Nature changing to the human touch

Another Life:The climate report's final notice to the world arrived on the winter's best day: sun aglow in the orange willow, a slow line of surf unfurling at the edge of the sea. At low tide, it curled around the prow of the old wreck, a gaunt, black timber jutting up from the sand in a final stiff finger to the future. How long before it, too, vanishes, even at the lowest spring ebb?

We have an old map of this corner of coast, from 1838 - roughly, I suspect, when the old boat was wrecked. Where the long dunes are now, and the acres of flat, green machair behind them, was a mere stump of sandhills.

The sea swept in past it to fill two deep inlets where brackish lagoons shine today.

This is, as geographers say, a "dynamic" coast, and knowing something of its past paves the way for the coming reinstatements of tideline and saltmarsh. Even in the past decade, renewed erosion has bitten deep into the rim of the strand, revealing ancient terraces of peat beneath the sandy grass.

It is a lot harder to live with what is unprecedented in the human experience of the world: the end of the autonomy of nature. Whether credited to a creationist God or a clockwork Gaia, its very supremacy and stability gave a framework to our lives; we were free to have it surprise us with its beauty. Now, our responses to nature become conditional, forensic, fatally knowing.

On the day of the climate report, for example, I found the first flash of gold under the hedge: a clump of lesser celandines in flower. There have been earlier ones: my occasional Diary of Things Seen noted some on January 25th, 1989. "Fuchsia is breaking into leaf," it went on, "and, down at the ford, the yellow iris shows pale green spears nine or ten inches long."

All that was written with innocent delight: a pleased anticipation of spring of the sort that might have inspired a poem or painting at any time since art began. How can we engage in either now, when the onset of spring, summer, autumn, winter, has passed out of nature's control and into our own incompetence? Gaia might have been unpredictable - but within historic rhythms and limits.

Already, in 1989, the scientific consensus on climate change was coming together. The first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment was published in 1990; the first report on implications for Ireland, with Brendan McWilliams as editor, in 1992. In early references here, I suggested it might be interesting to make a note of ensuing phenological changes - first primrose, frogspawn, peacock butterfly, chiffchaff, and so on. Global warming might enrich our nature-watching and even help science, after a fashion.

As I write, the twitchers' online bulletin, the Irish Birds Network, records some incidental sightings: a bat flying at midday beside Dublin's Iveagh Gardens; another on Cape Clear; a lesser tortoiseshell sunning itself on a garden path in Cork, a bumble-bee in Cobh. These sightings follow a clutch of January red admirals in Dublin and Limerick and even a hummingbird hawkmoth on Cork's Great Island. Primroses all winter, daffodils blooming weeks early - it's all happening.

"Is this unusual?" has been a regular gambit of letters to Eye on Nature, but there is no "usual" any more. Just to engage with the question was once to visit nature on her own terms, to make sense of her teasing exceptions. Now, the first thought comes unbidden: has this something to do with climate change?

As natural events and seasons become tainted by human pathology, the very act of "celebrating" nature with some hope to conserve it can seem increasingly a sham. But that, I suppose, is a pessimist talking, even a misanthropist. It must be wrong to wonder if our optimism could just be nothing more than mere cunning on the part of the ruthless human gene.

Perhaps, after all, we can put the brakes on global warming, short of setting millions moving, drowning and starving others at the margins, and culling half of nature's remaining species. It will not be, I suspect, by the wilder technological fixes (dusting the ocean with iron to fertilise the algae; spraying sulphur into the atmosphere to hold back the sun). But nuclear power: perhaps, if we absolutely must.

Meanwhile, this column, like most of the world's common discourse, will take it one day at a time, distracted and sustained by this bit of beauty, and that curious revelation.

Perhaps, then, when the first Spanish bee-eater lands on the lawn, I shall enjoy its gorgeous plumage without wondering if they've had to stop watering the gardens of Alhambra.