I’m extremely lucky today to be talking to Eamon Ryan, who is presently busy negotiating the formation of a government for Ireland and has taken some time out of his Sunday to be on the Nature Magic podcast. The Green Party has a strong voice in the talks, having secured 12 seats in the general election. Eamon has served as minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources from 2007 to 2011 and since then has been the leader of the Green Party in Ireland.
With the European Green Deal announced this week with a €20 billion a year budget, it is even more important than ever, that we have strong voices in government to ensure these measures are implemented. They include: reducing chemical pesticides by 50 percent, planting three billion native trees and protecting 30 percent of our land and marine areas by 2030. Eamon talks about who inspired his calling and why he became an advocate for the natural world.
It’s great to talk to you over Zoom from Kinvara to Dundrum in South Dublin.
“It’s a beautiful place, I’m looking out the window. It’s been an amazing April and May, very dry, but very beautiful, full of nature. I have a good garden and I have an allotment too. I live on the Dodder River and actually it’s a wildlife corridor, we have salmon, we have badgers, otters, foxes, bats, kingfishers, herons, dippers, you name it.”
How did you become a nature lover?
“This sounds a bit mad but I remember as a young kid aged 7 or 8, out on the street in Dundrum, thinking ‘It’s incredible I’m alive in this world’. I was a Rugby-playing-South-County-Dublin-jock and I wasn’t that mad into nature. I wasn’t a great student but I was lucky at the age of 16 that instead of doing the Inter-cert we did a series of O levels and one of those was Ecology. On the first day we got in a bus and went out to the Glen of the Downs (nature reserve in Co Wicklow). We thought it was a joke, we all ran out of the bus and went behind a tree and were smoking and thought it was the greatest fun ever. But as the year went on it got more interesting, we got more engaged and involved in it. This was 1979 and we were reading Gaia Theory, Silent Spring and Limits to Growth and all the latest ecological thinking at the time. It really got to me and I had a sense of the interconnectedness and the urgency around the need to change. And I suppose the frightening thing is, then we were saying that if we don’t change that in the next 50 years, we could lose 50 percent of our wildlife. And the World Wildlife Fund published a report two years ago saying that is what has happened. So that made me very green in my thinking and the importance of having an understanding of ecology at the centre of what we need to do. I think it’s innate in everyone, the very fact of being alive would give you that sense of connection.”
Have you a favourite plant or animal that you are particularly fond of?
“I don’t think it’s a plant or an animal, it’s more a place. I ran a tourism business for fifteen years, my sister owns it now, Cycling Safaris, and I spent a lot of time on the West Coast and the South West Coast. And my Father is a very good painter, he painted lots of landscapes, in an abstract way and I try to copy him. Now our Summer holidays are in Inishbofin, on the West Coast, out in the Atlantic. I love it. I do a lot of fishing, swimming and snorkelling and it’s that connection to the sea that really inspires me. Particularly snorkelling, just the colours and being in nature in that way where you really focus on your immediate environment. That place really inspires me.
Last year I went on a boat out from Bofin, West beyond Blackrock, where that terrible helicopter accident happened. We went out into the Atlantic and I had that sense of wildness and it was fantastic. I go out Kayaking a lot out from Bofin into the Atlantic and when you are in a tiny little sit-on-top Kayak and the swell goes up and down, you are just a tiny dot in a huge landscape, it’s an amazing experience.”
Are there any individual actions that people can take that to help the climate and biodiversity crisis?
A farmer in Clare who was involved in protecting Mullaghmore, Patrick McCormack, said something simple, that I thought was very good:
“Walk, get out and walk, walk the land” that sounds very simple but it is my first recommendation.
I also did a lot of work in the Burren College of Art and there was a poet there, David Wyatt, he quoted a Spanish poem about the Camino “Pilgrim make the path by taking the first step.” Little steps like planting stuff, it’s good for physical health, mental health and that sense of connection. I think it’s those simple, local, practical things without it being a big ‘virtue,’ small things like that are a start.
Before I got into politics I ran a cycling holiday company, as I was saying, and it was funny at times you would meet a group of people in Galway, Clare or Killarney, at the start of their holiday and they were coming from stressed work situations, from New York or London or Berlin. As soon as you got people out in nature they would be chilled out. There is something healthy in getting out in nature, it’s really good for you.”
Do you have any inspiring nature books that you could recommend to people or anything that influenced you that you’d like to mention?
“I was very fortunate. I met once, for three or four hours, John Moriarty, who is a philosopher, he was a Kerry man, he died about 10 years ago to cancer. But he was an amazing man, he lived in Tombola just near Roundstone in Connemara and then in Kerry towards the end of his life. He had lived abroad in Canada, in Britain, teaching, and came home and he was a kind of a mystic philosopher and I find his books fascinating. They are the real Green philosophy and they get to the core of understanding maybe where we are in the world and what we need to do. In my mind I think he was the most important philosopher of our times and he happens to be Irish! His book Nostos is very difficult to read, you almost have to listen to it as he writes like a Kerryman. He brings in all sorts of Irish, European and North American mythology and other references that are really hard to understand sometimes but when I read it I thought ‘this is the philosophy that underpins what I believe.’ A friend of mine arranged for me to meet him above a pub and it was the most fascinating, three or four hours because he was so inspiring and we had great conversations. What he believed is that we need to ‘Harrow the myths’ we need to go back to a new relationship with the Earth. I think he was one of the most important thinkers of our time. He inspired me.”
If you had a magic wand, but one thing that you do for the planet today?
“One thing I would I do today, and this isn’t magic wand stuff, as I’m involved in these programme for government talks and we are looking for a National land use plan. That sounds very prosaic but I would like to address what we can do in Ireland where we have some control. It would recognize that human beings are part of nature, we are not separate. We would be planning a rural Ireland that is vibrant, sustainable, secure, a great place to raise families and to be healthy. But you have to look at the layers of the plan- restoring biodiversity and reversing the losses from the last 50 years and doing that in practical ways, so you switch the forestry away from plantation forestry towards close to nature, continuous cover forestry that’s rich in wildlife.
What we have done in the last 50 years is drained every bog. And now we are saying, no, the opposite, we’re going to rewet every bog and in doing that not only store carbon but restore wildlife. We’re looking how to improve water quality and how we reduce nitrogen and ammonia pollution. In doing all that we don’t have to culvert every river for flood management, we can actually work with the rivers and live with nature in a way that is much more efficient and successful. So that’s not magic wand stuff. But it is what is needed. I think it’s a land use plan that changes our relationship with nature across the Island where we’re using so much less fertilizer, so much less pesticides, but we’re still getting a good price for food that pays young people to work on our land. And that we have a forest which is really rich and diverse and a thrill to explore and rural communities that thrive on the back of it. To go back to what I said at the very start about connectedness and interconnectedness- that is what ecology teaches you.
Lastly this is the magic wand, but isn’t impossible. I would love to have a marine protected area for at least 50 percent of our sea area. One of the great heroes I have is the great American ecologist E.O. Wilson. He is recommending 50 percent of every natural area be restored for protection. Let’s do that in the North Atlantic. It would be a huge contribution to the restoration of marine life and we could survey and study what’s happening on our planet at the same time, because it’s changing with climate change. That would be a brilliant project. And that is not magic.
This has been a tough crisis for a lot of people, still is and will be, but I think it is correct that we are connecting to things closer to home. One last thought from the Czech writer Milan Kundera, we spend all our time getting from A to B and we forget about the places in between. Maybe in this lockdown when we can’t go rushing from A to B it has brought us home a wee bit just to appreciate what is around locally. If would be good if we could keep some of that connectedness out of this crisis, as to what can we do here, locally, to protect our home. If it’s a small guerrilla garden on the side of a motorway, start there, that is as important as anywhere. Every place matters. Every person matters. Maybe it’s that understanding which will change our ways.”