The Blindboy Podcast - Tiocfaidh ár Lawn

Episode Date: May 29, 2019

A history of the negative impacts that colonialism has had on Irish biodiversity . Proactive Suggestions and guerilla techniques for helping Irish biodiversity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, what is the crack? Welcome to episode number 86 of the Blind Boy Podcast. How are you getting on? Are you having a lovely, charming week? I certainly am. I'm writing my bollocks off. Book deadline is coming up pretty soon. And I'm writing furiously, several thousand words a day. pretty soon and i'm i'm writing furiously several thousand words a day and several thousand words that i'm happy with so i'm very pleased with how the book is going i'm happy to report very pleased um all going well the new book will be out i'd say october and it's going to be another collection of short stories, just like the first book,

The Gospel According to Blind Boy. Don't know what the second book's going to be called, haven't a clue, not even in that discussion yet. My only priority is to deliver the first draft of that fucking book within the next week, and I reckon I'm going to do it. So anyway, thank you for the lovely responses

to last week's podcast which was good crack it was a cultural history of Irish faction fighting it was a nice little historical hot take type of podcast if you're new to the podcast go back to some earlier episodes maybe start at the very start i try not to i try not to have each podcast kind of too relevant as to what's happening right now i'll always mention a little bit at the start that's chronologically relevant we'll say but other than that you can you can dip into any podcast you like and it doesn't matter whether it's a year old or whatever so this week what i'd like to based on and we just had our european and local elections there in ireland and i'm relatively happy with the results because we have a trend emerging called the green wave where basically the green party of ireland and you know politicians who have climate action as something they want to tackle

people appear to be voting these people in now you know regarding the green party of ireland historically they tend to talk the talk and not necessarily walk the walk unfortunately so let's hope that the Green representatives that have been elected will go forward into fucking Europe and rattle a few cages um but if they don't I think it's still hugely positive that the vast majority of irish people are now voting and actually showing that hold on a second lads this climate business we need to fucking address this we need to do whatever we can to address this so i was very happy to see that the average person voting is actually giving a shit about that that's really

encouraging to me um one positive that came out of the green wave thing like our current fucking government finagale terrible pricks when it comes to the environment they're they're considered dinosaurs on environment policy after the green wave uh election carry on the leader of finagale leo radker come out and said that climate change is now a huge priority the number one priority of finagale he could be talking out of his hoop but it's better than him not saying it now as i've mentioned before in this podcast if climate change is to be really sorted out in the way that the fucking un is saying it needs to be sorted out 70 of the issue is not caused by you and me it's caused by massive corporations

in particular in the petroleum industry so any politician out there who has climate in their agenda your first fucking call to action has to be aggressively tackling these corporations that are creating these issues it's as simple as that it's if it's no good turning around to us and saying do more recycling. Absolutely, we can all recycle. We can all be more green in our everyday lives. We can switch the amount, you know. I've been on a plant-based diet for six days of the week for the past two months.

Just for my own little, I'm keeping an eye on my own individual footprint we'll say ecologically so one thing I did is I've I only really eat meat once maximum twice a week and it's not difficult at all to be honest it really isn't difficult loads of yummy food and and it just

it helps me sleep better at night and I get to enjoy then my chicken or steak on a Sunday and it just it helps me sleep better at night and i get to enjoy then my chicken or steak on a sunday and it's fine and i'm doing my bit to help the climate on top of all the recycling i do but i'm going to continue doing that but that's no good for you and me to be doing if the people in power are not aggressively tackling the huge corporations that are causing 70 percent of global warming so that needs to be the first priority of any green politician tackling these corporate pricks and ireland has a i think a unique advantage in this respect because so many huge corporations have got their headquarters in dublin so they can not pay any tax at all.

So maybe knock on their fucking doors because it's just around the corner from you. Because that's the interesting thing about Ireland you see. Ireland's carbon footprint as a country is pretty fucking small. Firstly we're a tiny island. So if you look at global warming as a whole. We're like firstly we're a tiny island so if you look at global warming as a whole we're like a percentage of a percent we're a fraction of a fucking percent ireland's impact on the on the environment is very very little even like when it comes to you know people talk about the meat industry and the dairy industry and that impact on the environment.

Even Ireland's dairy industry, as dairy industries go, isn't that much impactful on the environment because the big culprits are huge, huge pastures of cows where forests are cleared. Rainforest is cleared like in Argentina, just to have all these cows farting. That's really bad. In Ireland, it's like pastured, grass-fed cows. It's not great, but that's not the worst. Do you get me? So some cynical people say, well, why should we even be talking about climate change in Ireland? Because we, you know, our footprint is so small what's the point I I don't think so I think what Ireland can do is we can lead by example you know because we

the thing is too because we don't have a huge foot in the game because we don't have this huge impact on the global climate we get to be radicals who are roaring and shouting about it and our elected MEPs get to go to Europe because the carbon footprint of fucking Europe now that's pretty big our MEPs get to go to Europe and hopefully if they're not talking out of their arses they can be the ones in the European Parliament holding Portugal to account holding Spain to account holding France to account holding not talking of their arses they can be the ones in the european parliament holding portugal to account holding spain to account holding france to account holding the entire eu to account and becoming a watchdog becoming a thorn in the side of much larger economies um that are having a measurable impact on the environment so Ireland absolutely can play a really really

not only an important role but quite a unique fucking role so that's what I'm not speaking to any politicians I'm speaking to you and to me and to whoever's listening this is what we need to keep our eyes out for if our MEPs are not doing that then they're not doing their fucking job and we need to tell them so what i want to talk about this week though is i want it to be a climate podcast i'd like to address more climaty things in the podcast in general i was asked before why don't i do a lot of climate change podcasts and the answer I gave you was because it's too negative it's too scary and negative and I don't like thinking about it well I've I've changed my attitude around that in the past six months and I've read about it more and

I'm much more focused now on what can you do, what can be done, you know, aside from holding these huge corporations to account, doing the little things in our own lives, keeping our own politicians to account, one thing that is, one thing that we can all get stuck into, and give us a real sense of achievement and something you can actually individually create real change biodiversity okay so there's two kind of climate emergencies there's the one with okay the global warming where the temperatures are getting hotter and everything that goes with that we know about that one but the other big big crisis that was announced very recently that needs huge radical action against is biodiversity and biodiversity is is basically all around the world okay there is man's impact.

The impact of civilization is really reducing the numbers of living things and the diversity and range of living things in each little country. All right? And man is doing this. And as we know, all living things are interconnected in this symbiotic system

where there's a basic there's a relationship going on with every single little thing from the wolf down to the fungus that you can't even see it's all interconnected through nature and humans are fucking this up they're throwing it off kilter and as a result there's huge amounts of extinctions and like I think in Ireland I think that it's 90%

I think 90% of like birds and insects have disappeared which is really really shit but there is ways for all of us to act in our own individual ways that can have a significant impact to improve this biodiversity if everyone kind of does it if this becomes a new part of our culture if this becomes a new part of our culture if this becomes a new lifestyle that we do so i want to speak about that on this podcast this week what we can each do individually to deal with this biodiversity issue in a positive way because look you can either

sit on your arse and go sure jesus i'm too small what possible impact could i have or you could go oh there's much smarter people than me that are trying to fix this or you can go asher there's no point at all i don't want to do anything fuck it we're fucked i don't get any of those positions i would like to you know inspire people to have some action in my own life and then try and hold politicians to account and try at least and the worst thing that can happen out of that is i get you know i get a sense of personal meaning and happiness from now being interested in biodiversity and helping animals what a lovely thing to do and

could get hit by a bus tomorrow you know that's the way i look at anything in life is on a large enough time scale we're all fucked you know people get cancer people get hit by buses terrible sad things happen this is the inevitable pain of existing as a human being and through that tapestry of pain we can have a choice to create a sense of meaning and happiness in our daily lives so i'm going to go with that option one thing i want to address before i get into this podcast um this is like i wear a plastic bag on my head i wear a single use plastic bag on my head okay and anytime i talk about climate online someone's contrarian father fucking gets into my mentions and goes what are you talking about climate change for are you going to take off your plastic bag and your plastic bag isn't environmentally friendly you fucking charlatan so someone's fina gale contrarian, da, gets in my mentions and gives me this shit.

Well, Donald, let me tell you, regarding my plastic bag and the environment, my plastic bag is, it's a single-use plastic bag, and this is why my plastic bag is very environmentally friendly. My bag, as you know, it's a shop called jc's in swords okay and i wear their single-use plastic bag because i like the design and jc's is a family business and it was almost shut down by a by an aldi or a lidl i think it was and i just started wearing their bags because i didn't like wearing the bags of the large corporations I felt it was nice to support this small family supermarket swords but JC's no longer use single-use plastic bags because they gave their all of them to me they gave me

a couple of thousand single-use plastic bags for me to keep and to make masks out of. So here's the thing with my plastic bag. I've actually taken a few thousand single-use plastic bags completely out of circulation from the supermarket. They won't make them again. I then take these single-use plastic bags and i repurpose them into a new purpose that's the best thing you can do with single-use plastic because it cannot be destroyed or it can't be recycled so i repurpose single-use plastic bags that are taken out of circulation and i make them into masks they get several uses i then store these bags i don't throw them away i keep them safe and hopefully

one day what i'll do when i'm when i'm old is i'm going to make an art installation just i'm going to build a giant sink a huge sink with with a tap on it massive but size of a house and then there's going to be a larger plastic bag in there and i will store all the single use plastic bags that i turned into masks i will store them underneath a giant a giant sink as an art installation so my single use plastic bags that i wear on my face they are environmentally friendly because what i'm doing is i'm repurposing something and reusing and repurposing is the best approach that you can do with something that can't be disposed of and i've taken a serious amount of them out of circulation these these now don't end up in

hedgerows i have them i look after them i don't throw them out, I keep them. And JC's supermarket now uses reusable plastic bags. So fuck you, Donald. So with this week's podcast, what I'd like to focus on is Irish biodiversity, but from a post-colonial perspective. I'm going to go very hot takey with it. I'm going to go very hot takey with it. And I want to talk about how kind of the situation that Irish plants and animals and insects are in now isn't really that recent a thing. How you can trace it very much to it being a colonial problem something that started with the plantations by the british in ireland and i want to make the case as to how each of us

trying to improve biodiversity is not only something that helps the planet. And helps the environment. But it's a radical act of. Decolonization. Alright. I'm just doing that for the hot take. To be honest. To make it interesting. But sure fuck it.

We'll have a lash. So. The thing with Ireland. Ireland used to. Have a fierce amount of forests and we don't really have that anymore. We don't have a huge amount of forests. Now you can imagine the amount of life that a forest supports and once you take that forest away then the life that's there is gone. The first, when the Normans came to Irelandireland in the 1100s 1200s they very much had an eye on

the timber in ireland so they had a crack at it but you know it was the 1100s they were taking bits of it away but when you get to we say henry the eighth's time in the 1500s one major thing that really changed the landscape and wildlife in Ireland in 1543 King Henry VIII who he I suppose out of all the kings the British kings and queens Henry VIII was that was a really fucking bad one for Ireland because he's the one who changed England to Protestantism so he could have several wives, but that made the conquest of Ireland very religiously based and very dogmatic. It became about eradicating Catholicism, you know the british empire all of a sudden now had a real excuse to eradicate the irish but in 1543 henry the eighth brings in this thing called

the the forest act and it was this charter because in england they had been rapidly depleting their own forests. And this was at a time when the British Empire was just kind of starting to expand. So they really needed timber and their own native timber resources were declining. So the Henry VIII Forest Act is the first aggressive attempt that the british had of really taking forests out of ireland for the use of the timber and clearing this to create pasture i suppose you'd call it but also deforestation by the british in ireland was it was ideological as well and it was also strategic there was a proverb from sometime in the 1500s but it was the brits used to say the irish will never be tamed while the leaves are on the trees and what that meant is that when like before

Henry VIII and we'll say afterwards the Tudor conquest you had the Normans in Ireland and the first 400 years of British conquest like the Normans were pricks the Normans essentially are

they're Brits that are second or third generation French they were the first that came over. They were pricks. But the first Normans that came over, they kind of absorbed themselves into Irish culture. And they intermarried with the native Gaelic Irish and became more Irish than the Irish, you know. So real aggressive, brutal British colonization only really starts from King Henry VIII onwards. And when they would find themselves fighting, we'll say, the last of the Irish aristocracy, I suppose you'd call it. The dynasties and native Irish clans that ruled certain areas that were fighting the

british they would the irish would use forests as subterfuge as a way to hide as a way to attack and that's why the brits were saying the irish will never be tamed while the leaves are on the trees there was also an actual a type of of Irish warfare for fighting the Brits, and it was known as plashing. And plashing was where the actual forest was used as a weapon against invading British armies. They would get, they'd make a forest impassable. They'd get all the boughs of trees and tie them together to form these impenetrable walls and to use this as a defensive structure against the attacking British so attack them then disappear into the forest so deforestation became not only a way to take resources from Ireland and to redistribute

in Britain or other parts of the emerging empire but also deforestation became a way to remove the Irish natural defences against the British invaders. Similar to what the Americans did in Vietnam in the 1960s the Viet Cong who were fighting the Americans in the 1960s the viet cong who were fighting the americans in the vietnam war would use the forests as subterfuge to hide and to attack and to disappear so the yanks defoliated the place they had stuff called agent orange which was a defoliant that they'd spray over huge amounts of fucking jungles and it would utterly destroy all life all over vietnam and the americans did that via helicopters because the vietcong were using forests as a strategic way to

attack and ironically that chemical they used agent orange it caused american soldiers to go psychotic to have particularly very very bad ptsd with hallucinations as well but that's a separate podcast but the deforestation of ireland by the british it was a very deliberate thing to eradicate the people but had this knock-on effect of also drastically changing the biodiversity in Ireland I mean think of all the animals that don't have homes think of the deer the wild boar that don't exist anymore because of this aggressive deforestation by the British also one thing that never really gets spoken about is the Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland which we remember as the bloodiest and most brutal murder wide-scale murder of Irish people by the British is probably Cromwell's comes to mind he was a particularly nasty bastard you know when Cranwell sacked Drahida thousands and thousands of women children and men killed

like he literally said don't stop until your swords are drunk with the blood of Irish people you know so this was a particularly nasty character. But what isn't spoken about is Cromwell's personal vendetta on the native Irish wolf. Cromwell basically personally caused wolves to go extinct in Ireland. Now, I know what you're thinking. Class, who wants fucking wolves? Well, wolves are what's known as a keystone species. They're apex predators. Wolves are what's known as a keystone species.

They're apex predators. So if you think of how, we'll say, the ecosystem of the Irish forest would have worked, you're going to have wolves, you know, aggressive carnivores, and they're feeding on deers, wild pigs, boars. These animals are then feeding on plant and vegetation and insects are then reliant upon those plants and vegetation to survive. So Cromwell aggressively pushed for the eradication of the Irish wolf and he caused the Irish wolf to be extinct effectively. extinct effectively and the reason like they reintroduced wolves in yellowstone park in america in 1996 right they had no wolves at all it once had wolves but they were hunted so they said fuck it let's bring the wolves back in and the effect that bringing wolves back into Yellowstone Park had on all of the ecosystem, they couldn't believe it.

It changed the behaviour of the type of animals that the wolves were eating, we'll say. So all of a sudden, deers are a little bit more cautious. They're not eating as many plants. They're not stripping the ground of moss. And then the knock-on effect that has for the insects more birds started returning to the area because of the wolves they it had an effect on trout in the river so just by reintroducing those wolves in Yellowstone it had this huge beneficial effect on the entire ecosystem.

So you can imagine what happened to Ireland when Cramwell went in and got rid of those wolves. Now how did he do it? And why did he do it? Well, there's a more tenuous argument that's ideological and then a more realistic one that's practical the ideological argument and one that i would look at from a colonial perspective is when when a large empire like britain or spain or anywhere colonizes a native people it's it's not just about the sheer violent brutality on the people themselves it's about the complete eradication of culture and eradication of identity and eradication of pride and Cromwell hated the Irish Cromwell didn't believe the Irish to be human he saw theish as a heathen race of either you know fucking very devoted catholics or pagans that completely deserved to be eradicated cromwell believed that irish culture

was inferior and savage and needed to be tamed and deforested and stripped and one way that you do that alongside killing the people you kill the only natural predator the wolf being a possible symbol of strength or power or freedom i mean if you're a band of fucking Gaelic warriors fighting Cromwell. And you're hiding out in the fucking forests and the trees. And you're trying to look for this. Strength within you. To fight these British soldiers with their superior armour. You hear a pack of wolves howling in the distance.

And their freedom. And their ability to creep through the fucking trees and use the subterfuge and follow the moon and strike and leave the guerrilla nature of a wolf pack I'm just hot taken like a motherfucker here

but I imagine 15th, 16th century Gaelic warriors in the forests fighting Cranwell's forces of course they're going to be drawn inspiration from something like a wolf

you know because they're seeing parallels with it so when you as an army and as a force eradicate the wolves that sends a very strong

message of propaganda that not even the mighty fucking wolf can evade my new model army you're all fucked and this eradication of Irish wolves it was it was incredibly deliberate by Cromwell he put huge bounties on wolves and huge amounts of professional wolf killers arrived over from England with the sole purpose of eradicating the Irish wolf and they managed to do it in about 30 years. The native wolf in Ireland ended with Oliver Cromwell because of Oliver Cromwell. Now another practical reason why Cromwell wanted rid of the wolves

is you have to look at what was Oliver Cromwell doing in Ireland. Cromwell came over as part of kind of the end phase of the second Tudor invasion. Like I mentioned the Normans had conquered Ireland in the 1100s but they had become more Irish than the Irish. They intermarried with Gaelic clans. And before Cromwell, Ireland wasn't really properly colonised. What you had was the area around Dublin known as the Pale. But anything outside of Dublin, Kildare, was called Beyond the Pale. You still hear this phrase today. English people use it, the phrase Beyond the Pale. Beyond the Pale. You still hear this phrase today.

English people use it, the phrase Beyond the Pale. Beyond the Pale means savage. The savage lands beyond Dublin where the English rule doesn't hold because the original Norman settlers, they kind of married into Irish Gaelic dynasties and they were no longer considered themselves kind of to have any allegiance with britain whatsoever they had embraced a new type of irishness you see this with irish names that

like if you're called fitzgibbon or fitzmaurice like the fits part that's a french it means fee it means son so these are anglo or hiberno-norman names so the Tudor conquest was it was kind of way of going fuck these cunts we're really taking Ireland this time and we're going to eradicate them and we're going to root out any problem any Gaelic clans that have any claim for their land they're gone they're done so Cromwell's specific goal was obviously to create a land that was fully protestant but his thing was plantations so the what the plantations were is it's literally confiscating huge amounts of land banishing or killing the ruling families of that land, killing the population, telling them to move to shittier lands.

And Cromwell's thing was create these plantations, right, have these huge swathes of land to be exploited and fill them with English and Scottish settlers, eradicate the Irish, replace them with new colonizers boss aggressively exploit the land in the interests of Britain get rid of the forests replace those lands with pastures for cattle for grazing how can you have sheep and cows if you have wolves so Cromwell's deliberate attempt at eradicating this keystone species the wolves it was a way to bolster and make the plantations that

had cattle and sheep and goats as as profitable as possible so that there was no threat that any of these animals would be killed by the wolves and you could further exploit the land in the interest of Britain. So that's their kind of part two of the huge effect that Cromwell had on the biodiversity of Ireland. He's after kicking out the wolves, massive deforestation and now replacing natural meadows and forests with industrial agrarian grasslands that have nothing but grass and hedgerows. What does that do to insects? What does that do to native birds? do to native birds so that's the a huge kick in the balls that ireland took in its biodiversity as a result of english colonialism before i get into where it goes from there now we're 30 minutes in so we'll have a bit of an ocarina pause and you might hear a digital advert you might not

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Please do. It makes a real. Huge change to my life. So thank you so much also like the podcast share it recommend it to people subscribe on spotify subscribe on itunes leave a review all that carry on all right so what i want to move into now is we'll say the 1700s and 1800s and these colonized plantations that were all over Ireland these huge massive swathes of land that were deforested and agrarian and pastures essentially for cattle and these lands were owned by a very a relatively small amount of the population the Protestant ascendancy okay on these plantations you would have

had a small amount of land that was dedicated to the landlord assuming they were actually living in Ireland but they had these massive estates with the plantation house. But what they also had was the landscaped garden. Okay, and this is what I really want to try and focus on. to try and focus on in the 1600s to 1700s owners of large plantations in all around the world really what they wanted to try and do is they wanted to shape and manipulate the land directly in front of their house for purely aesthetic means specifically like in the birth of landscaping what they wanted was to reflect kind of the artwork and paintings at the times so if you go to certain one good example is is there's a place called donnerale park in cork and that has an old school

kind of plantation house and i'm not gonna lie it's beautiful when you when you stand at the door of that plantation house and look down you can see how the entire landscape of the gardens including an artificial lake was constructed not by nature but by human hands, to specifically create an absolutely perfect, picturesque view. And what this meant was completely ripping out any natural flowers, any Irish flowers, getting rid of them, and bringing instead imported flowers from around the British Empire. A common thing you find with, and this is where a lot of dangerous invasive plant species find their way into Ireland,

because that's another huge issue with biodiversity. You start bringing in these plants that aren't native and animals, and they do better than the plants and animals that are native, and they eradicate them, and they don't belong there and they soon start to have an unfair advantage within the ecosystem and fuck everything else up but like in down by yorty's couch in limerick okay that's that river that i speak about where i meditate and i run where yorty hern the otter lives that's near an river that I speak about where I meditate and I run, where Yorty Ahern, the otter, lives, that's near an area called Plassey, okay, and Plassey is called Plassey is because it was named after the Battle of Plassey, which was a battle in India that had something to do with a

lad called the Earl of Plassey, I think, but anyway, the area around University of Limerick is former kind of plantation land where there was these landscaped gardens. But there's an invasive species called giant hogweed, which is a huge, huge problem down there. It competes with other plants, but it's also, if you were to touch giant hogweed, it leaves blisters on your skin for the rest of your life it can cause you to go blind and this is all around that area of limerick because it was introduced by one of these plantation owners but ultimately what i want to look at ideologically is these really beautiful landscaped gardens that when viewed from the door of the plantation house look like oil paintings you know you look down and the hills and bumps are manicured in such a way that they're placed perfectly and symmetrically the trees are cut in such a way that they fit symmetrically

within the view and the water features and then you'd have peacocks from china and india all over the lawn essentially creating the environment into this perfect painting that even though it's an act of beauty fits in perfectly with the colonial mindset what it is is it's a symbolic act that represents the chokehold and control that you have over native wilderness, including the people. The people are seen as wild and savage and untamed. So therefore the aesthetics of the plantation house has to also reflect that you out with the wild no wildflower no native plants don't allow the weeds to grow don't allow the native plants to grow in the way that they do carve out the landscape create a new one in your own idealized image of what perfection is

and anything outside the walls of your landscaped garden that's beyond the pale that's where the savages are but within this beautiful perfect garden that you've created in your own image right there that's the ideology of colonialism reflected in the aesthetics of it and another thing that the the landlords of these houses like they they didn't work they made their money from the fact that they had acres and acres and acres of this confiscated land that was very heavily um pastured and you know crops being grown and those crops being exported and sold, they were very, very wealthy. So often what a lot of them would do is, instead of going to college, they used to do this thing called the Grand Tour, where they would visit, we'll say, classical sites

of antiquity like Rome and Greece and things like that but also visit all other colonized areas of the British Empire and it was usually young men who'd do it in the ages of about 19 to 24 they'd go on their grand tour but what they would do is they would travel to all parts of the British Empire and then they would pick up in various parts plants and exotic things, exotic animals and exotic plants from all corners of the British Empire, and then bring them back to Ireland to be planted on their estate or to live on the lawns of their estate. And they'd have conservatories where they'd grow pineapples and oranges and these fetishised exotic things.

And essentially what they're doing is, this was like them hanging their degree on the wall. Their posh bastard visitors would come over from London, visit their plantation house, and then see, like Limerick has redwood trees that belong in California all over certain parts near the University of Limerick, that belong in California all over certain parts near the University of Limerick because those redwoods were brought over by some young lad on a grand tour who'd managed to go as far as California and you'll see plants from India and all that shit is very very dangerous for the environment and for biodiversity and a lot of it was brought in through that plantation and colonization process but mostly i think the most destructive for the environment element of this landscape garden culture and the big house and the plantation house and it's something i'll get into a bit

more detail later is there's no television or magazines in those times so essentially celebrities and people who set trends and set style are the aristocracy the main aristocracy to set the style obviously are going to be the the royals but all these landlords would have been 6th, 7th generation royal or they might have been dukes or whatever fucking things they have. These were the celebrities and they were setting trends and styles with their lawns and with their plantation estates and these landscape gardens. This was their status symbol. plantation estates and these landscape gardens this was their status symbol this was their way of showing off and people would look to see what what is that person doing on their estate how can

i copy that and they'd set trends but the trends demonized native wildflower native plants and it created in some situations kind of monoculture especially around grass and lawns so any of the biodiversity that ireland would have had in its natural meadows with different types of grasses that became demonized and instead they would bring the type of lawns and grasses we see today one type of grass which is shit for insects and animals and of course the great uh crisis of biodiversity that had real human impact in ireland is obviously the great famine now the great potato famine there's many many causes some people rightfully call it genocide, but there's also an environmental factor to take on board. And climate scientists today do look to the Irish potato famine as a horrible warning of what can happen.

The Irish people became completely reliant upon potatoes as their primary source of food. It was a great source of food. it's a whole food, it has enough protein, carbohydrates, sugars, everything you can just live on potatoes and be okay and the Irish did that the Irish were not allowed all the food these big plantation estates

where they'd gotten rid of all the forests and were growing crops there was plenty of corn being grown plenty of wheat being grown, plenty of wheat being grown, plenty of carrots, plenty of cabbages, but they were all being shipped out of Ireland. The Irish people weren't allowed to eat these things, so instead the Irish people lived on really shit land

and had their tiny little cottages where they would grow just enough potatoes for themselves and their families. But where the failure of the Irish potato crop becomes a biodiversity issue is because it's an example of what's known as pure monoculture and this is one of the one of the warnings that scientists have today is that a lot of the world's food depends upon these monocultures where we're growing massive massive massive amounts of foods from basically the same crop without diversity so basically what happened in ireland is this disease called blight this kills the fucking irish potato but one reason why

why blight was so devastatingly effective at destroying entire crops to the point that there was a fucking famine in a country where it rains all the time and everything is green one of the reasons that blight was so effective is there was only one type of potato in Ireland a variety which I think it, I don't know is it extinct, but it's nearly impossible to get your hands on now, but a variety called the lumper potato, and the thing with lumper potatoes, this breed, all the lumper potatoes in Ireland, they were essentially clones, they were clones of other potatoes, so they had the exact same genetic fucking material each potato was identical to the other pretty much and that right there is what's known as monoculture there

is zero genetic diversity in any of those potatoes so when the blight comes it's like fucking excellent none of these potatoes have any diversity in their genes if i kill one i kill them all so the blight eradicated all of the fucking potatoes because there was zero genetic diversity it was a monoculture of just lumper potatoes and they've done studies with fucking blight and they would have the way they study blight is you'd get one group of potatoes that are clones essentially monoculture and then another group of potatoes that have a bit of genetic diversity and the blight doesn't completely eradicate potato crops that have genetic diversity it only eradicates some and nature will keep the you know the healthy potatoes will survive and the weak ones won't but when you've

got a population of spuds that's monoculture and just one type that are clones then you've got a widespread famine so right there is a biodiversity crisis in ireland that killed three million people as a result of british colonization so i'm hot taking all over the gaff this week um i'm not like i'm not this podcast isn't about me seriously trying to fucking blame the brits exclusively for the problems we're having in Ireland with biodiversity. What I'm trying to show is, using the interesting topic of Irish history and Irish colonialism, showing how crises in biodiversity happen through aggressive human intervention. And yes, British colonialism absolutely had that effect on Ireland.

It's not 100% the reason that we're in the situation we're in now the situation we're in now most likely is it's 20th century behavior after the fucking Brits but where I want to get to and where I want to get to regarding a call to action and the kind of more positive side of things where we can actually change so when i spoke there about the cultural significance of the plantation garden and landscaping and these beautiful uh what will you see there's a place called bally finn house is it called bally finn i think it's in leash if you want to go and get a look at that, that was designed by a fella called Capability Brown, who was probably the most famous landscape gardener ever, he designed landscapes, like the paintings of John Constable, or Turner,

do you know, Bally Finn house, but there's loads of these old houses in Ireland, most of them in England to be honest, because the IRA burnt a lot of them down in Ireland but if you still want to see these beautiful gardens go and get a look at them but they're a bad example and this is what I'm trying to get to so the landscaped

garden of the 1700s and the 1800s led to a fetishisation a stylistic fetishization whereby native wild plants were demonized they were seen as common as wild as untamed and instead what was fetishized was prim proper exotic colonial okay and you have this situation in these giant houses, but this sets a fucking trend. And this trend still exists today

with our fetishization of lawns. Every house in Ireland has got a lawn. And these lawns, we must keep them fucking prim and proper and green and the grasses and all the lawns they're pretty all over Ireland it's the same fucking shit it's the same type of glass grass it's a monoculture and we don't plant wildflowers in our gardens instead what we do is we go to garden centers and we fetishize the exotic and we can trace this to the victorians and the georgians when in both britain and in ireland post-industrial revolution you start to see the emergence of

a middle class as such this like the plantation fucking houses there was no real middle class then you had incredibly rich people and serfs but after the industrial revolution you start to see the emergence of people who are in the middle whose bourgeois values they aesthetically look up to these plantation owners because these are the people who set the trends and the style and this emerging middle class now they now live in in semi-detached houses or in row houses and they have their little gardens which are effectively modeled on the gardens of the large estates using the same toxic principles of demonizing native wildflower native plants and bringing in instead invasive exotic things and fetishizing the perfect green

lawn the modern irish garden is not a particularly friendly place for biodiversity when you have a perfectly manicured lawn that you look after and you take out of. There's no life on that lawn. It's just green grass. So the call to action. And I'm going to call this. As a hot take word. I think we should be leaving our lawns. To grow a little bit more wild. And I'm going to call this Chuckie Gar Lawn.

To take from the Republican phrase. Chuckie Gar Law this Chuckie Gar Lawn to take from the Republican phrase Chuckie Gar Law, Chuckie Gar Lawn don't be freaking out about having a perfect green lawn don't use fucking pesticides start introducing native wildflower

into your own garden if you want to help the biggest issue that we got to tackle is butterflies bees insects the really small little creatures they're the ones that are we say the indicator species that are really dying at the moment there's 500 000 people in ireland who listen to this podcast if everyone who listened to this podcast made a choice to say that i'm going to stop fetishizing this aesthetic aesthetic values about my garden that come from the 1700s and 1800s and instead i'm going to embrace a garden that's more wild and natural and irish if everyone in ireland did that that would have

a genuine huge positive impact on biodiversity because now your garden becomes a place not for aesthetic beauty and for control and controlling the environment. Instead what it turns into is a place where wildlife can exist and thrive. If you have a garden full of native wildflower, all the bees are going to arrive into your garden and start pollinating and becoming healthy and improving their colonies. Like, even if you leave your lawn grow a little bit longer, like, don't mow your lawn every fucking week. Mow it every two weeks. If you don't like weeds, ideally leave them there, but do not fucking go and buy Roundup. Don't spray Weedkiller. Weedkiller is killing insects. It's going into the groundwater.

It's going into streams. Domestic use of Weedkiller is destroying creatures in Ireland. Stop doing it. If you don't like weeds, get out a fucking trowel and cut them out of the ground. If you hate them so much, throw it into a compost heap. Or look up ways to make weed killer that's environmentally friendly. There's a million people listening to this podcast in total, so the other 500,000 are scattered all around the world.

So ye can do the same thing. Find wildflower. You can go to any garden center and buy packets of wildflower the there's there's hardly any meadows left in ireland meadows are very important for pollinating insects meadows have been replaced with agricultural land. Acres and acres of fields that are just there for cows to eat. That's not great for insects. It's great for cows, but it's not very good for insects. And we're losing loads and loads of these grasslands that have a huge variety and diversity of flowers for bees to collect pollen from and because these things are disappearing the bees are disappearing too and bees are fucking very important

and it's not good enough to just have fields of wheat and to have most of your land used just for crops for human consumption that's not. So we can make the wildlife our gardens. There's loads and loads of gardens. Make them about natural Irish wildflower or whatever the fuck you live. Make it about your native wildflower. You can still have a garden. Like imagine this for a challenge.

If you're the type of person who truly does love having a garden like imagine this for a challenge if you're the type of person who truly does love having a garden that you keep that is aesthetically beautiful when you look at it from your kitchen window and you like it to look that way reassess your aesthetics to accommodate plants that are native and wildflower and you can still create a really really beautiful garden that has a degree of landscaping in it but it doesn't have exotic plants that might be invasive and it doesn't fetishize this big green lawn that no fucking insects exist on like do you ever cut your lawn after you've let it grow wild for a good while and you see all those little spiders and everything escaping?

That's their home. And when you've got a perfectly shorn green lawn, nothing's living there. Be careful with fertilizers. That's another thing. Chemical fertilizers aren't great. Again, they seep into the groundwater. They find their way into rivers. They cause blooms in algae. Algal bloom then fucks with the level of oxygen in the water this kills fish instead of using chemical fertilizers start doing a compost heap then you've

got all your waste from the kitchen you're making your own compost it's natural you you're doing it all in your own garden you're feeding the plants what they need and you can trust that compost that you make isn't going to end up leaking into any groundwater or creating any hassle also within your compost that you make yourself you've got worms you've got little insects bacteria fungus all of these useful things working with nature so you can still have your fucking garden but you're not taking the piss by using these chemical fertilizers i know it's a lot of effort but genuinely like my ma was telling me a story about she told me that she remembers in limerick and this would have been the 50s

She remembers in Limerick, and this would have been the 50s, when she said every house in Limerick had a pig out the back garden. And people would grow as much of their own fruit and vegetables as they could. They gave the scraps to the pig to feed. They mostly lived plant-based because they were poor. And then they would take the pig into town once a year and have him slaughtered for the meat for the winter that was preserved and i'm not saying to you fucking have a pig out the back garden and kill it once a year in town but that's a very self-sufficient style of living out of your back garden like if you're the type of person if you think you have the time and resources to even so much as grow 20 of the vegetables that you might consume throughout the throughout the

year and you do that by becoming handy at things like canning you know you grow a load of fucking carrots you can so they don't go rotten you learn how to can them in jars and shit like that stuff that people were doing 50 60 years ago because they had to because they had no money this small things like that are what you and i can do to improve biodiversity and stop putting a strain on the environment also as well if you grow your own carrots you grow your own herbs that's another set of herbs that doesn't have to go on a ship that come all the way over from spain do you know what i mean little things like that but again there's 500,000 people in ireland listening to this podcast if everyone did it that's and if you told your neighbors

it's a good chance. That actually change. And. As Collie Ennis. Mentioned on this podcast. Because his thing is. Is frogs. If you can. Have a pond.

Out your back garden. And it doesn't even have to be. A fancy pond. That has. A pump. Or anything like that. Go on to YouTube. And figure out.

Out of an old tyre or an old barrel. What kind of stagnant. Water even. Can you make. That would introduce. Insects. Birds. Dragon flies.

Maybe even frogs. Tadpoles. What can you do in your garden. So now you're looking after aquatic animals, because frogs are dying off big time because they've got no natural breeding grounds anymore, so what little pond water feature can you have in your garden, what project where you have it there and it's just small but you are providing a small little climate for some insects that really need it because everything's covered in fucking concrete the final thing i want to address and this is what i think

could be a load of fucking fun it's really simple and could have real change and this also like if you're listening to this and you're feeling left out because you know you you might you might live in an apartment you have no garden whatsoever or you are one of the people who's renting in ireland and you have no agency over your garden if you start planting fucking carrots out the back the landlord will go apeshit so i'm sure there's plenty of people listening to this podcast who are in that situation here's a cool thing that i think everyone should do this this should become a new type of irish culture within the tradition

of we'll say environmentalism as an act of decolonization chucking our lawn right on right guerrilla gardening not guerrilla warfare but guerrilla gardening guerrilla gardening is when a citizen takes it upon themselves to look around their city or their countryside and they find available pieces of space that are being unused and they then try and plant things that are beneficial to the environment in these areas of public space okay there's various ways that people do it some people go totally extreme and they start digging up the earth and really planting things in there but here's the simplest way and and a really really helpful way to have a crack at guerrilla gardening which i think would be a lot of fun if everyone started doing it i'm going to give you a recipe for a thing called a seed bomb and a seed bomb is it actually comes from

it's like an ancient japanese culture in j Japan it was called Nendo Dango. But what a seed bomb is, it's a small little clay ball about the size of a golf ball or smaller that contains the seeds of native wildflower. And you can carry these seed bombs around in your pocket and just throw them anywhere. If you're walking past, like, open up your eyes when you walk around your city or walk around your countryside. And do you see, like, a vacant lot where there's just a bunch of nettles or dandelions growing?

Or even the middle of a roundabout? Or a ghost estate or like in limerick we've got this thing the parkway valley center now i know it's going to be fucking it's going to be built over soon but it's this huge monstrosity of a fucking a shopping center that was never built full of ugly concrete with weeds trying to make its way through with seed bombs you have this grenade of life a grenade in your pocket that has the seeds of native wildflower that you can throw whatever the fuck you want and when that lands it will grow into native wildflower that will assist bees and butterflies and all these things so this is how you make a seed bomb first off you need uh get a bag of wildflower seeds you can buy wildflower

in any garden center you can buy it online make sure it's native wildflower obviously if you're in ireland it needs to be irish wildflower if you're in britain british wildflower if you're in Ireland it needs to be Irish wildflower if you're in Britain British wildflower if you're listening from Spain Spanish wildflower so get your hands on a decent amount of assorted wildflower seeds the more assorted the better then go into like an art shop and buy a clay pottery clay it's not that expensive you get a big like a kilogram of it for about a tenner okay and when you have pottery clay um make sure that when you take it out you close it because it can dry up quickly so you've got native wildflower seed you've got some pottery clay that you get in an art shop and then just a regular bag of compost right so what you want to do is mix the compost and the clay i would say mostly mostly compost but what you want and use a bit

of water as well but essentially what you want is for the compost and the clay together for you to be able to form it into these golf ball sized balls but into this then as well throw your native seed so roll it in your hand and now essentially what you have is this this ball of pottery clay and compost with native iris seeds in it so once you have these balls made dry them don't put them in plastic what you want to try and do is let them dry naturally and preferably in the sun so that they kind of dry out don't dry them in an oven or anything like that because you can kill the seeds but you need to make sure they dry because that will stop the seed from germinating and the benefit of these little balls is that the

shape of them themselves becomes its own little planting pot so you don't need to get a seed bomb and you don't need to plant it in the ground you could literally have a dried seed bomb in your pocket or in your bag don't keep them in plastic like i said because that can increase moisture but keep it in in a paper or whatever and you have these on you at all times and you're walking around town or around your city and you see a vacant unused lot you can throw the seed bomb in there when the fucking rain hits it the seed bomb will grow if it's big enough you can nearly put it on concrete and that bit of earth and soil there would work.

And then you've got native Irish wildflower growing. Imagine, like, make a load of them, give them to your friends, tell them what they are. And now you're armed with this fucking weapon that increases biodiversity wherever you go. If you're a business owner, if you have a cafe, make a batch of fucking seed bombs and give them out free to the people there. Tell them what they are. If you're in a student union in a college, get a workshop together and everyone makes a shitload of seed bombs. And that's what people have. Have them on you at all times to be thinking about the environment around you.

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Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Where can you put these? Throw them over fences, into ghost estates, into whatever, and populate the entire fucking landscape with native wildflower that supports bees and beetles and butterflies, which then supports bats, do you know, I think that'd be a great thing for everybody to do, and it's so simple, if you can't be arse making them, go online, I'm pretty sure you can buy pre-made seed bombs with native Irish wildflower in them. But it's probably cheaper and more sensible for everyone to be completely self-sufficient. And to be able to make them themselves.

One thing I do want to warn about there. I guarantee you someone's listening to this and they're thinking to themselves. Wow, that sounds like a class idea. I'm going to make these seed bombs. about there i guarantee you someone's listening to this and they're thinking to themselves wow that sounds like a class idea i'm gonna make these seed bombs but for the laugh i'm also going to put cannabis seed into my seed bomb and we can grow wildflower and there'll be cannabis everywhere i guarantee you someone's thinking that don't do that and nothing against cannabis you know my feelings on that i'll tell you why not to do that if ye out there decide for the laugh let's put some cannabis seed in these balls then what that does is it encourages let's just say for the laugh you find a fucking ghost estate

and you've got your wildflower and then for the laugh you put in some fucking hash seeds if you throw that into a ghost estate and all of a sudden now there's wildflower and cannabis growing someone's gonna see it someone's gonna rat it out and then you've got the county council or the guards down with weed killer to kill the cannabis seeds that are growing so that would be hugely counterproductive so even if you think that'd be crack definitely don't do that because it will result in some prick who doesn't give a shit with fucking weed killer and another issue of county councils a huge problem with biodiversity in ireland is county council cutting down fucking hedgerows and destroying nesting populations of birds keep an eye on your local council workers your local park workers make sure they're educated on the damage that they could do

to populations of birds and insects through using fucking weed killer and cutting down hedges you can't have that anymore and on the railroads um another thing you can do urban beekeeping um if you don't want to be a beekeeper yourself i guarantee you if you're living one of in one of the cities in ireland there's somebody doing urban beekeeping if you have an apartment block if you have any type of space you can offer your space for an urban beekeeper to come in and keep a hive like i know in limerick there's at least there's six or seven beehives that are on the roofs of buildings and it's actually there's a it's an art project in limerick called soft day and their art project is based around colony collapse of bees so what they do as part of their art project is plant these beehives all around

rooftops on limerick city and that stuff's fucking amazing to use the urban landscape to have beehives living and then for them to have access to wildflowers sure look if the 500 000 fucking irish people listen to this podcast if if only a percentage took that on board or if you don't have the means to take it on board you told a friend to take it on board that could have real impact to irish biodiversity you know i don't know what it would do for global biodiversity but for Ireland, for your community it would have to have a positive difference to make your garden

if you have one a space for wildlife and for insects and not necessarily a space for aesthetic beauty based on 18th century British colonialism so look I hope you enjoyed that. I'm not an expert on this shit.

I'm only learning. I'm trying my best. If you want to hear an expert, go back to my podcast called St. Anne's Handstand, where I interviewed Collie Ennis from Trinity College. He's who got me into this shit.

He's the person who... What I loved about talking to Collie was that he gave College he's who got me into this shit he's the person who what I loved about talking to Collie was that he gave me that sense of hope he's a very positive person and he when when when I'm reading about climate change when I'm reading about biodiversity I love to also hear about here are the changes that you can do in your life here are the things that you can do to improve things to help i always think that's a positive thing rather than coming away from it with a sense of fear and hopelessness so i hope you enjoyed that anyway i'll be back next week um i'm out of the country to for, for writing and for other stuff. I'm out of the country next week and the week after.

So I'll be doing those podcasts on the road. So I don't know what they're going to be about anyway, but shall we have crack? I hope you enjoyed this. Like I said, it's a roasting hot take. I'm not blaming the Brits and problems with Irish biodiversity. hot take i'm not blaming the brits and problems with irish biodiversity i'm just trying to contextualize the whole thing in an interesting hour an entertaining hour god bless go fuck yourselves yart Thank you.