Another Life: From the smell of hot lead to the groves of virtual reality

There are moments in the Vineys’ embrace of cottage electronics when fear of the wilful robot can become very real. One morning last month the list of incoming emails was not just the usual mix of readers’ encounters with nature, science reports and solicitations from luxury-yacht salesmen, wedding-photograph retouchers and Chinese light-bulb manufacturers but also an unremitting flood of emails we had deleted years before.

All that day, and the next, any tentative approach to the world beyond the hill released a new gush of ancient deletions, eventually numbering many thousands.

The flood was finally halted by our long-serving server, whose electronic cellar was, it seemed, still deeply awash with the Vineys’ detritus. The cause, in so far as I could follow it, involved some distant mismatch of virtual clocks and my failure, years ago, to click on something for which I had never thought to express a preference. The hiatus left me discomfited, uneasy with new and rudderless interstices in the day.

A night or two later my bedtime radio listening was a sober report on the progress of virtual reality (or VR as we’ll be saying , like IT). It will, apparently, soon have quite as much impact on the human world as computers and mobile phones. Some examples were telling: trainee surgeons joining the teams at virtual operating tables, learner drivers thrust into the thick of city rush hours, and so on.

I hope to be well gone by the time you stop reading columns about nature and choose an app to take you, via your headpiece, into a walk-in, look-around countryside with fluttering butterflies and birdsong, or jungles with snakes, smiling tigers and all.

When I started in newspapers, at 16, the mainstay of print technology was the Linotype machine. These clattered away in a basement acrid with molten lead, as burly men frowning at keyboards turned written words (sometimes handwritten, rushed from a courtroom) into moulded and cooling lines of type.

That, as it happened, was at the time – 1950 – that many scientists are saying should be taken as the start of the Anthropocene, the epoch in geological history in which the impact of human activity took over from the forces of nature. It has brought indelible processes of change to the whole of the planet, its atmosphere and oceans.

If one dug deeply enough beneath the strand at Thallabawn one would come, I suppose, to the bottom of the stratum of waste plastic washed ashore since the 1950s, among it early chunks of Tupperware and shreds of the first polyethylene bags. But, as a writer in the science journal Nature has insisted, "The new geological epoch does not concern soils, the landscape or the environment, except inasmuch as they are changed as part of a massive shock to the functioning of Earth as a whole" (at iti.ms/2bFIoHq).

It can feel quite odd, at 83, to have lived through the first chapter of such a dramatic turn in human evolution, without much immediate prospect of knowing how it all turns out. Much of it can happen without me, thank you (enormous wildfires, inundations, the flight of climate refugees, global panic, riot and commotion). But the progressive digitisation of human life – indeed, perhaps, of its final generations – suggests at least a psychic transformation of the species. Many if not most of the young are already of a different humankind, their thoughts and imaginations grafted to electronic data and images on Pokémon-haunted screens.

Not, of course, that the Vineys have exactly shunned technology. Our double-glazed windows shut out the winds, the ocean, the birds. Broadband gorges our appetite for deeper knowledge – too much of it, probably, filtered through chilly laboratory lenses.

Digital cameras in mobile phones and pads have sent our readers zooming after flowers, insects, strange things on the beach, emailing us photographs that can make us gasp with pleasure or surprise. This new joy in wildlife discovery lies in capturing the moment, sharing and revisiting it. It must open up, even digitally, a stronger sense of the human place in Earth’s web of life.

The green counterculture is also alive and well, its ecovillages and city allotments imbued with a youthful vigour once the province of subversive politics. My drawing, if you were wondering, is of a beanstalk twining up the Spire of Dublin’s O’Connell Street – a little essay in virtual reality.

So we’re not quite at the end of nature, as Bill McKibben mourned in 1989, even if the raindrops are now, unmistakably, a different size. So, for that matter, is most of everything that this summer has grown on our acre – gilded parasols of fennel as tall as bamboos, trees adding a metre or more in their reach for the sky.

It may be the carbon dioxide or just another summer’s rain. But it is, like, awesome.

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks