Putting the green back in Ireland - reforestation in Ireland - includes related article

After years of deforestation, the Irish are planting trees. They're looking backward for reasons - and forward for answers.

No country capable of growing forests has fewer of them than Ireland. While most countries struggle to manage their existing forests, Ireland struggles to remember when the Emerald Isle was green with trees. The task now is to return trees to land stripped of them centuries ago, and the implications for the island's economic and cultural future are enormous.

For millennia native oak, ash, elm, and birch covered rounded granitic hills and deep glens near the capital, the port city of Dublin. Celts overtook the land around 600 B.C. and began using the wood for heating and cooking, as well as for building canoes, agricultural tools, and barricaded artificial islands, called crannogs. Because the Celtic Irish traded in cattle, grazing was also important: Cows represented wealth, prestige, and sustenance.

By the time the Vikings began raiding Ireland in the 9th century, Dublin's watershed had been seriously altered. But at a time when the rest of Europe was into or past the Renaissance, Ireland's sparse population and semi-nomadic way of life continued to mesh well with forest cover. When the Normans arrived in the 11th century, though, more trees were cut for the roofs of castles. As settlements grew up around these buildings, more trees were felled for homes.

In the following centuries, the pressures of trade with Britain and Europe wreaked more havoc on Ireland's trees. The newly arrived industries of ship-building, cooperage, metal, and glass created markets for wood, and landlords were happy to respond. They built mansions with the proceeds and turned smaller parcels of their now-barren lands over to tenant farmers to grow potatoes - and to starve in the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s.

By the turn of the century Ireland was less than 1 percent forested. The few remaining oak woodlands were in deplorable condition, and many Irish voiced concern that centuries of abuse would leave them barren of woodlands.

Memories of the potato famine

The seeds of the tree-planting dilemma were planted generations ago in the barren potato fields of the 1840s. Now, some 150 years later, the prevailing sense remains that land capable of growing food should do so. Tree cover is perceived as promoting idleness, a view are shared by rural - and Ireland's increasingly urban - residents. These beliefs are broader than merely the folk memory of a long-gone hunger or the profits to be derived from successive rotations of exotic conifers. Many wonder how it makes sense to plant a crop that will take 40 years to harvest. Others worry that uniform, rectilinear blocks of conifers will have a jarring effect on tourists, who account for one-third of Ireland's gross national product.

Today much of Ireland is a blanket bog of heather and turf whose subdued colors and uniform expanse have an austere beauty that evokes a deep emotional and cultural response. Regarded as a rich ecosystem, these heather-and-turf fields have widespread, vocal support over any attempt to replace them with trees. The few patches of perennial green are exotic conifers, to be removed and not replaced.

Of the conifers that could grow there, natives such as juniper and yew are hardly timber trees, and exotics like Sitka spruce are roundly disliked. The once-native Scots pine disappeared centuries ago. And although Ireland has some splendid native hardwoods, they require less acidic and better drained soils than are found on the bogs and rough grazing lands. Because hardwoods grow slowly, taking years to reach harvestable size, they have received little notice and comprise merely 16 percent of Ireland's forested areas. Until recently they played almost no part in the restoration endeavor.

Despite these obstacles, tree planting has been underway since the 1950s. Tentative and exploratory at first, these efforts have resulted in new forest that covers an additional 60,000 acres each year. Forestland totals 2.5 million acres - 8.3 percent of Irish lands - with the land, the money, and the willpower on hand to double those figures.

Hope for the future

What really guides forest restoration in Ireland are the European Union's agricultural policies and the payments it offers for tree planting. Until about 1980 the EU favored food crops, virtually confining the land to broadleaf species. That meant new forests were restricted to upland and bogland areas, comprising virtually all conifers and introduced species.

Since then policies have changed to allow timber trees to be planted on broadleaf-suitable land. In 1989 the government set up a corporation, the Coillte Teoranta, to grow and sell timber at a profit. The corporation now owns 75 percent of the country's forestland and supplies most of the wood to its forest industry. Profits come from monocultures of high-quality, fast-growing Sitka spruce, managed with short rotations, clearcutting, and replanting. Changes to account for other forest values are underway, but the driving force is - and will remain - profit.