Another Life:For anyone living within sound of the waves, the south coast trawler tragedies struck a deep vein of sympathy. On the stormy days that followed, the grey-green reaches of the sea and its furling breakers became forbiddingly evocative of indifferent power and doom. The all-too-vivid, hands-on detail of local disaster spoke volumes for lives spent in traditional relations with the sea, writes Michael Viney.
In looking for support and livelihood, people, too, claim a share in the ocean. How much of a share is the question, and one that flickers through the current Green Paper of the EU Commission, Towards a Maritime Policy for the Union - A European Vision for the Oceans and Seas (see www.ec.europa.eu/maritimeaffairs/policy_en.html).
The Green Paper is open for submissions until June, and was considered by an international conference of marine interests in Galway in November, organised by CoastNet and hosted by the Marine Institute. Speculating on the future, it found a fundamental question ahead: will public and politicians press for sustainable development, or for environmental protection? Will governments be able to maximise new opportunities - "carefully managed" needless to say - or will strict EU regulations, framed to protect the ocean's ecosystems, get in the way of jobs and commerce? The "ecosystem approach" is the new mantra of human exploitation of the ocean. It is not really new - a century ago, Irish fisheries scientists were urging the study, not just of the fish that people eat, but of the whole ocean ecosystem in which they live. But all kinds of marine interests are now becoming nervous at the implications. At the Galway conference, many delegates felt that human society should stake a claim as part of the ecosystem.
The variety of society's claims on the ocean are already huge, quite apart from food supply. Shipping, ports, marine tourism, coastal living, oil and gas, offshore wind energy - the list goes on. Among dozens of submissions to the EU Commission on the Green Paper, from protests by Greenpeace about bottom trawling to the worries of the European Coalition for Silent Oceans, the concerns of the European Dredging Association were almost touchingly broad. It wants the establishment of "a European Centre of Excellence for the knowledge of the sea and the oceans with, as focal themes, marine resources, climate change effects, dynamics of coastal zones, impact of infrastructure development, the relationship between development and ecology over longer periods".
Another submission offered help from Hermes, the big group of European scientists (some Irish among them) involved in Hotspot Ecosystems Research at the Margin of European Seas. The "hotspots" notably include the newly-found deep-water coral reefs west of Ireland, vulnerable to intrusion by fisheries, oil-and-gas prospecting, mineral extraction and the hunt for species useful to the drugs industry. Hermes says it is working on ways to use such offshore resources without doing too much damage, and developing tools to judge ecosystems for monetary and other values.
Unlike exploiting natural resources on land, each new step in marine development depends a great deal on the initiative and expertise of marine scientists: more than ever before, they mediate intrusion on the sea. This puts a big burden of eco-ethics on one small group of people.
The limits to ocean exploitation, however, and the line between need and greed, will be fixed by the wider community, with all its competing interests. Some will see the ocean as the Earth's last expanse of relatively intact wilderness, to be defended at all costs from human degradation. For others, it offers new adventures and resources on which to practice human ingenuity.
Faced with the likely stagnation of wild fisheries, for example, the Marine Insititute has been exploring prospects in biotechnology. A recent study zeroed in on marine "biodiscovery", matched to the constant need for new drugs. The deep coral reefs and carbonate mounds discovered on Ireland's continental slope present a whole range of new or specially-adapted organisms that could be the source of pharmaceutical compounds.
Such a distinctive national asset underlines how enormously varied are the ecosystems - and the politics - of maritime activities between the Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic, Black Sea and Mediterranean, all of which now fall within EU coastal waters. Ecosystem-based management will need regional planning, which is one reason why our Marine Institute is part of a project (called Mesh) producing maps of seabed habitats for north-west Europe.
The EU Green Paper aspires to a "holistic" approach to ocean - a task in which it would be easy to drown. But at least, for the first time in our maritime history, Ireland seems equipped to make some sensible and expert contributions.
Eye On Nature
I saw a bat busy in my garden at 12.50pm searching for food. The temperature was 9 degrees.
Anne O'Neill, Ballyhooly, Co Cork
Hungry bats sometimes emerge from winter hibernation in the daytime if the weather is mild.
I observed a red admiral butterfly on January 13th, tossed about by the wind.
David O'Brien, Rathfarnham, Dublin 6
It is thought that red admirals now occasionally overwinter here, hiding like tortoiseshells in crevices. It must have been lured out by the mild weather.
On a hill in mid-Wales I came across about 12 hazelnut-sized blobs of a clear jelly-like substance on the path.
Bill Fleming, Powys, Wales
They were the remains of frogspawn regurgitated by a predator, such as a fox or an otter, that ate a gravid, female frog.
My hand-fed robin has sadly gone to bird heaven, but has left an offspring who comes to hand very readily. He has a rival, however, a coal tit who pecks at each of my fingers before picking up food and flying off.
Louis Mullen, Riverstown, Co Louth