After several fires severely overstretched teams in the Blackstairs Mountains last week, the Carlow fire service warned that " lives are being put at risk.” Meanwhile, Kerry fire services reported more than 50 call-outs for similar outbreaks over three days.
These fires coincided, very predictably, with the end of February, after which all burning on uncultivated land is illegal until September. This measure is to protect breeding wildlife, though the law remains very patchily enforced.
Human lives are most obviously at risk because, if teams are fighting fires in remote areas, they cannot quickly respond to domestic and business emergencies. But human lives are at risk from these fires in other senses, too. Smoke clouds exacerbate respiratory illnesses. The carbon released, though mostly unrecorded, accelerates the climate crisis that threatens us all.
The destruction of breeding habitats pushes threatened species ever closer to extinction. Once familiar upland birds most affected by the fires, like curlew, lapwing, snipe, kestrel and skylark, are disappearing from degraded landscapes.
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The Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss called for a constitutional referendum to protect our vanishing habitats, but we are still moving, and fast, in the opposite direction. The assembly’s own delay in producing its final report, with recommendations on how various sectors, including agriculture, can assist protection, is telling.
Farmers burn hillsides to foster new growth for grazing sheep. But this is one of many traditions and practices, across all of society, that we must urgently rethink as the climate and biodiversity crises intensify. And many conservationists argue cogently that the State itself has repeatedly failed to protect biodiversity, in national parks and other protected areas.
We must support upland farmers, economically and culturally, to become stewards of healthy landscapes. And we need to get serious about enforcing laws against those who degrade ecosystems, on public as well as private land.
