Ireland has a poor environmental record, despite its green image. In the 1980s it had more than 500 rivers and lakes with pristine water, now there are just 20, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The definition of “pristine” has changed over those years.
That’s about the period of time in which measurement techniques have advanced from parts per million to parts per billion and then trillion.
As I say, I don’t actually know this but I’d most certainly want to disprove that contention before I believed the statement.
Only ever looked at books by the 18th Lord, not films by the 21st. But the leftist greenie attitudes seem consistent.
As for Irish pollution, I’d guess that when the peasants were dumping their shit and everything else into the creek, it was much worse than now.
As with so many things, it isn’t that things have gotten worse, it’s that the definition / measure has been altered to suit someones agenda.
I’ve a feeling that most of the “culprits” making the various waters “non-pristine” are phosphates, and the New Bogeyman: nitrates. So yes, farming runoff.
Then again, as long as that stuff isn’t present in amounts that turn running water into algal soup, Mother Nature actually likes that free lunch and Stuff grows and breeds like mad in the enriched water.
Which is of course what the eco-nutters don’t want. They want the waters as starved of nutrients as their simian brains can imagine. And try to enforce their insane “zero presence” notions through whichever means possible.
As for the 21st Baron… He’s got a point in letting his lands grow wild. The area he owns is large enough to have a local effect and act as a “seeder” patch for the area.
It’s his land, his life, and as Old Nobility you’re supposed to be eccentric to an extent.
Dear God that opening sentence needed an Oxford comma.
The second photo looks like ragwort. Maybe he uses it as an anti-horse defence.
The same amount of pollution will look much worse in a small shallow lake than a big deep one.
It says that he’s a vegan. So why is he wearing a leather jacket in the photo?
dearieme – indeed. That’s ragwort and the re-wilded fields around here are full of the stuff. At present whenever the rain stops and the wind picks up, there’s a blizzard of thistledown around Bison Villas. The banks of nettles struggle to keep up but the brambles are doing well.
Synth leather, Tom. They specifically point it out in the article.
There’s a neverending source of amusement to be had by showing Vegans that their ideology and lifestyle is only possible because of the things they abhor: oil-based large scale chemical industry, large-scale crop monoculture, and large-scale modern supply chains.