ANOTHER LIFE: Last month blight weather blurred the hillside. The wet leaves of the potatoes had more the sheen of a cold sweat than of rain, and only their powdery tips reassured me that the spray stuff really does what it says on the tin, writes Michael Viney.
There must be far less of the Phytophthora fungus to haunt the western seaboard than there used to be. It lives from year to year in little potatoes left behind in the ground over winter, then spreads from the next season's "volunteer" plants in floating fungal spores. Now that so many small, part-time farmers look to the supermarket for their spuds, ridges that once supplied whole families have been raked flat, or left to grass over like the enduring corrugations of the Famine.
It rarely arrived before the end of June, but an increase in "early blight" was predicted with global warming. Greater hazards, it seems, could end commercial potato-growing, at least in the drier eastern counties.
Research in UCD's Faculty of Agriculture suggests that summer droughts in Leinster could check the development of maincrop potatoes, without costly irrigation and water storage. This could make native-grown potatoes even more uncompetitive with imports - never mind the likelihood of flooded fields at autumn harvest-time.
In the coming climate of extremes, an alternation of winter downpours and summer drought offer new, disquieting readings for the landscape. Our water comes from the hill-stream that begins in a small bog couched beneath the ridge. The freedom to hose the garden crops with unending gallons that were headed, anyway, for the sea has been a casual privilege. There have been summer droughts - 10 days or so without rain - when the stream has dwindled to a silver thread, but always its peaty basin on the hill has been replenished just in time.
Surely, with the 25 per cent increase in rain now forecast for western winters, the bogs will store enough to feed all the plastic pipes that now snake down the hillsides? With a living, mossy skin, the peat soaks up water like a sponge - but not, perhaps, when its surface is baked hard by drought (like a peat-potted houseplant left unwatered too long). From the first talk of climate change, the decay of Ireland's peatlands has seemed the saddest certainty.
But nature disdains straight lines to any conclusion (think of last year's sodden summer and this year's Arcadian March). John Sweeney, Maynooth's climate expert, recently offered the arrival of eight new breeding birds as a measure of the island's warming, only to be challenged by ornithologists. The blackcap and whitethroat, for example, have been breeding here for a century, and few on his list could be called southern birds.
The Mediterranean gull and little egret are the really notable exceptions, and the significance of their arrival is complicated by the behaviour of two northern species, the goosander and great skua, a few pairs of which have come south to breed in Ireland. But, as ornithologist Paul Hillis has pointed out, the loss of the red-necked phalarope, an Arctic bird, from its last breeding outpost on the Mullet peninsula, and of breeding golden plovers anywhere south of Co Galway, are both pointers to climate change.
Nothing to do with global warming, but still hugely exciting for the list-making twitchers of these islands, has been the arrival in a west Cork garden, overlooking Dursey Sound at the end of the Beara Peninsula, of a sparrow with bold black and white stripes on its head. The white-crowned sparrow is American (and thus, of course, jumbo-sized, at seven inches), and while wandering a few times to Britain, this is a first for Ireland.
Some 20 carloads of British twitchers and as many more Irish crowded to Penny and David Durell's garden. They had excellent views of the sparrow at the bird feeders and shared theories on the loss of its tail. A tempting conjecture was that it had hitched a lift on a vessel and fallen foul of the ship's cat.
More serious perspectives on nature and its fate are the concern of a part-time MA course on ecology and religion beginning in September and hosted by the Columban Missionaries at Dalgan Park, Navan, Co Meath, in association with the University of Wales, Lampeter. It is the inspiration of Fr Sean MacDonagh, who has spent decades urging his church towards what the Pope has called an "ecological conversion". Fr McDonagh will take global warming as one of his themes, along with the threats to water, land and biodiversity. Other modules range widely, from John Feehan on science and religion, to Richard Douthwaite on ecology and economics, and Gail Grossman-Freyne on ecofeminism. Inquiries to imuinst@eircom.net.