See that tree? Now say `hello'

Another year, another growth ring in the trees, in the ear-stones of fishes. When we're sawn down, or cut up, is there some similar calibration of human age to be found - notched into a rib, perhaps, like Ogham? You may have to be getting on a bit to mark the year by such a reflection, but cultivating some kind of oneness with nature seems a worthy resolution to urge upon the world.

Looking at those powerful people who turn up at summits on global warming, wincing through the few steps of a fresh air between limousine and conference lobby, I wonder what meaning climate has for them at all. How long is it since they were properly cold or wet?

In Ireland, weather does have a way of forcing itself on our attention, but still there are two ways of experiencing it, and the worse is certainly to shrink from the touch of rain as if it were deadly acid. Unfrown, lift your face out of your collar; if in a pedestrian precinct, there may be room for a Gene Kelly skip or two: the difference is all in the mind.

Then, begin to see trees. Winter is a good time for this, since they are not hiding in leaves that block out the sky or make it difficult to read street names. They stand around in their naked treehood, their woodiness, one quite different from another.

Do you know an ash from a sycamore, a beech from a lime? It does not matter greatly which is which, it is the seeing that counts: poise of branches, scribble of twigs, texture of bark, the wounds and scars of their lives. Where do the roots of the trees go? Think of them, stretching their toes under the hedgerow, the pavement. Pick a tree you pass each day: learn to see it all over, top to bottom; say hello, like Prince Charles.

Don't let the twitchers put you off birds: they see through a glass, if not darkly, then in a frenzy of discernment. This is not about eye-stripes, wing-bars, first-year plumages: it is more like Tony Soprano and the ducks, a revelation of liberty. Wrap up and find an estuary this weekend (the North Bull will do nicely) and watch the waders swirling round the sky, the flocks folding and unfolding. Feel stress lap away, like the tide through a salt marsh.

Appreciating nature does not require science as a first or even a fifth language. To reclaim the proper human sympathy with other species and their needs, the impulses of poetry and art speak much more directly for what we feel. Also humour and anthropomorphism, that deadly sin of science.

"The tonachan tra is like the miol crionna or the dreancaid mhara. He is always working at the ebbing tide, making small holes under the sand. He is no bigger than two inches in length, but very lively. He raises his hard pointy little head from time to time to look around and see how the labour is going. I haven't a clue why he works so hard. He doesn't live in his holes. Usually there are a huge crowd of them together, helping each other loyally and stoutly."

That cameo of the sand-hopper's life comes from the enchanting new translation of Seamas Mac an Iomaire's The Shores of Connemara, just published by Tir Eolas. In his introduction, marine botanist Cilian Roden quotes it as the kind of anthropomorphic nonsense that would drive the editor of a scientific journal into a frenzy, yet expressing the quite admirable "observation, warmth, passion and attachment" of Mac an Iomaire's values.

Roden goes on to recount a comparable glow of pleasure in the sand-hopper's behaviour on the part of several naturalists (to which I would add a vivid two-page account of the amphipod's labours in Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea), and to regret the total erasure of feeling and values from today's journals of marine science.

Anthropomorphism - the imputation of human motives and characteristics to other species - is clearly not always a helpful guide to understanding why they act as they do. When chimpanzees came back from their trips in rockets, grinning broadly, it was actually terror they were communicating.

The imposition of human sentiment on nature can be another kind of arrogance: anthropocentrism piled upon anthropomorphism. Some of the worst gush in nature writing came from pious human ecstasy, like this breathless bit from the Dublin University Magazine of May 1850:

"Yes, all nature, marsh and meadow, hill and hollow, land and sea and sky, forest monarchs and small, nodding blue-bells flowrets, beasts and feathered fowls and winged insects, the tiny myriads of creation, all hail the sabbath of the year and sing the matin of the dawn of summer. Let us then also . . ."

So we can do without that. But at the other extreme is the science in which, as Roden puts it, "the model on offer is the model of the feelingless universe" updated by an infinity of anonymous and fastidiously value-free authors. Science is admirable when one is being scientific, and ecology (the cool, post-modern mode of nature writers) fine for bringing home the holism of wildlife and its habitats. But in the immediate approach to nature what is wanted is honest human feeling and sensation. Last summer, I caught my first, brief glimpse of a brimstone butterfly, skipping over the hedge, and wasted half of it calling up the name in my mind instead of enjoying the flicker of brilliant lemon-yellow against the distant blue of the sea.

The name of an object, says Zen Buddhism, is like a pane of dirty glass between it and you. But Seamas Mac an Iomaire had no such problems: what he saw, he made part of his life. He described the cushion starfish as:

"round shape like a cartwheel without the wale or like the wheel of fortune that the trickster would have at a fair or a market or at the races. They vary in size from a shirt button to a parasol and they have every colour under the sun. They're a beautiful sight, indeed, on a clear, starry night when they glisten with the magic of luminescence. It would be worth your while to go out of your way to see such beauty."