a part of the farming lifestyle. So is this the land right here? Yep. Okay, so it's really close to town. Donal wanted to show me what this looked like. So he took me to a sprawling farm in County Wicklow, about an hour south of Dublin. And that's where we saw, yeah, sheep grazing, but also acres and acres of trees. I don't know if you know of a film called Cocaine Bear. I do know Cocaine Bear. Much of that was made in an Irish forest. I think some of it was made here, where they've actually... So you can see. I haven't seen it myself. It's got mixed reviews here. I can see why they would film here. Because this doesn't look like the plantations I saw in Leitrim. It looks like a real deal forest. Yeah, there are some sick of spruce, but also some native scotch pine. We have oak. We have holly. We have rhone. This is Liam Byrne. He and his three brothers are local forestry contractors. Tending trees kind of the way that you tend sheep. We have overstory trees from the 1800s. We have midstory trees from the 1960s. They're practicing something called continuous cover forestry. Think of it as permaculture for logging. Instead of clear cutting, you go in and selectively cut trees. It's giving us an economic return, but we're actually allowing the forest to develop ecologically as well. Continuous cover forestry is beginning to catch on in Ireland. Even the folks in the Save Leitrim group say that this kind of agroforestry, where farmers have control over their farms, is great. And for Liam, who lives in town, whose nephew works for him, who probably gets a Guinness every once in a while at the local pub, this is the future of Ireland's forests. If there's one word I feel in here is sustainable. I feel it's truly sustainable. And I mean that economically and ecologically. Walking through this forest, I can't help but think it must look a little like the woodlands that grew on this island thousands of years ago. But of course, with an American twist. Some Sitka spruce. This episode was reported and produced by me, Nate Hedgie. It was edited by Taylor Quimby, who yes, does wear a scally cap from time to time, though he says he bought it in France, not Ireland. Taylor is the executive producer of Outside In. Rebecca Lavoie is head of On Demand Audio here at NHPR. A very special thanks to Hagen O'Neill, who took me out to a bog in Ireland for some really fun reporting that ultimately did not make this episode. Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Hankey, and Jessica Hunt. music in this episode was from Blue Dot Sessions Outside In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio Thank you. Follow Tomorrow's Cure wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow With and For, hosted by Dr. Pam King, wherever you get your podcasts.