Restoring a rainforest at Atlantic's edge in West Cork

When you take away the artificial impositions that are preventing nature from coming back, it comes roaring back in a full throttle way. My name is Eoghan Dalton. I'm originally from Dublin, but in 2009 I bought a farm in the Bear Peninsula in West Cork. The farm had been abandoned for quite a long time, and over that time an extremely extraordinarily rich woodland developed naturally. Unfortunately for maybe a decade or a bit more before I came, that process of reversion to natural forest habitat had been interrupted by overgrazing by feral goats and cica deer. It was kind of an ecological meltdown really. Between the the exclusion of the goats and deer and my removal of the rhododendron and other invasive species, the results have really been quite spectacular. Essentially the spontaneous formation of a wild natural ecosystem. When we think or talk about rainforest, we think we tend to think about places like the Amazon or the Congo or Southeast Asia. Those are all tropical rainforests. In the temperate regions you have what's called temperate rainforest, and that's exactly what I had here. The main indicator of a rainforest is the presence of epiphytes. Epiphytes are plants that grow on trees without being rooted on the ground. The only place they can grow are in regions where you get a very frequent and abundant arrival of water from the air in the form of rain or drizzle or fog or mist or whatever else, and there's certainly no shortage of those kind of conditions here in the Barrier Peninsula. There are a number of reasons why I think we need to be letting wild nature come back on a really big scale in Ireland and elsewhere. Nature is dying at a catastrophic rate all around us. We're losing nature and the primary reason for that is a lack of habitat. The other reason why I think I feel it's absolutely essential to bring back wild natural ecosystems is the climate, because natural ecosystems regulate and help keep this climate stable in so many ways. But I think beyond the climate crisis and the ecological crisis, I think we really need wild nature as well for ourselves. If we lose all access to those places because they don't exist anymore, it's going to make our lives so much poorer.