ANOTHER LIFE: Our last home in Dublin, just up the hill from the Dead Man's Inn in Palmerstown, was disarmingly bucolic. Crom Cottage looked out over the cornfields of the Mount Street Club Farm to the distant mountains. My first close-up of a corncrake was over our lavender hedge, and the glow of ripening wheat on summer evenings was a pleasure straight from Constable, writes Michael Viney.
The idyll ended with discovery of engineers' markers out in the fields, heading directly for our fence; all has now vanished under a ring road from Clondalkin, square miles of housing estates and the Liffey Valley Centre. News of yet another westward surge of concrete, around Lucan village, affirms the lost enchantment of living where and when we did.
The amoebic creep of the capital pushes the pastoral countryside even further away. But at least the planning and enhancement of nature's place in the city draws on a new appreciation, both of what nature needs from people and what people need from nature. A report just published by UCD's Environmental Institute makes an encouraging read.
Biodiversity in the City records the proceedings of an international conference held in Dublin last autumn. The "biodiversity" to be conjured or restored is essentially the mix of species familiar from woodland and meadow, not any special ecologists' brew. The kind of urban setting with the widest range of habitats and the maximum diversity of species could well be a "brownfield" stretch of dereliction full of undisturbed ruins, stagnant ponds, piles of rubble, clumps of scrub, drifts of flowering and seeding "weeds" and plenty of buddleia for butterflies.
This is clearly not an urban ideal, however justified in an occasional act of conservation (such a site downstream of London has been hailed as an ecological treasure-house). So there are limits to the kind of biodiversity really desired in the city: plenty of birds, bees and wildflowers, and a few of the more presentable mammals.
In past decades of the capital's sprawl, provision of new "green space" has usually meant just that - deserts of close-mown grass between blocks of housing, home to ants' nests and little more. Any progress towards more natural and species-rich vegetation has been made in the teeth of vandalism: snapped-off saplings and torn-up shrubs. Even natural enrichment of parks and riverside corridors of greenery is beset with worries about creating hideaways for drunks and addicts and cover for muggers and rapists.
In the report, a paper from UCD's Mammal Research Group says that while people like walking their dogs through woodlands with little ground vegetation, this isn't where foxes and badgers feel safe about making their dens and setts; we should create bushy, closed-off areas in all the bigger parks. But the problem of human low-life remains the biggest obstacle in taking city parks beyond the era of municipal geraniums and grass. As Trinity's Prof David Jeffrey says: "Management of nature in the city must intensify and extend beyond amenity horticulture. For example, the river valleys of the city can be enriched by careful habitat restoration, as safe and secure amenity areas."
Of all the conference papers, one that absorbs and even exhilarates, is an essay entitled Urban Nature and Human Nature by UCD's John Feehan. He propounds something called the Biophilia Hypothesis to explain the human hunger and need for natural landscape - more particularly, for much the kind of landscape in which human beings first evolved.
"The aesthetic which is reflected in parks and gardens," he argues, "unconsciously paints that first human world of paradise in East Africa . . . The landscapes of classical art, the landscapes in which the great myths and sagas unfold, are savannahs, forest edges, pastoral landscapes, which echo the same psychogenetic depths. The pleasure and peace even of highly formal parks and gardens can be traced back to these same roots."
"Biophilia" was coined by Harvard's Edward O. Wilson (The Diversity of Life) for "the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life". The Biophilia Hypothesis, as John Feehan explains it, goes beyond the pleasure we feel in parks, gardens, and urban landscape architecture, to the built fabric of the city itself. Echoes of natural rock-forms make us thrill to the lines of a cathedral or skyscraper, or draw us to enfolding ravines of alleyways (does this help the attraction of Temple Bar, crouched beneath the soaring cliffs of the Central Bank?).
Thus, Feehan suggests: "Allowing the heart of nature to throb in the fabric of the city is not only a biological or ecological issue; it also has a geological component that nurtures body and spirit in the same way." Biophilia: evolutionary ecology, with a strong dash of poetry and soul - where do I sign?