"Ecological desert" is more sensationalist than technical. I think they meant "wasteland".<p>That more or less describes many areas depleted by industrial agriculture. There are also many people working on restoring and regenerating ecologies all around the world, some of it restoring from eroded bedrock and compacted dirt.<p>Not to diminish this person's work, my point is this isn't just an Irish problem, and the solutions are known.