Nature in a rage

The townland of Thallabawn is smaller than it used to be, if land rather than sand is meant to be its substance. Egged on by January's first full moon, the storm-driven tide surged up into the empty rabbit burrows and tore out a huge new strip from the seaward edge of the fields. It found fences thatched with marram-straw blown from the dunes, wrenched them out of their sockets and swept them in across the grass. It made new lagoons on the land and fringed them with seaweed and fishing-floats.

Walking the ragged hem of the shore and making sense of its new topography, it is easy to get a fit of pre-millennial apocalyptics. We have seen nature in a rage. We are breaking her ecosystem laws, and every other species which does that gets clobbered in the end. Such observations can seem somewhat irrelevant in Ireland's economic euphoria. For most people in the warm and wasteful glow of our cities, the Christmas storms were just a distant rushing in the treetops. Here beside the tumbling surf, the gouged-out dunes, the ecological future of our species takes on a more pressing interest.

I am torn two ways in deciding how to think about it. My instincts often chime with the "dark brown" dialectic of people like Gillies MacBain, organic farmer and veteran eco-philosopher, forging his maxims in an ancient tower in Tipperary. Dark brown is the colour of soil and tree-trunks; also of compost and human waste.

"I am not a green," he tells avid green audiences, such as the conference on the future of the Irish environmental movement held in UCG last year. "I am not nature's caretaker. Green thinking says that unless we make greater effort, and quickly, humankind will upset the balance of nature. But the dark brown understands that nature is responsive, ruthless and resourceful. Nature is always in balance."

For MacBain, even the word "environment" is a bureaucratic way of distancing people from nature, rather than living as part of it. In his vision of a stable, "dark brown" community, mechanical systems would be replaced by living systems or applications of them, all to be recycled through the soil. All architecture would be grown, all means of transport would be bred, all artefacts would be biodegradable. Waste would be the one inexhaustible resource.

How eccentric and uncomfortable it can sound - rather like a blueprint for post-apocalyptic survival. Surely science will rescue us from such dire necessities?

Yet many leading ecologists are beginning to echo the same ideas. Go to www.eeiu.org and you arrive at the Website of the rapidly-growing Eco-Ethics International Union (EEIU), based in Germany and the Ukraine. It is oddly stirring to see so many of its scientific backers in institutes and universities of the former USSR, in places such as Kiev, Tbilisi, Moscow, Sevastopol.

The Earth's worst zone of ecological devastation could thus become a crucible for ethical renewal in science. The reach of the 30-odd "fellows" of the EEIU already spans the globe and includes Edward O. Wilson, Harvard's great champion of bio-diversity, which is certainly good enough for me.

Eco-ethics takes a different slant on the world from the moral thinking we are used to. Rather than focus simply on what is good for human society - the anthropocentric view - it uses ecological research to draw up a code of ethics that consider the welfare of all forms of life and the environment as well.

Our species was born, after all, under ecosystem laws and we still carry the ecosystem programme in our cells. But we have become runaways and lawbreakers, experts in bending nature's rules and replacing the networks of co-existence with patterns of dominance. Even the "environmental protection" we profess as an objective is chiefly protection for ourselves - nature's worst enemy. "We will be punished severely," says the EEIU, "unless we establish a new balance between our modern ways and those of our ecosystem past - unless we re-establish compatibility between nature's metabolic patterns and those of the human population. This is the first thesis of eco-ethics."

When these eco-ethics are applied to economics, things get even dark-browner. We are used to taking natural resources and turning them into materials that are more or less foreign to nature. In the process we use a lot of energy and produce a lot of waste; the products, too, become trash in the end, little of it biodegradable.

Natural ecosystems, they point out, work instead to cycles. They transform old resources into new ones in a network of life-supporting processes, using naturally-available energy. Our industrial models must try to do the same (impossible, says MacBain: sustainable mechanical systems are a wild goose chase).

But adopting eco-ethics means more than recycling Christmas trees or wine-bottles, or testing the plans for every new Irish industry for its ecological impact. In an echo of Arne Naess's highly-radical "deep ecology", the EEIU wants the size of populations, and their use of energy and natural resources, reduced to the carrying capacities of the ecosystems in which they live. And this, of course, "must be handled primarily by governmental and intergovernmental bodies". It needs "time and political will".

Indeed it does. It is my deplorable lack of faith in the human capacity for consensus that drives me back to the dark brown, seemingly stoical, scenario of Gillies MacBain. It keeps me crouched within my acre, planting things, and trying also to cultivate a calmness in the face of natural - and unnatural - storms. Yet people, and groups of people, do move on. I first learned about the EEIU at the New Year, in an approving description in an email list-server site managed by Dr Mark J. Costello, independent marine scientist and chairman of the Environmental Sciences Association of Ireland (ESAI). The ESAI is holding its annual "researchers' colloquium" on the last weekend in January at Johnstown Castle in Wexford. Perhaps, between that castle's tower and the one occupied by Gillies MacBain in Tipperary, some faltering Morse code may flicker to and fro.

The proceedings of last year's environmental conference at UCG have just been published and are available through Ronan Kennedy, EcoSoc, University College, Galway. The Environmental Sciences Association of Ireland's Website is at www. ecoserve.ie/sai/index.html