We all love a good feel-good news story, in this case about an Irish baron who rewilded his estate:
According to the UN, the world needs to rewild and restore an area the size of China to meet commitments on nature and the climate – but not everyone applauds Ireland’s pioneering effort. “You’d be surprised when you live in a castle how many times people think you’re an idiot,” says Plunkett, the 21st baron of Dunsany.
He still loves death metal, and sports a ponytail and (fake) leather jacket, but he decided seven years ago to turn over 300 hectares of his estate to nature – no livestock, planting, sowing or weeding.
Before, the estate had just three types of grass, now it has 23. “I didn’t do it, the birds did.” Trees regenerated and multiplied – oak, ash, beech, Scots pine and black poplar. “I see a lot of saplings growing that I haven’t planted.”
Death metal emphasizes reality over human pretense. This leads us to see the importance of eternal things, instead of immediate novelty-based social gratification, and therefore treasure that which is out of human control.
On the other hand, any time you get a committee or a herd of people together, they start demanding that human desires become more important than reality, and this never works, so they double down and it becomes an obsessive mania to smash anything other than human desires.
This culminates in a state like Communism or Consumerism where human rules control everything, and as a result, life detaches from both nature and common sense, leading to a tedious existence of servitude to the lowest common denominator.
It’s not too difficult to cherry pick quotes to buttress a knavish narrative.
I try to keep quotations short in order to respect the commercial and copyright needs of the original holder. In this case, although The Guardian is mostly plastic asshole consumerist-communist trash like The New York Times, it’s an informative article and you should go read the original at The Guardian, preferably with our Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) tag intact so their web guys get a good morning WTF.
The pleather part should have been a dead giveaway.
when you listen to fools…
Yep, you end up with democracy.
A good start would be ending the collective misery of endangered species. Pandas, whales, rhinos, etc, etc, etc. That would be the most “humane” thing to do.
Someone finally wrote down the solution that occurred to me in childhood, which was to force limits on human land use and therefore, limit our population and drive us toward prioritizing quality over quantity. It’s both fashy and nrky.
There’s enough land for 9 billion early graves.
His idea will fail unless he’s willing to control the vegan grazers on his estate by either hunting them (which will upset the Guardian) or by introducing wolves to his land (which will further anger his neighbours).
The simplest solution would be for him to overcome his misguided belief that being vegan will help save the planet, and instead hunt the deer on his land, eat their meat and use the skins to make himself some real leather jackets.
When I read Plunkett – it clicked. So this guy is a descendant of the highly influential writer Lord Dunsany?