Another Life Michael VineyLast week's downpours brought a surge of growth across the garden, so that vegetables and weeds are all fighting for space and scarcely a hand's breadth of bare earth remains. Thinning out the jostling carrots, I remembered being taught that all the people in the world could stand, shoulder to shoulder, on the Isle of Wight - but I dare say this may have been revised.
There's a devious and militant strain in Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene that seems to implant in even the most thoughtful of people an instinctive denial of global overpopulation, the planet's ecological (and now atmospheric) tragedy. It bridles at any idea that the planet would be better off with, say, 2 billion people (still twice the number at the start of the Industrial Revolution) than the 6.3 billion we have now or the 9 billion promised by the middle of the century.
It twists and turns to argue that the trends are now in reverse, or at least under control. Liberate and educate women, cure poverty, reduce child mortality - the figures for the "less developed world" will come down: we can cope in the interim through GM crops and cloned livestock, better environmental controls and more alluring contraception for men. Europe, meanwhile, with a falling and ageing population, is urged to offer free IVF to childless people, so that more young workers can pay for more old people to be nursed towards their century (open-ended lives, at vast cost to society, are seen both as burden and crowning human achievement, this often by the same people).
To get too excited about all this is to risk being labelled misanthropist, racist, eco-fascist - or, in the eyes of the godly, one sadly lacking in trust. To see famine, warfare, Aids and, imminently, bird flu, as natural curbs on numbers of an inordinately mobile and demanding species is to have a piece of ice for a heart.
How excited to get can relate to the niceties of ecological ethics, the fairly new discipline of thought about human relationships with the rest of nature. Even that interpolation - "the rest of" - suggests a fair degree of change. More people are now willing to see themselves as numbered with the totality of nature's species. From there, much depends on how superior they feel towards the rest of Gaia's teeming multitudes and ecosystems.
The long history of ethics dealt mainly with human values. It can be argued, for example, that "rights" are a human idea, with meaning only in a human context: how can animals have rights? The inherent value of other species and ecosystems has also been difficult to swallow: who awards value, if not humans? Even today, the conservation of rain forest or ocean is seen largely for anthropocentric - human-centred - reasons of future human use and benefit.
As an opposite position, "ecocentrism" can take on emotional extremes that let populist politicians talk scornfully about tree-huggers and snail-fanciers. But it is still essential to weighing up our place in the natural world, to conserving other species and what remains of wilderness.
To help in sorting out one's green ideas, I would warmly recommend a new book by Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics (£14.99 from www.polity.co.uk). If this is a text book (and some of it is irreducibly hard going) I still have to envy Curry's students at the Sophia Centre in Bath Spa University.
As he sum its up, humanity has already taken over at least a quarter of the planet's natural energy, two thirds of its habitable land-surface and half of its fresh run-off water. He uses the arguments on population control as his case study to demonstrate the spectrum of green ethical conviction.
The lighter shades of green have to do with "sustainable" human benefit and moral or religious obligations of "stewardship" towards nature. The darker greens are moved by an ecocentric ethic - sometimes, a near-animistic spirituality - in which people must learn to live with earth (or Gaia) on the earth's terms.
As Ireland's swelling population, native and migrant, begins to flood out across the plains, the recent "Ecopolis" issue of New Scientist (June 17th) makes implicit comment on our spatial strategies. Noting that next year, for the first time in history, more people will live in cities than in the country, Fred Pearce describes a new form of megacity which grows much of its food within its own boundaries, having saved the space now given to car use for urban farming.
His model is Shanghai, where a new island suburb of half a million people, Dongtan, "will be a zero-pollution, largely car-free, renewable-energy powered, sewage-recycling, green-fringed utopia" with a vastly reduced ecological footprint. In the first foreign development deal in the development, worth €1.2 billion, Dublin's Treasury Holdings will create a golf course, equestrian centre and marina in place of a small fishing port.
Eye on Nature
I saw three or four tent-like structures of dense web which caterpillars had made over the tips of Rosa rugosa.
Heather Dunwoody, Blackrock, Co Dublin
They were the caterpillars of the small, brick-coloured lackey moth, which hatch out in spring, spin webs over the foliage of their foodplant (Rosaceae family), and rely on their warning colours for defence.
I came across a worm-like creature squirming in the dirt. It was 9-10cm long and less than half a millimetre in diameter, dark green in colour but pale ochre at the front.
Timon Baudry, Ballymote, Co Sligo
It was probably Mermis nigrescens, one of the larger nematodes. Its eggs parasitise grasshoppers, then pupate in the ground and emerge as this worm.
The cuckoo was still singing here on June 14th. Is this normal?
Eoghan O'Loingsigh, Castlegregory, Co Kerry
The male ceases calling later in June.