Save Bogs Before It Is Too Late, Irish Told

Conservationists are ringing alarm bells for the bogs of Ireland before, they say, 10,000 years of history are destroyed forever.

“There will be nothing left by the year 2000 if we don’t do something now,” said Peter Foss of the Irish Peatland Conservation Council, which is fighting to stop the bogs from vanishing.

The rolling red-brown boglands that are such a unique feature of Ireland are being eaten away by forestation, mechanical peat turf-cutting and drainage. As a result, an Eden for plants, insects and birds is rapidly disappearing.

“Progress has reached that stage when even the traditional turf cutter and his donkey laden with peat may soon vanish from the Irish rural landscape--to be replaced by a fume-belching mechanical digger,” Foss said angrily.

“Industrial peat-cutting leaves a vast brown desert. The whole thing is destroyed,” he said.

“We are cutting away our birthright. If we destroy our environment, people are not going to come here. Tourism is our second-biggest industry after agriculture. We do not want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Peat is used to keep the home fires of Ireland burning, to fuel electricity generators and to improve garden soil.

Bord na Mona, Ireland’s state-run turf board, which sells about 4 million tons of peat a year, scoffs at critics who say it is plundering a nation’s heritage.

“Nobody else works the land of Ireland on a 50-year time-scale like we do and supplies indigenous energy and employment in remote rural areas,” a board spokeswoman said.

“We would regard the bogs of Ireland as a valuable ecological asset, but they also have social and financial value.”

Peatlands once covered more than 2.5 million acres, or 17% of the land surface of Ireland.

“Today less than half of the original peatland area remains in a relatively intact condition,” Foss said. Ecologists are targeting just 4% of the remaining land, which they say merits conservation.

International pressure has gone a long way in helping to galvanize Irish public opinion.

The Dutch, who realized too late that they were plundering an irreplaceable ecological asset, have been leading lights in a campaign to save Irish bogs now that their own have vanished.

Dutch environmentalists raised $300,000 to buy four prime Irish bog sites as nature reserves.

“Ireland can still avoid making the same mistakes, but only if the right decisions are made now,” said Matthijs Schouten, chairman of the Dutch Foundation for the Conservation of Irish Bogs.

British naturalist David Bellamy campaigned long and hard for the preservation of Clara Bog in central Ireland, now rescued from its fate as fuel for a power station.

Tourist authorities organize trips to Clara for enthusiasts who say a day hiking on squishy bogs is the nearest thing to walking on water.

“It is like being on a giant water bed. There is more solid material in milk than there is in peat,” Foss explained.

“When you step out onto the bog, you are entering one of the last great wilderness areas of Europe.”

Poet Seamus Heaney described the ground as “black butter, melting and opening underfoot.”

Clara is now recognized as a natural heritage site of international importance, a rolling wilderness that is home to ferns and frogs, skylarks and slugs, mushrooms and mosses.

Plans are under way to build a Peatland Museum in Clara that could match in popularity its equivalent counterpart in the Netherlands, which attracts up to 1.5 million visitors a year.