The Truth About the Trees in Ireland
Still thousands of feet above the ground, I peered out the airplane window. My brother Alec and I were moments away from reaching our home for the summer: Ireland. For the next three months, we would live in this country, taking in everything offered to us by the Emerald Isle.
This nickname suits Ireland well, something that I quickly realized from my sky-high vantage point. With its misshapen green paddocks and asymmetrical mountains, the island nation really does resemble an unfinished emerald — rough facades clinging to the gem’s surface, making the most of every square millimeter.
Ireland looked as verdant as I had expected, as lush as I’d pictured. Arriving from an American desert state that’s groomed to look greener than it actually is, I couldn’t help but feast my eyes on the scenery below.
And yet, in the back of my mind, something felt off. As our plane taxied to the gate, as we gathered our bags and left the airport, I mulled it over — though, in the more conscious part of my brain, I was spellbound by the isle’s beauty.
It wasn’t until much later that I finally realized what was missing.
Where were all the forests? Where were all the trees?
It may sound odd, but Ireland, the land of shamrocks and rainbows, is home to far fewer trees than most nations. The island is roughly 11 percent forested today — a number that’s much lower than most European countries’, such as Finland’s (73 percent), Spain’s (37 percent), and even Belgium’s (23 percent).
Of course, Ireland hasn’t always been so bare. For thousands of years, its broadleaf forests grew thick and plentiful, thinning only when ecological conditions altered, diseases spread between trees, or early farmers cleared land. For most of Irish history, the trees remained firmly rooted in the island’s soil, and forests sprawled across large areas of the rugged landscape.
Then, in the mid-16th century, everything began to change. Just like that, the forests gave way to tree-felling and land-clearing.
The English monarchs, who confiscated and cleared huge swaths of acreage, only to award plantations to English and Scottish settlers, were a major culprit behind the deforestation. Additionally, then-booming industries like shipbuilding, barrel-making, glass-working, and iron production all greedily devoured the island’s trees for profit. And still, the Irish had to clear land and plant new fields to feed their children. While the Irish families’ motives were innocent and entirely understandable, the island’s population grew fourfold between 1700 and 1840, and that didn’t make things any easier on the vanishing broadleaf forests.
The forest cover finally bottomed out at 1.2 percent in the 1920s — then began its slow recovery.
Through a mixture of colonialism, capitalism, and desperation, the trees had disappeared, falling to decisions that would change the face of Ireland for centuries to come.
An hour or two after landing, still blissfully unaware of the island’s lack of trees, Alec and I settled into our apartment in Limerick and got ready to begin our internships the next day.
We quickly fell into our routine, befriending our co-workers and getting to know Ireland bit by bit. On weekday mornings, I drove us to the office, and in the evenings, Alec drove us home. After work, we sometimes visited nearby wonders, like the Cliffs of Moher, or joined our co-workers around the town. But we did most of our exploring on the weekends.
On one Saturday in June, Alec and I set out to visit Newgrange and Knowth, two of Ireland’s ancient megalithic monuments. They blew me away — but my foray into the Neolithic world of stone and sun also made me think of the trees that once stood tall in Ireland.
Newgrange is an above-ground tomb surrounded by massive stones and covered with a grassy dome, its interior sitting in complete darkness for most of the year. But for a few minutes on December 21, the sun shines through a narrow window above the entrance and illuminates the main passage and central chamber.
It was astonishing to realize how well Newgrange’s builders understood the natural world, how they built their lives around it. They knew when the winter solstice occurred, and they aligned their most enduring monument with the sun’s path on the shortest day of the year.
Modern archaeologists have discovered that the Neolithic builders sourced the kerbstones — the heavy rocks making up Newgrange’s foundation — from mountains roughly 70 miles from the site. And Michael J. O’Kelly, who excavated Newgrange in the ’60s and ’70s, even theorized that it must have been almost impossible to find those rocks, “half-hidden as they were by scrub and forest,” let alone transport them so far.
As Alec and I stood in the dark central chamber, our tour guide described the site’s history. In my bones, I could sense how special Newgrange was. And later, as I strolled around the tomb, I felt a chill, the result of visiting a sacred space, where long-dead ghosts might have been watching. Just then, the intervening years didn’t seem to matter very much — after all, 52 centuries hadn’t worn away Newgrange’s might or mysticism.
At nearby Knowth, Alec and I came upon another grand scene. Though it’s a similar passage tomb, Knowth boasts a few features that Newgrange doesn’t, including an exterior woodhenge added a few centuries after the main structure. This circular arrangement of upright beams lies adjacent to the tomb, strangely out of place on the treeless, windswept hill.
After seeing the henge at Knowth, after learning how the Newgrange builders uncovered their foundation stones in forests, I thought of the trees I had expected to find in Ireland. I had already lived in the country for weeks, but I’d seen nothing even vaguely resembling a forest.
These thoughts struck me with a sharp pang, especially as I looked down the hill sloping away from Newgrange. I could see a few trees lining the fields on the valley floor, but they felt like a poor substitute for the country’s long-gone forests.
Stone lasts longer than wood does — I understood that. But it didn’t stop me from wishing that Ireland’s forests had survived the centuries as well as its monuments had. It didn’t keep me from imagining how the landscape would have looked if the trees had still been there.
The trees that grow across this blue-green planet are fundamentally important to humankind. Their life-giving role comes down to science — biology and chemistry — and the precarious calculus of maximizing resource usage while trying not to set the planet on fire.
It’s all about carbon, which the Earth stores in four major reservoirs: the crust, the oceans, the atmosphere, and the terrestrial biosphere.
The first, the crust, contains the largest amount of carbon — comprised mainly of limestone, shale, and hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). The second-largest reservoir, the oceans, contains natural carbon deposits, but it has also absorbed about 30 percent of human emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. Unfortunately, this sponged-up carbon dioxide reacts with seawater, making today’s oceans 30 percent more acidic than they were 200-some-odd years ago. This is a deadly development for many marine species, and as acidity levels continue to rise, they’ll throw off the chemical balance of entire oceans, jeopardizing ecosystems that have existed for longer than the human mind can comprehend.
The third carbon reservoir, the atmosphere, is the one that’s often discussed on evening news reports, in legislatures around the world, in classrooms and doctors’ offices and city halls. That’s because the atmosphere’s increasing concentration of greenhouse gases is killing people — lots of them. The exact estimate varies from study to study, but researchers agree that air pollution causes millions of premature deaths every year.
The world’s fourth and final major reservoir, the terrestrial biosphere, is comprised of all plants and animals that live and die on land and store carbon in their cells. This category includes everything from trees, flowers, bushes, weeds, crops, and organic matter to wild animals, livestock, household pets, bugs, microorganisms, and even human bodies.
For the past 250 years or so, humankind has steadily polluted the atmosphere and oceans by burning and burning fossil fuels from the crust — but interestingly, ordinary people often have their most meaningful experiences when their lives intersect with the fourth carbon reservoir, the terrestrial biosphere, instead. Constructed of carbon building blocks, human bodies live and grow and befriend each other until it’s time to go back into the soil; meanwhile, the human race grows flowers and picks them, hikes through forests and cuts down trees, cares for pets and squishes spiders beneath wads of toilet paper. Not every human action is kind or well meant, but there’s something beautiful about the intricate way that humankind is bound to the terrestrial biosphere. In the realm of science, in the natural order of the world, this is where humans belong, and it’s where most people have their greatest impact and form their favorite memories — with each other and with the life forces of the planet they call home.
With the climate crisis raging all around the world, it’s never been more essential to understand the ins and outs of the carbon cycle, including the natural and human-caused processes (or fluxes) through which the reservoirs exchange carbon. Take a forest fire as an example: as it furiously burns the trees and brush that lie in its path, it releases carbon into the atmosphere, and in turn, the atmosphere deposits some of that carbon in the oceans.
Of course, carbon fluxes can also be forces for good. For instance, when photosynthesis occurs, trees siphon carbon dioxide from the air and convert it to oxygen, storing the leftover carbon in their cells — which is why trees are so important to the Earth’s past, present, and future.
To that end, Ireland’s trees contained an estimated 381 million tons of carbon, all of which was sucked out of the atmosphere and reinvested in the terrestrial biosphere, in 2012. Even better, that number had increased by 9.5 percent since 2006, meaning that the isle’s forests are getting bigger. And that amount of carbon will only go up as Irish foresters plant more saplings and as the country’s trees grow taller.
But this makes one thing even clearer than it was before: if the Emerald Isle hadn’t lost so many trees a few centuries ago, the amount of sequestered carbon might have remained high forever. In our current climatic predicament, that would have been a boon for the entire planet.
To be fair, not all the trees that have ever grown in Ireland could have saved our world from the climate crisis. To put an end to the global temperature increase, humankind — the people living and breathing today, and most of all, the people who run the industries that dictate almost all of our climate decisions — has to stop removing fossil fuels from the Earth’s crust. Humankind has to stop releasing emissions into the air and oceans.
But Ireland’s once-thriving forests could have made the climate crisis less damaging. If they were still here, the planet would be breathing a little easier.
And frankly, the human race desperately needs the planet to start breathing easier.
During my summer on the Emerald Isle, I fell in love with Dublin.
Alec and I visited the capital often, drawn to the city for the way it feels both lively and laid-back. Though it’s just a collection of neighborhoods and zip codes, it somehow has qualities that I don’t usually associate with a European hub, traits like candor, friendliness, and openness.
There’s a lot to do in Dublin, so I enjoyed my time in the city’s pubs, museums, shops, and historical sites. But I’ll never forget its parks — or the trees that grow there.
On our first visit to the Irish capital, Alec and I ventured to St. Stephen’s Green, a large park crawling with locals and travelers alike. We found an unclaimed spot and sat down, happy to rest our feet for a few minutes. The weather was overcast, the gray sky diffusing the shadows that would have been there on a brighter day. A thin breeze made the stalks of grass shiver.
Quietly, I looked around to see what the other park-goers were doing. Not far away, undeterred by the cool weather, a group of friends was slack-lining between two thick trees, and another was eating lunch under a large sycamore. Just beyond the picnickers, a couple of parents were chasing their children between saplings.
Ignoring the goosebumps on my arms, I watched these scenes play out, noticing that these trees filled a more central role than they had anywhere else that I’d visited in Ireland. Even amid Dublin’s busy, buzzing, vibrant streets, the park and its trees felt like an important backdrop to city life.
St. Stephen’s Green wasn’t exactly a forest, but it was enough for me that day — a glimpse of the leafy greenery I had been craving. It seemed to be enough for the people around me, too.
A few weeks later, Alec and I returned to Dublin on a work assignment, and on our first evening back, we eagerly made our way to the city center. Not far from St. Stephen’s Green, we came across Merrion Square, a pretty park that’s edged with foreign embassies and Georgian townhouses.
It was another breezy day, but this time, the lighting was soft and golden. We wandered around the park, eventually settling down in a shady spot under a maple. I lay on my back and gazed through the gaps in the dark-green leaves.
The city felt far away, even though I was at its center, and the park’s few hundred trees seemed much more real than the people surging through the surrounding streets. Lying under that canopy, I felt connected to the planet, as if my feet were roots binding me to the Earth.
Alec and I stayed there until the setting sun cast a silhouette of the trees against the dusky blue sky. We left the park and found a bus that took us back to our hotel — the end of an uneventful evening. But it stuck with me anyway.
In my two months in Ireland, I had seen trees that stood as token gestures to Mother Earth and trees that marked the boundaries between fields and roadsides.
In Dublin’s green spaces, I finally found trees that meant a little more.
It would be unfair to imply that Ireland’s population doesn’t care about the country’s trees. A blanket statement like that wouldn’t at all capture the national attitude, let alone represent the ideology of the students striking for the climate in Dublin, Cork, and smaller cities across the island.
And besides, the country’s forestry efforts have long been the subject of lively debates.
In recent years, the Sitka spruce has been at the center of one of Ireland’s most active tree-related controversies. This conifer is native to the western coast of North America, from Northern California to the Gulf of Alaska, and without human interference, it never would have made its way to Ireland. But today, this tree makes up more than 50 percent of the country’s forested areas.
In many ways, the Sitka spruce sounds like the answer to Ireland’s forestry problems: it adapts well to the island’s soil types, it’s one of the country’s major sources of timber, and it grows quickly, so it makes good financial sense for private landowners to plant this tree (collecting sizable government grants for their trouble). And since it matures so rapidly, it doesn’t take the spruce long to sequester lots of carbon that would otherwise remain in the atmosphere.
But the Sitka spruce also has its fair share of critics. Many say that it was a huge mistake to plant this tree on bogland, where afforestation projects disturb carbon-rich peat, unearthing much more carbon than the spruces could ever sequester. Others argue that planting this tree destroys the natural habitat of endangered bird species, or that the foreign investors who plant Sitka plantations in Ireland usually spend their government subsidies elsewhere, diverting money from the country. One major political party has even called on the national government to blacklist the Sitka spruce and name it as an invasive species.
The spruce’s critics maintain that it would be better to leave the peatlands alone and plant broadleaf trees on land suitable for reforestation. After all, they say, most climate scientists agree that planting native broadleaf trees is better for the environment, even though they mature more slowly.
But people are arguing about trees beyond the Emerald Isle, too. In July 2019, an article published in Science contended that humankind could mitigate climate change around the globe by planting 900 million hectares of forest. According to the study’s authors, these trees would store 200 gigatons of carbon by the time they reached maturity, a quick fix to save the planet.
The 2019 study got people talking. Some rejoiced in the idea that there might be a straightforward solution to the climate crisis, but others cautioned that taking effective action won’t be quite so simple. Rather, it will require rapidly ramping down greenhouse gas emissions and deciding to leave fossil fuels in the ground—forever.
Climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf even jumped in to debunk the study’s major arguments. For example, the original authors said it would take 50 to 100 years for the as-yet-hypothetical trees to store 200 gigatons of carbon, but Rahmstorf rebutted that the trees couldn’t possibly grow fast enough to save humankind all on their own. (After all, he said, emission levels have already reached 11 gigatons per year.) What’s more, the study’s authors suggested planting trees across places like Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada; Rahmstorf said that following this course of action would actually warm the Arctic, since the newly planted forests would absorb solar radiation that the snowy-white ground currently reflects back into outer space. And if the Arctic gets too hot, thawing the permafrost that stores more carbon than all of the Earth’s trees combined, the planet will be in serious trouble.
Even the study’s authors conceded that simply planting trees wouldn’t be enough to stop the climate crisis. In a press release, they acknowledged that it would take decades for the new trees to reach the carbon-capturing potential they envisioned. They reiterated the importance of looking for additional solutions and phasing fossil fuels out of human economies.
While these questions and answers and arguments and rebuttals are enough to make anyone’s head spin, they’re deciding the planet’s future, so no one can afford to sit them out.
Amid the flurry of ideas, one bottom line is emerging: we have to plant the right trees in the right places. And we have to slash our dependence on fossil fuels.
For many first-time visitors, Ireland feels like a dream they’ve forgotten, a childhood home they left when they were small. For me, it was Killarney National Park that instilled this dreamlike sense of familiarity. The park was the embodiment of everything that I had expected to find in Ireland, a gorgeous expanse made up of mountains, lakes, and forests.
Yes — forests.
In fact, Killarney National Park is one of the most extensive forested areas in the country. On the day that Alec and I spent there, we explored as many trails as we could, each one engulfed by towering trees — colossal oaks, ancient yews, emerald alders. It was invigorating to spend a few hours breathing fresh air under the cool canopy.
On rented bikes, with a paper map as our guide, we roamed the park, stopping to see a fortified castle, an old bridge, a streaming waterfall. But my favorite stop of the day was a crumbling stone abbey.
Situated close to the park’s edge, Muckross Abbey was built in 1448, and generations and generations later, it still feels like it’s tucked inside another century. Bushes and shrubs grow tall and wild among its gravestones; its roof is gone, and its windows contain no glass.
To me, the abbey seemed to belong in a fairytale, an era when magic seeped out of the Earth like groundwater.
That atmospheric abbey stands in the middle of one of Ireland’s largest forests, and in the abbey’s courtyard, a massive yew tree has grown for centuries. According to local legend, the tree is as old as the abbey itself. But yews can live for thousands of years, so it’s possible that the monks built their abbey around an already-mature tree. It’s possible that the tree’s roots stretch even further into the past than the abbey does.
As I crept into the courtyard, my breathing slowed. I gazed at the yew, its trunk knotted and rough, its branches crooked and uneven. It looked exactly how Ireland feels, imperfect and flawed in a wild and beautiful way.
When I climbed to the abbey’s upper story, I looked back into the courtyard and stared at the yew tree; even then, I wasn’t level with its highest branches. I pivoted to peer out an exterior window, examining the dense forest that surrounded the building. From my perch, I saw dozens of trees, each one a different height, shape, and tint — a textured mosaic of staggering green.
My latest batch of goosebumps had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the forest itself. There, in one of the Earth’s most stunning locations, I found magic that felt unearthly.
During that hour in the abbey, I had the curious sensation that the monks hadn’t just constructed the building to worship God, but that they had also designed it to honor the trees of Killarney, to safeguard a yew tree. My imagination was probably just running away from me, but years later, I still haven’t shaken those impressions.
Before we left the abbey, Alec asked why I’d been whispering instead of talking normally. Until then, I hadn’t realized that my voice was soft, almost reverent, but I knew the answer. It was because my summer-long search for an Irish forest had finally come to an end.
But, unsure how to explain what the trees around us meant to me, I just told him, “Because this place feels different, somehow.”
Hundreds of years ago, most of the trees in Ireland disappeared, falling to decisions motivated by colonialism, capitalism, and desperation. Centuries later, those forces are stripping the planet of its trees. And two of them — colonialism and capitalism — are driving drill bits into the Earth, hell-bent on sucking fossil fuels out of the crust. But our planet can no longer afford to lose forests, can no longer bear the burden imposed by the fossil fuel industry.
We know where these transactions lead. Our future, our inhabitable planet, is being traded for tree stumps and barrels of oil.
It’s easy to feel hopeless in the midst of the climate crisis — I find it difficult not to feel that way. But I know that nothing will improve unless we, the people who care the most and fear the suffering that’s going to happen around the world, hold the guilty parties, the red-handed fossil fuel industry and the government bodies that only listen to lobbyists, accountable. Unless we, the only species making decisions that affect the entire planet, change the way we treat the natural world.
Like many individuals, I often do things that don’t exactly help the climate crisis — things like flying round trip from the United States to Ireland. But I’ll say this: my experiences in the Emerald Isle changed the way that I look at the world around me.
Knowing what I know about deforestation, I no longer take trees for granted. In my everyday life, I pay attention to the plane trees that I find along the sidewalk, the oaks that I notice beside mountain trails, the goldenrain trees that I see in public parks. I study the texture of their bark, look at the shape of their leaves, wonder about their history.
Knowing what I know about the climate crisis, I ask myself what I can do to help the planet. I think about what climate justice and environmental protection mean in the 21st century.
As a result of the things I’ve learned on the road, I’m traveling less often and more intentionally — only venturing to new places if I’m committed to learning and absorbing and giving back anything I can. And at home, I’m doing my part to fight for the environment — telling corporations and elected officials that I need them to stop hurting the planet.
I know that the climate crisis is much bigger than my own actions. I know that it will take more than planting a few broadleaf forests to save the planet. But when I think about the forests that the people in Ireland cut down long ago, when I remember the near-spiritual experiences that I had with the country’s still-standing trees, I want to be more mindful. I want all of us, the human race, my species as a whole, to take better care of the planet.
I want to look for ways to make my corner of the world greener.
An abridged version of this article appeared on passionpassport.com on September 5, 2019.
