The news of the last few weeks has been grim for nature. Fires happen every year, but this year’s conflagrations have been, almost literally, off the charts.

A cynic might suggest that the fires are only grabbing the headlines because they are threatening cities like Bordeaux and forcing the evacuation of thousands of tourists. But they are truly terrifying.

They suggest that the Earth’s systems may be approaching what George Monbiot describes as a “flickering”, the way a complex system signals that it may be approaching a tipping point as its behaviour becomes more volatile.

The fires are not normal, but they raise the terrifying possibility that this is the future we are moving towards. Worse still, we are nowhere near prepared for it.

We are not even writing about it: the news coverage of each successive wave of heat this summer is still, in many media reports, a story of beaches and ice cream, of children cannonballing into urban canals.

Climate change is barely mentioned or, if at all, often dismissed as something to which we cannot confidently attribute the heat. (We can, and it is journalistic malpractice to say otherwise.)

The heatwaves this summer are a kind of “holy shit” moment that could lead to despair, or they can remind us that hopelessness is not a strategy. The correct response to an emergency is not to surrender to it but to anticipate it, prepare for it and manage it in a way that addresses both its immediate impacts and its underlying cause.

The Biosphere is the kind of strategy that can help Ireland respond with the scale and urgency that this moment demands.

Restoring at least a third of Ireland's natural ecosystems would, at the most fundamental level, make the country more resilient to the growing pressures of climate change. We now know, with absolute certainty, that Ireland will not be spared its impacts. The fires we have witnessed this summer are not an anomaly but a warning.

Because healthy Irish Atlantic rainforests do not readily burn. Upland bogs and wetlands do not go on fire. Killarney National Park is burning because rhododendron has been allowed to proliferate beneath the oak canopy, crowding out the native undergrowth.

The Slievenamon Hills are burning because of monoculture plantations of exotic conifers like Sitka spruce, and the desiccation of its upper slopes from overgrazing and drainage is turning the surface gorse into a tinderbox.

Yes, quotidian human idiocy—a discarded cigarette butt, a disposable barbecue—or just plain bad luck plays a role, but our neglect in allowing these landscapes to become so degraded has made them much more vulnerable to the twin impacts of climate change and human carelessness about fire.

The Biosphere offers us a way to buffer against both, through a national, generational programme of investment, repair and resilience.

It would mean taking out invasive plants from everywhere they are found in the Irish landscape and ending the grazing of feral goats, while limiting sheep grazing to designated and fenced-in locations.

It would compel state owners of land—first and foremost, Coillte and Bord na Móna, which between them manage seven percent of the country on all our behalf—to restore native woodlands and healthy bogs.

It would incentivise farmers to create habitat for pollinators and return to less extractive practices. It would offer relief to flood-prone towns by restoring complexity to landscapes upstream that can hold more water and release it slowly.

It would also mean building the water pipes, broadband connections and electricity connections in and near towns and villages to help those who wish to settle close to services and to their communities.

Building the Biosphere is not just about restoring nature; it is also about addressing the underlying reasons behind exurban sprawl and the lack of housing in our towns, cities and villages.

These and a thousand other interventions would create a mosaic of landscapes connected across the island that is large and diverse enough to absorb the blows of climate change.

And it is just good economic sense. Climate change is going to wreck Europe’s economy, but Ireland has the power to do something about it.

Restoring nature at scale is more than an environmental project. It is a blueprint for national renewal, creating meaningful work that brings together foresters, farmers, engineers and town planners in the shared task of preparing Ireland for a changing climate.

The Biosphere is the kind of plan that can give hope to a generation that might otherwise succumb to despair, because hope does not emerge from catastrophe on its own.

It is cultivated through the patient work of repairing landscapes, strengthening communities and building a country resilient enough to meet whatever lies ahead.

The mismatch between those two timescales sits at the heart of many of our environmental challenges. Nature restoration is often discussed through election cycles, annual budgets and short-term targets, while the landscapes we are trying to restore operate on entirely different clocks.

Native woodlands take generations to establish. Rivers require years of sustained intervention before species return. Even the hedgerow, one of Ireland’s most important ecological corridors, reveals its greatest ecological value only over decades.

Those who planted them were rarely thinking about biodiversity. They planted them to mark boundaries, shelter livestock and manage farmland. In doing so, they unknowingly created habitats that would support birds, insects, mammals and pollinators for generations. Their immediate needs produced benefits they could never have fully imagined.

So how do we begin intentionally thinking at the scale that nature restoration requires?

One answer can be found in cathedral thinking.

Cathedral thinking is the practice of undertaking long-term projects whose greatest benefits may only be realised by future generations. It asks us to invest in outcomes we may never fully experience ourselves, trusting that others will inherit both the responsibility and the rewards.

Consider St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. When construction began in the twelfth century, it represented an extraordinary investment of labour, materials, organisation and skill. More importantly, it represented confidence in the future.

Those who laid its foundations could not have known exactly how the cathedral would ultimately be completed. Building techniques evolved, new knowledge emerged and future generations solved problems the first builders could not. What endured was not a perfect blueprint, but a shared commitment to continue building.

More than eight hundred years later, Ireland continues to benefit from that decision. St Patrick’s remains a place of worship, a landmark, a repository of history and a symbol woven into our cultural landscape. Its builders could never have anticipated every way future generations would use and value it. They simply understood that some investments are worth making because their benefits extend far beyond the present moment.

Nature restoration demands the same perspective.

For too long, environmental policy has been trapped between ecological timescales and political ones. We ask programmes to deliver measurable results within a handful of years even when the processes we are trying to influence unfold over decades. We celebrate individual projects, but rarely build institutions capable of sustaining them.

This is where a Biosphere for Ireland becomes more than another conservation initiative.

At its heart, a biosphere is an act of long-term coordination. It provides a framework through which schools, farmers, local authorities, community groups, businesses, researchers and government agencies can contribute to a shared ecological ambition while pursuing their own individual goals.

A school restoring a small woodland or a farmer extending a hedgerow. A local authority reconnecting wetlands. Researchers monitoring ecological change. Community groups collecting biodiversity records. None of these actions are transformative on their own.

Together, they begin to build something much larger.

Perhaps the challenge facing Ireland is not a lack of ambition, but a lack of institutions capable of carrying ambition across generations and connecting the work already happening across the country.

The builders of St Patrick’s Cathedral did not know every challenge their successors would face, nor every benefit their work would eventually provide.

The same is true of nature restoration.

The hedgerows we plant, the rivers we restore and the partnerships we create today will solve problems we already understand. If we build them well, they may also solve problems we cannot yet imagine.

That is the promise of a Biosphere for Ireland.

The cathedrals of the past remind us what can be achieved when a society commits to a vision larger than itself. The challenge now is to build a framework for nature restoration capable of carrying that same ambition beyond election cycles.

The commission shone a light on a contradiction at the heart of Irish environmental policy.

It is a contradiction that environmental advocates have been highlighting for years. Among them is Fintan Kelly of the Irish Environmental Network, who questioned whether state-owned companies can fulfil their ecological responsibilities while operating under commercial mandates.

Ireland already owns much of the land needed to begin restoring nature at scale. The state’s landholdings are huge: half a million hectares and more of forests and bogs, mountains and coastline, and control over much larger swathes of the sea and ocean that surrounds us.

Between them, Coillte, which manages the state’s forests, and Bord na Móna, which controls the peatlands previously harvested for turf, own over 7% of the surface of the Irish state; the Forest Service of Northern Ireland manages a similar share.

If Ireland is serious about restoring nature, these publicly owned lands should be among the easiest places to start.

Yet both Coillte and Bord na Móna have explicit mandates to return a profit to the state.

Both have figured out ways to do this, at least on paper.

For years, Coillte has planted the Irish landscape with dense rows of coniferous trees, mostly Sitka spruce. These trees, originally from North America, grow quickly in the Irish climate and are a dependable cash crop. A hectare of land can be planted with about 2,500 saplings that will eventually yield between 500 and 700 tonnes of timber when they are felled about 40 years later. New trees are then planted around the stumps and the cycle repeats itself.

But as anyone who has ever visited a Sitka spruce forest will know, many spruce plantations are ecological deserts, dark, silent expanses without birdsong or any kind of green undergrowth, not even moss, to temper the grey forest floor. They grow fast, but to the exclusion of everything else.

They also represent a risky bet that the state is placing on our behalf. Any monoculture is inherently prone to disease, and bark beetles are already sweeping through spruce forests in Europe. Climate change will make Ireland’s forests more vulnerable to such diseases, or to storms like Éowyn, which felled about half a billion euro worth of commercial timber in 2025.

Bord na Móna presents a similar contradiction.

For many years, the company harvested the bogs of the Irish midlands. The bogs produced a vital national bounty of fuel during the Second World War and formed the backbone of the economy in counties like Laois and Offaly. Towns such as Edenderry and Mountmellick were indelibly shaped by mid-century Ireland’s industrial strategy around exploiting its peatlands.

Recently, Bord na Móna has refashioned itself as a renewable energy company, using the lands it manages to provide sites for wind energy or to grow feedstock for biomass production.

But these activities, too, can sit at odds with the natural inclination of the land. Ella McSweeney wrote recently about Cornafulla Bog on the western bank of the River Shannon in Roscommon, where the Shannon Callows provides a protected wetland internationally renowned for its rare plants and bird species. The bog is threatened by a wind farm that Bord na Móna and SSE Renewables are considering. If this and other projects go ahead, Bord na Móna will be trying to achieve two incompatible objectives. Wind turbines require hard access roads, concrete foundations, drainage infrastructure and pumps to keep water out. Bog restoration requires the blocking of drains to raise the water table and rewet the same land.

Both companies say they are managing their lands sustainably. Bord na Móna points to Ireland’s renewable energy targets and the suitability of spent boglands, far from people’s homes, as sites for wind farms. Coillte advertises its efforts to increase species diversity in its forests and restore native woodland in pockets of its estate.

But these efforts remain secondary to their obligation to make a profit.

That profit motive overrides other concerns. You would be forgiven for assuming that state-owned companies would be doing their best to protect land designated under European environmental law. Yet around 25,000 hectares of land managed by Coillte lies within protected areas. Drive through the Wicklow Mountains and what dominates much of the landscape is row after row of dark-green conifer plantations in the middle of a Natura 2000 site, because these are the trees that return a profit.

This is precisely the contradiction identified by the commission. Publicly owned land that could become a cornerstone of nature restoration remains constrained by commercial imperatives.

And yet these lands offer perhaps the fastest route to a different future.

Imagine if these precious assets, already owned by the people, could become part of a tapestry of revitalised landscapes: bogs restored to life; forests loud with insect and birdsong; thriving industries of continuous cover forestry and coppicing to provide timber and other forest products; paludiculture in the bogs; and new opportunities in hospitality, fishing, hiking, farm stays, whale watching and rural retreats.

Imagine if the state decided to do this today, to turn the lands it owns, the lands we own, towards purposes that would benefit everyone: resilient forests better prepared to withstand fire, disease and climate shocks; upland blanket bogs rewetted to hold water that would otherwise rush downhill to flood towns and villages.

The Irish biosphere would stretch from coast to coast, from mountain to river and from bog to lake. It would stitch together land voluntarily given over to the project, converted from intensive exploitation to nature-friendly cultivation or allowed to return to a state of natural restoration. From little copses and corners of wilderness too remote or too steep for browsing sheep, biodiversity could spread, blossom and connect across the island.

Bord na Móna and Coillte are perfectly positioned to play a central role in making that vision a reality. They are publicly owned and, if it wished, the state could direct them to repurpose their portfolios towards nature restoration and nature-friendly economic activity.

Christopher O’Sullivan, the minister with responsibility for Ireland’s biodiversity strategy, has suggested that it may be easier to transfer parts of these companies’ estates to the National Parks and Wildlife Service. But as Fintan Kelly of the Irish Environmental Network notes, limited land transfers would leave business as usual intact across the vast majority of publicly owned land. Changing the mandate of these state-owned companies, on the other hand, could be done quickly through new letters of expectation to their boards.

We need a new default.

State-owned companies do not need to maximise profit. They can maximise public value.

Let them become the first patches of the biosphere at scale.

They see life. Dragonflies skimming water. Moss holding rain. Curlews calling across the air. The strange softness of peat underfoot. They crouch to inspect things adults walk past. Beetles. Ferns. Puddles reflecting clouds. To a child, the world is alive before it is useful.

A. A. Milne once wrote, “Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.”

Children understand this instinctively. They begin with intimacy toward the natural world. They do not separate themselves from it until they are taught to. The tragedy of modern life is not simply environmental destruction. It is that so many people grow up losing that relationship entirely.

What would it mean to raise a generation in an Ireland shaped by a shared biosphere?

Not an Ireland where nature exists in isolated parks and protected areas disconnected from ordinary life, but one where ecosystems are woven visibly through everyday experience. Rivers restored not as abstract climate infrastructure but as places children swim in again. Native woodlands expanding beside roads, farms and towns. Wetlands alive with birdsong. Communities participating directly in the care of landscapes around them.

The psychological effects of such a society would likely be profound.

For decades researchers in environmental psychology have documented the relationship between nature and human wellbeing. The biophilia hypothesis proposed by Edward O. Wilson suggests human beings possess an innate tendency to connect with other living systems. Studies repeatedly show that children with regular exposure to biodiverse natural environments demonstrate lower anxiety levels, improved concentration and stronger emotional resilience.

Researchers at the University of Aarhus in Denmark found that children who grew up surrounded by more green space had significantly lower risks of developing psychiatric disorders later in life. Other studies have linked access to nature with stronger social cohesion and higher levels of civic participation.

Perhaps the deeper question is not therapeutic, but political.

Children who grow up participating in the stewardship of place develop a different understanding of agency. They learn early that environments are not fixed backgrounds controlled by distant institutions, but that they are living systems shaped by collective care.

A restored river becomes something your community protects. A woodland becomes somewhere planted by neighbours and schools. Nature ceases to feel separate from democracy.

Modern environmental policy often struggles because people experience it as something imposed from above. Targets. Restrictions. Metrics. Consultation processes few believe they meaningfully shape. Even those deeply concerned about ecological collapse can feel detached from the mechanisms of restoration itself.

This alienation mirrors broader patterns across contemporary society. Political theorists and psychologists alike have observed how powerlessness erodes participation. People withdraw from systems they do not believe belong to them. They stop imagining themselves as actors capable of shaping public life.

That may be one of the most radical possibilities within the biosphere idea. Not simply ecological recovery, but democratic renewal through participation in shared landscapes.

A child raised within this system might grow up with a fundamentally different relationship to responsibility.

They would understand biodiversity not as a slogan but as memory and sensation. The return of salmon to rivers once polluted. The sound of insects in summer fields. The annual arrival of migratory birds. The silence when habitats disappear.

They would also understand interdependence.

One of the defining myths of modernity is that autonomy means separation. But ecological systems reveal the opposite. Forests survive through networks. Rivers connect entire regions. Soil, fungi, insects, animals and people exist in constant relationship. A biosphere asks society to think in those terms again.

Not ownership without obligation, but autonomy through stewardship.

Ireland is uniquely positioned for this conversation because the landscape remains central to cultural identity here in a way many countries have lost. Memory in Ireland is geographic. We locate ourselves through fields, coastlines, parish roads and rivers. Even emigration literature is filled with landscapes carried emotionally across oceans.

Yet contemporary Ireland often feels strangely detached from its own ecology. Native woodland cover remains among the lowest in Europe. Rivers continue to decline. Peatlands are degraded. Rural communities feel abandoned by economic centralisation while environmental debates become increasingly polarised.

The danger is not only ecological collapse. It is emotional detachment. A society that no longer experiences itself as belonging to place becomes less capable of defending it.

Children notice this absence instinctively.

They notice the disappearance of birdsong. They notice empty hedgerows. Before environmental crises become data, the destruction is experienced as silence.

Perhaps this is why the image of the child feels so important.

Not because childhood is innocent, but because children still possess the capacity adults spend years suppressing. Attention. Curiosity. Wonder. The belief that the world around them matters intimately and personally.

A National Biosphere cannot succeed as a purely technocratic project. It has to become cultural. Emotional. Participatory. Something people see themselves inside rather than regulated beneath.

Ultimately the question is not only what kind of landscapes Ireland wants to restore.

It is what kind of people those landscapes might help raise.

E.O. Wilson, one of the giants of conservation biology, described the importance of connectivity in nature. Drawing on his pioneering work on island geography, where he observed that smaller oceanic islands and those that are farther from mainland have fewer species than larger ones, he and other biologists demonstrated that the smaller a habitat fragment, the more species will die out and the more quickly they will do so.

Wilson and his colleague Thomas Lovejoy coined the term biodiversity loss to describe the effects of this kind of habitat fragmentation.

Fragmentation is a killer for nature, but conversely, as Wilson and Lovejoy advocated, it’s possible to give nature a chance by reconnecting the fragments through wildlife corridors.

In the Irish Biosphere, we imagine patches of extant raised bogs connected to each other through lengths of formerly harvested bogs that have been rewetted.

Zooming out, these restored Midland peatlands are linked to blanket bogs by corridors of alder, hazel and rowan.

These wooded corridors, in turn, trace the course of rivers, connecting fragments of indigenous woodland to one another and to more recently established commercial monoculture plantations that are now being transformed into multi species, multi generational continuous cover forests or, depending on the landowner’s preference, restored native Irish woodland.

Wildlife corridors will be the threads that knit the biosphere together. Even a strip of native woodland only a few metres wide can offer a vital lifeline, allowing animals to widen their range in search of food, find a mate or move into new habitats as the climate shifts.

Wildlife corridors can make the Biosphere tangible, and at times, strikingly so.

Many landscape restoration projects around the world include overpasses to keep large mammals away from roads. In Los Angeles, a wildlife corridor is being built across the eight-lane Highway 101.

The largest project of its kind in the world, it will see an overpass planted with native coastal sage scrub connect conserved lands and waters in the Santa Monica Mountains and the Sierra Madre range on either side of the highway.

Its backers hope that the overpass will help mountain lions whose habitats are bisected by Highway 101 and other roads and which are frequently killed by collisions with vehicles.

The opportunities for wildlife corridors extend beyond species protection.

Landscape-scale corridors can underpin community-led nature restoration, creating jobs in nature-friendly farming and forest management, boosting tourism, and offering new economic opportunities for landowners who are compensated for safeguarding watersheds and reducing wildfire risk.

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy is one of the oldest such initiatives, a collaboration of six community-led conservation partnerships along the 2,200-mile route of the Trail.

A contiguous Biosphere for Ireland would allow large mammals to move the length of the island, from red deer and foxes to, one day, lynx and wild boar, alongside commonage cattle and their predators.

The Biosphere would be a national project of restoration and repair, shaped by the simple need to connect. It would focus attention on the routes that make this possible and give communities a clear way to take part and share in its benefits.

It also allows us to imagine how we could do things better.

In the early 2000s, the Glen of the Downs was the site of a standoff between the government intent on widening the N11 to a motorway and protestors who staged a three-year battle to stop it, at one point by occupying the ancient sessile oak forest in treehouses and blocking the heavy machinery with their bodies.

The effort was partially successful, its participants say, because it drew the public’s attention to the preciousness of what was being lost and it caused the local authority to revise the plans to reduce the amount of habitat to be destroyed.

Resistance in the trees: the Glen of the Downs protests brought national attention to habitat loss. Photo credit: Matt Kavanagh, Irish Times

As everyone who commutes from Wexford and Wicklow to Dublin knows, the expansion of the old N11 to a motorway did nothing to relieve congestion: the road is at a standstill most mornings and there are new plans underway to “upgrade” the road to speed more traffic through the area.

We know enough about induced demand to predict that this will only create more traffic and congestion, yet the political and economic pressures behind road building remain strong. We need solutions that allow roads to be built without bisecting habitats, or better still, that restore nature across them.

Imagine if the motorway at the Glen of the Downs had been buried in a tunnel from the outset, its noise and movement carried out of sight, leaving the valley to its own rhythms. Imagine the absence of it, the quiet continuity of the woodland, the sense of a landscape unbroken.

That may still be too costly, though a tunnel was recently proposed and rejected. But we can begin to think differently. Sections of the road could be capped with a wildlife overpass, stitching the two sides of the Glen back together and allowing red deer and other mammals to cross safely, as they once did.

This is the kind of logic we need: not to choose between infrastructure and nature, but to design in a way that allows both to endure.

Done well, such interventions would not only function, they would be visible symbols of a different approach, one in which economic development, local communities and the living landscape are held in balance.

A fence line cuts across the Irish landscape so often it becomes invisible. It marks where one field ends and another begins, where one farm stops and the next starts. It signals how the land works.

Before wire fences, hedgerows confined animals and enclosed land that had once been held in common through complex systems of shared use.

Fences can protect nature, to an extent. Vast lengths of taut wire have been erected across Ireland to create exclusion zones for deer and other animals that browse saplings. Where such fences are absent, forests often have no young trees. They may look healthy to a casual observer but nothing grows beneath their fragile overstorey, aside from colonising Rhododendron ponticum. Where landowners have erected deer fencing, life has returned.

Yet fences also interrupt and fragment nature. They block the paths of migratory animals and even some low flying birds. Biodiversity persists within fenced land, in hedgerows, along rivers, in rough ground and at the margins of working farms and forests. But it exists under pressure, piecemeal, reduced and often in competition with the other demands placed on the land.

Fences are also unreliable. Gaps form from a falling tree or a rotten post and sheep, goats or deer find their way through. They require constant and costly maintenance to function at all. They also prevent the natural disturbance of ecosystems by large animals, a process that is vital to the regeneration of many landscapes.

There is another way to think about the fence. Instead of enclosing nature, we could enclose extraction.

In this logic, a shared biosphere would stretch contiguously from one end of Ireland to the other. Ancient migratory patterns could re-emerge across a living network of restored bogs, wetlands, rivers, woodlands and commons.

Imagine cutaway bogs in the Midlands rewetting and breathing again. Floodplains along the Shannon and Barrow allowing rivers to spill and meander. Native woodland returning along hillsides and riverbanks where monoculture forestry once stood.

This would not be a park or land set aside. It would be the default landscape.

The land beyond the fence would be largely unfenced. The fence would still exist but its meaning would change. Instead of enclosing the last fragments of nature, it would mark the places assigned to more intensive land uses.

Dairy, beef and tillage farming would remain central to the rural economy but these activities would take place within defined areas. The fence would protect livestock from predators and begin a buffer between intensive agriculture and rivers, lakes and other sensitive ecosystems.

Outside the fence, life returns to shared ground. Hedgerows thicken into corridors alive with birds and pollinators, linking field to field, farm to village. Paths cross landscapes where people walk not through protected areas but through the ordinary living fabric of the country. From above, the change would be striking. Instead of scattered fragments of nature surrounded by production, Ireland would begin to resemble a living web. Forests linked to rivers, rivers to wetlands, wetlands to coasts. Towns and villages would appear not as interruptions but as nodes within the system, connected by green corridors running through estates, parks and old railway lines.

The inverted fence is a small conceptual shift but it changes how the land is organised. For centuries we have placed extraction first and ecology second. This approach asks us to reverse that order, to let ecology shape the land and to make space for extraction where it can still fit.

In practice, this would not be simple. It would require changes in policy, incentives and land use that are often contested. Farmers would need to be supported through any transition, not asked to carry it alone. Land would still be owned and worked, and the economic pressures that shape rural life would not disappear. But the logic guiding those decisions could change.

In many ways, this shift is older than the system it would replace.

Ireland once held traditions of shared landscapes. Commonage grazing on uplands. Turbary rights on the bogs. The rundale system where land, labour and responsibility were intertwined across communities. The meitheal, collective work carried out not for profit alone but for mutual survival.

No one owned the entire system, or even exclusively any part of it, but everyone depended on its health.

The inverted fence echoes that older logic. It asks us to see land not only as property but as something we live within together.

Nature would no longer be the exception. It would become the ground on which everything else depends.

This is the deeper idea behind a national biosphere. Not simply protecting places, but changing the logic that governs the land itself. If isolated efforts to rewet bogs, restore biodiversity on farms and improve water quality were connected across a shared landscape, they could begin to function as a system.

Agriculture, contained within defined areas, could then focus on producing food without carrying the full burden of holding together what remains of Ireland’s biodiversity.

A national biosphere, stretching the length and breadth of the island, would be a visible, shared project of nature restoration for the whole country and a worthy response to the climate, biodiversity and social crises of our age.

The biosphere would not be a fenced-off reserve; it would be the new default, a modern commons outside the fences.

Ireland is trying to meet 21st-century crises with tools that were never designed for them. Climate policy sits in one silo, biodiversity in another. Rural development is separated from housing, health and community. Land is framed as either productive or protected, leaving little room for the living systems that fall in between.

The result is a churn of strategies that signal action but rarely add up to real change.

What if Ireland stopped tinkering at the edges and chose a different scale of ambition altogether?

Ireland has never been ruined by dreaming too big, only by settling too small. The scale of our biodiversity crisis now demands a different kind of ambition.

What if Ireland decided to create a “national biosphere”, covering at least a third of its land and an even greater share of its seas, in which revitalised local communities would be at the centre of a long project of restoring Ireland’s degraded, but not quite lost, natural habitats?

This is the idea: a national biosphere that would turn climate action and nature restoration from something distant and technical into something people can see, walk through and shape – and collectively own. Not another policy layer, but a physical reimagining of Ireland that reconnects land, nature and communities while shifting who holds power over what happens on the ground.

The ambition is large by design. A national biosphere could eventually cover 30% – ideally closer to 50% – of Ireland’s land and a far greater share of its seas. This would take decades, but the scale is not excessive. It is proportional to crises that are no longer abstract: climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, rural decline and the slow erosion of people’s sense of agency over the places they live.

The idea is not as radical as it sounds. The European Union is already moving in this direction. Under its biodiversity strategy, member states have committed to protecting at least 30% of land and sea by 2030, while new restoration laws require degraded ecosystems – from wetlands to forests – to be brought back to life.

Ireland is currently failing on most of these fronts. By almost any measure, it is one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe. The majority of protected habitats are in poor or bad condition. Rivers are polluted, bogs are drained, and native woodland cover remains among the lowest in Europe.

Decades of extraction and intensification have delivered short-term output at the cost of long-term ecological decline. Worse, they have done little to stem the emptying of rural Ireland.

When rivers, fields and forests are seen primarily as places to dump waste, graze livestock or harvest timber, we crowd out the many other ways landscapes can sustain communities: mixed farming, traditional crafts, recreation, or simply providing a healthier and more beautiful environment in which people choose to live.

A national biosphere would not just help Ireland meet EU targets on paper, but fulfil their underlying intent.

At its core, the idea is simple. A connected biosphere would stretch the length and breadth of the country, stitching ecosystems together and allowing plants and animals to move across landscapes and latitudes.

Fragmentation is one of the great killers of ecosystems. Even a corridor as narrow as 100 metres in places could give species the range they need to survive and adapt to climate change.

On a morning walk to work, the biosphere might be visible everywhere: pollinator paths along city streets, regenerated fields at the town’s edge, countryside and townland treated as parts of a single living network. Motorists driving to Dublin along the M11 might notice wildlife overpasses allowing red deer to cross their territory safely above the road.

The biosphere would be organised around ecological systems rather than administrative lines. Mountains would link to rivers, bogs to forests, floodplains to coasts. Oyster beds, blanket bogs, wetlands and restored floodplains would do more than support biodiversity. They would repair damage caused by drainage, pollution and overuse while acting as natural buffers against flooding, erosion and heat.

The economic benefits of nature restoration, from flood protection to climate resilience, are substantial and measurable. But the deeper transformation would be social. Instead of nature being something managed at arm’s length to satisfy regulatory requirements, it would become part of everyday life.

Paths, commons, wetlands and working landscapes would sit alongside towns and housing, giving people real proximity to nature and a stake in its recovery.

What might this look like in practice?

The biosphere would not be a fenced-off reserve. Instead, it would become the shared landscape, the new default.Intensive land management for profit-making farming would still be an essential use for some land, but this would be behind the fence-to protect its livestock and to buffer its impacts.

Conventional farming and forestry would no longer be allowed to define the entire countryside. Within the biosphere, high-value nature farming and forestry would be supported, but within a broader system that prioritises ecological recovery and public access.

For this to work, it would have to be built with communities, not imposed on them. The biosphere would need to be economically alive, but not economically dominated. It would create space for forms of value that have been squeezed out by extraction: biodiversity, food security, cultural life and public health.

The idea of the commons becomes relevant again here. Older Irish land traditions recognised that landscapes could be shared productively, with overlapping rights to gather peat, reeds, seaweed or timber while maintaining ecological balance. A biosphere offers a way to revive that principle at a national scale.

Farming would still play a role, but on different terms. Low-impact grazing could operate under commonage-style rules, with access limited by ecological capacity and grazing treated as one activity among many. Orchards, coppicing, paludiculture and other forms of high-nature-value land use could become part of a diversified rural economy.

The state would have an enabling role. It would set the framework, governance and funding structures, and place state-owned land within the biosphere. Coillte and Bord na Móna together control around 1.3m hectares – more than 7% of land in the Republic – and similar amounts of land in Northern Ireland are publicly owned.

But communities would be central. Farmers and landowners could choose to place land within the biosphere, temporarily or long term, receiving support either to allow habitats to recover or to manage them in ways aligned with ecological restoration.

Participation would be voluntary. Those who prefer to continue with more intensive farming or forestry models could do so, supported by existing subsidies but separated from the shared landscape by clear boundaries and buffers. What would change is that intensive economics would no longer determine the overall shape of the countryside.

Even the language matters. Calling such a project a “national park” risks evoking exclusion and enclosure – conservation done to people rather than with them. The idea of a biosphere suggests something different: repair rather than restriction, openness rather than control, and a shared responsibility to restore damage accumulated over generations.

Over time, this network could extend into every town and city. Imagine an aerial view of St Stephen’s Green. Instead of a solitary patch of green surrounded by grey, it becomes a node in a vast ecological network connected by living corridors across the island. Green space stops being symbolic and scarce and becomes ordinary and close.

Building such a system would take decades and thousands of jobs. It would be a national project comparable in ambition to the electrification of rural Ireland or the creation of national parks in the United States – but rooted in older Irish traditions of shared land and shaped by newer ideas of participation and co-creation.

Whether a project on this scale is ultimately possible remains an open question. But it is a necessary one to ask. Ireland is already legally committed to restoring nature at scale. The real question is whether that restoration continues slowly and defensively under threat of fines, or becomes a deliberate national project.

For generations, Ireland extracted from the land until little was left to give.

A national biosphere offers a chance to reverse that trajectory – not as nostalgia and not as bureaucratic compliance, but as a collective act of repair.

A living country cannot simply be inherited.

It has to be rebuilt.

This is our time to go all in.