- Bees: common myths and misunderstandings - 20/05/2020
- Worthless wetland? - 26/09/2019
- World Bee Day 2019 - 20/05/2019
For the past few months, I’d been hearing about this amazing urban wetland oasis. A wildlife haven right in the middle of Tallaght, on the south-west outskirts of Dublin. Every time I bumped into Collie Ennis on campus he was bouncing excitedly about how wonderful this place was and how I should go down there and see all the plants, and the incredible insect life. This sounded so amazing and I was looking forward to planning some insect and plant surveys there next year.
And then I heard this weekend that it’s been destroyed. Obliterated. Annihilated by >1.5m of dredged silt dumped on top of the entire habitat. This was a crushing blow to all those people caring for these wetlands and their wildlife, and the devastation they felt was reflected far and wide. If you haven’t seen the story – it was covered by Irish Times and Joe.ie as well as on Collie’s own Twitter feed.
Wetlands are among the most threatened habitat types globally: the IPBES Global Assessment published earlier this year reported that loss of wetlands is currently three times faster, in percentage terms, than forest loss. And they are important components of the Irish landscape. A landscape that’s not doing well when it comes to nature. In a recent report to the Convention on Biological Diversity, 91% of assessed habitats in Ireland were found to be of “unfavourable conservation status” – i.e. not doing at all well ecologically.
So against this backdrop of national failure to protect our threatened wildlife, this was a site that had, over the past two decades, become an incredible biodiversity hub: a healthy functioning ecosystem, full of creatures that are mostly being pushed out by urban sprawl, agricultural intensification, and industrial development elsewhere. It was the epitome of urban biodiversity. That these wetlands were providing habitat for unusual and amazing creatures is reason enough to maintain them – there are so few places where these creatures are hanging on that we should protect every one of them.
But if we need any more anthropocentric, selfish reasons, here are a few. Urban wetlands are incredibly important habitats for people: they are important for regulating water quantity, recharging ground water, regulating floods and the impacts of storms, they help in erosion control and increase resilience to storms, they are important for nutrient cycling, filtration of pollutants from water and air, carbon sequestration, local climate regulation, providing habitat for organisms that do useful things for us (like natural enemies of pests, pollinators), they contribute to the local landscape aesthetics, and provide urban green space that can improve both the psychological and physical health and wellbeing in our increasingly stressed urban populations.
So they are important habitats for humans, contribute to immediate and vital solutions to climate change, and provide an amazing place for wildlife to live.
Which begs the question: why were Tallaght’s wetlands destroyed? South Dublin County Council has confirmed it dumped drained silt on the site (see report in thejournal.ie) – describing the area as “uncultivated”.
And this makes me cross – just because it’s not cultivated, does it mean it has no value? Why is it considered by the council as a worthless piece of waste ground to be dumped on? The answer is probably because our systems don’t properly recognise the worth of biodiversity and healthy functioning ecosystems. The value of nature is not seriously taken into account in any decision-making. This didn’t look like a valuable piece of land – it’s described as “uncultivated” by the council – as if only land that can be cultivated is worthy of respect.
And this is why nature always loses out. As Collie put it, people say sorry and move on, but this habitat, destroyed overnight, will take years to restore. It took 20 years to become this urban oasis. It will take another 20 to get back to where it was.
Councils everywhere are embracing “nature-based solutions” – they want to know what installations, what technology they can add to urban landscapes to solve problems. But the best solution is nature itself, and the best way to get nature into the urban landscape is to not destroy it in the first place.
So, we need to make sure that nature is not seen as worthless and it is not carelessly destroyed. The value of habitats like this wetland should be very carefully calculated and communicated in terms of all the things it does for us. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that nature is only of instrumental value to humans – it has an intrinsic value of course, but we are dealing with people and systems that don’t recognise or don’t care about that intrinsic value.) If we can quantify all the outputs from these habitats that have a benefit and value to us, we can start to realise the worth of that piece of wetland, and that it needs to be considered in decision making. This is what the Irish Forum on Natural Capital has been working towards over the past five years – making nature count.
The other thing we can learn from this disaster is that biodiversity needs to be front and centre in any kind of decision-making. We need to improve general appreciation for nature. We should not just see these “uncultivated” areas as worthless, but see them for what they are – important remnants of biodiversity providing us with heaps of free services. So that the contractor, the site foreman, the people in the office processing the paperwork, all question the decision to dump tonnes of silt on top of such a wonderful site.
We need to educate people on the real value of these pieces of habitat that appear on paper to be valueless. We need to change our perception and realise that these areas are our life-support systems. And get people to understand the worth of nature. Otherwise we’re going to lose it all and we’ll only realise its value once it’s gone.
Tallaght’s wetland is symbolic of what we’ve been experiencing in this country and globally for far too long. Enough is enough. It’s about time that nature was put first.