Small victories distract from the apocalypse

Another Life: It's a little late to be patching up earth's environment, but trusting for the best is one of the happier parts of being human.

Besides, "restoration ecology", the new science of repair, gives us something to do while we're waiting. Clean the rivers, save the bees, put heather back on eroding hills and maybe Gaia will let us off the ultimate apocalypse.

The new coinage is matched by a fresh line of argument for nature conservation: that by putting a cash value on the benefits provided by natural ecosystems, governments can be persuaded to take better care of them. The recent European Conference on Ecological Restoration, held in Germany, called for massive and urgent investment in "the restoration of natural capital".

Presented in such economic terms, wild nature can indeed take on a new perspective, framed to impress the powerful in market-based societies. One much-quoted example has been the investment by New York city in conserving a natural watershed in the Catskills, which filters its water more cheaply and effectively than a filtration plant would do. In South Africa, clearing plantations of thirsty, alien trees and restoring native scrub is improving vital national water supplies.

Having used up, and mostly squandered, the earth's natural capital - such as oil, native forests and freshwater aquifers - the value of "ecosystem services" to the human race becomes easier to argue, as climate change begins to educate us about Gaia's ecological machinery. But in the longer term (if we have one) the local commodification of nature is a shallow and risky strategy.

Giving ecosystem services a value in the nation's capital accounts may secure protection for more obviously "beneficial" habitats and species, but it can also become a means test for any kind of nature conservation. The question of what nature is "good for" still runs deep in Irish thinking, with tourist revenue the most immediate - often meretricious - measure of worth. The intrinsic value of nature, its "right" to exist, and its non-material benefits to humanity have been more difficult to argue.

The European approach to conservation is science-based, almost crudely mathematical and ecologically precautionary. Biodiversity is good and necessary for stable natural ecosystems and what is rare must be protected.

There are still some notable gaps - neglect of insects, for example - but as a policy discipline the EU conservation directives are succeeding, and without them one shudders to think of the fate of nature in Ireland.

They have also created, over just a few decades, a virtually new profession in science - that of ecological consultancy. After a lean beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the demand for environmental impact studies in planning and for basic field research has blossomed with the pace of development. With the growth of the profession has come a need for firmer standards in scientific competence and integrity.

Next week's first conference of the Irish section of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management thus marks a professional coming of age. The section brings Irish ecologists, from the North and the South, within a well-established British-based but international body with strict standards of professional and scientific ethics - and a distance from Irish domestic pressures, which may be no harm. Nature in these islands has its own cross-Border affiliations, and a united front for ecologists makes good sense.

As an overview of Irish progress in restoration ecology, the conference contributions are encouraging.

Now that ecological management plans are at last in place for the shamefully overgrazed mountain and coastal commonages of the west, new compensation payments are offered by the National Parks and Wildlife Service to farmers not already in the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. The hills should soon be greening with something better than mat grass.

Ireland's salmon and trout rivers, often scoured by brutal drainage schemes and denuded of bank vegetation and insect life, are being restored to their natural flows and ecosystems. New riverside woodlands should help them, as our last fragments of native woodlands are restored and extended with the help of State grants.

Wetlands now have their champions, as in BirdWatch Ireland's restoration of the Murrough fen in Co Wicklow and the construction of wetlands for waste-water treatment in Munster and elsewhere. Even the disruption of landscape by new highways has brought opportunities for creating wayside wetlands, meadows and woodlands, with full NRA commitment and pilot examples already on view in Co Kerry. The same ecological guidelines are inspiring the landscaping of new industry.

Ireland's ecologists are right to celebrate the work in progress on this island. The global environmental impact assessment for the human race is, alas, still too upsetting for the client.