To solve our energy crisis, look to the sea

ANOTHER LIFE:ON OUR Atlantic hillside, the long but brilliant end to winter has offered great days for work outside: frosty but invigorating –­ midgeless, above all. No point in sowing seeds before the soil has warmed; instead, a run of guilt-free days for tackling those corners where nature has gone too far.

The stream that rattles down from the bog ducks under the road through a stone-built arch and cuts off a corner of our acre on its journey to the sea. When we knew it first, the banks of its sheltered hollow were open and grassy, an arena for early nurturing of goats, geese, ducks, orphan lambs and bees.

These ventures gradually met their end for reasons of space, climate, predators, belligerent bees, indisciplined ducks, squeamishness, final admissions of folly and so on. The Hollow fell quiet, except for the rumbling floods by which the stream wore ever more deeply between its banks of ancient sand, biting down through saffron-coloured clay.

Bushes of Fuchsia magellanica, crept out from their boundary hedges, pretending to stumble and fall in the wind and springing up again. When we took the bush-saw to them, any branches left lying down pushed out roots into the damp, sandy soil. Before we knew it we were 70-something, let’s say, and The Hollow was crowded with fuchsia, some of it 3m tall. The stream lost most of its voice, completely screened by overarching branches even in winter. We missed the bridge, its curling ferns and craftsman’s keystone, the frothing cascade into the pool.

My current reclamation was encouraged by “intermediate” technology – ratcheted loppers (macho, shiny things that amputate thick but sappy branches of fuchsia click by click) and an electric shredder that munches the light stuff, not worth drying for the stove, into mulch for paths or composting. A stout rope steadied my scrambling up and down the bank and eventually, with many rests upon a rock (bird-chatter, babbling water, gleam of snowy mountain) the vista was restored.

Life beside a hill-stream brings home the periodic power of rainfall: our ravine is one of many carved into a glaciated hillside over countless thousands of years. But, as a harnessed energy source, like the wind, it cannot be relied upon, whereas the sea, as the nation is discovering, is always there.

“Spirit of Ireland”, the impressive volunteer think-tank for energy independence, aims to find empty west-coast valleys to dam and flood with seawater – pumped storage for reserve hydropower linked to adjoining wind-farms. In a similar “Turlough Hill” approach, the Organic Power company would use surplus wind-power to pump seawater up to reservoirs on Glinsk Mountain, above the cliffs of North Mayo. This will feed generating turbines, when needed, as it pours back down a shaft to the ocean.

In the crisis over climate change and energy, attention comes back to nature – even to the rocks the island is made of, and the seabed all around it. There is news of Ireland’s first geothermal energy project, using the heat in deep rock strata hugging the mantle of the Earth. It will bore down to layers four kilometres deep under Newcastle, Co Dublin, and harness their heat, through a water network, to warm half the city.

The depths of rock beneath Ireland and its seas, still largely unexplored, hold many kinds of promise. This week has seen a major Dublin conference on carbon capture and storage. CCS, as we must learn to call the new technology, looks to inject polluting CO2 from coal-fired power stations and other industry into deep rock structures and aquifers, such as the emptying Kinsale gas field off the south coast and sandstone basins under the Irish Sea, plugging the holes for safe and permanent “sequestration”.

On the mainland, there may be still minerals to find (Tara Mines supplies Europe with almost two-thirds of its zinc) but the urgency of unplumbed depths, especially of the island’s limestone basement, lies more with what happens to our groundwater, as pollutants drain down and climate change brings droughts, floods and rising sea levels to threaten our usable supplies.

All this is has to do with geoscience –­the mix of geography, geology, geophysics, geochemistry, bathymetry, remote sensing and other technologies – that has found its identity in the newer problems of human life on Earth. In Ireland, it is promoted through the close-knit energies of the Geological Surveys, north and south, the Royal Irish Academy, and others.

Sitting on my rock, communing with my stream, I like to think this is all part of getting back to basics –­ if Gaia wíll give us the time.

EYE ON NATURE

Recently I saw a buzzard sitting on a fence on the Charlestown bypass. It dwarfed the crow that hopped around it. Great to see this lovely bird in east Mayo.

Vincent Coleman, Ballina, Co Mayo

Buzzards have moved southwards from the north over several years, mainly seen to the midlands and east.

In this part of central Dublin a Bengal cat has taken up residence and does drastic damage to birds and other creatures. Is it an ordinary domestic animal?

Hilary Richardson, Wellington Road, Dublin

The Bengal cat is a hybrid, crossed between a domestic cat and an Asian leopard cat (which is a wild cat). They are safe to keep as household pets if they are three generations away from the original cross. Your local Bengal cat may be kept by someone in the neighbourhood and it is let out to hunt. Most countries require a licence to keep this cat. There are several breeders in this country.

There has been a brambling feeding on a nut feeder in my garden during February. Do they often use a nut feeder?

John Meade, Rochestown, Cork

They are uncommon winter visitors to this country, and are driven here by severe weather. Like chaffinches, they frequent feeders.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Include a postal address