(A Partnership Between Children Watch & The Bellamy Fund)
Baba Dioum, a Senegalese forestry engineer, authored one of the greatest insights into the importance of education for conservation during a 1968 speech in New Delhi on Agricultural Development. “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we’re taught.”
1 The Project:
It is interesting and significant that two charities working to meet the needs of young people and adults of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu have independently settled upon the ideas behind school/community democracies. They are seen as the routes to actions for improving well-being in both school and community. One of these NGOs is Children Watch is working with the Irula tribal villagers in the county of Kancheporum who have been expelled from their forest heartland in the Western Ghats..
In 2021 The Bellamy Fund supported a development officer to make an assessment of how school/democracies could be established in Irula communities to create a sense of place. The idea is to develop the educational theme of animal conservation, expressed as a combination of peer educators, animators, child protection units, parent classes and children parliaments. This led to the Bellamy Fund in 2023 supporting a day out at the local zoological gardens, organised in partnership with Children Watch, where mothers and their children could begin to bond through the life of animals to create a shared sense of place.
This project, called ToTheZoo, has been initiated with 150 Irula children, aged between 10 to 16, with their mothers. They are going for a day trip to the local Arignar Anna Zoological Park in batches of 60 children and mothers each with 3 volunteers representing Children Watch. AAZP is a zoological garden located in Vandalur, in the southwestern part of Chennai. Established in 1855, it was the first public zoo in India. It is situated at a distance of 60 kms from the main Kanchipuram tribal villages.
The park has 81 enclosures and more than 170 species of mammals, birds and reptiles. The dense vegetation of the park supports about 56 species of butterfly. The children with their mothers will spend their time at the zoo from 9.00 am to 5.00 pm, the working hours and opening hours of the Zoo. They will be guided by the Children Watch volunteers and Children Watch’s Chief Functionary to get the most from their visit, applying informal or free choice learning to understand the relationships between people and animals under the threat of extinction.
Free choice learning refers to the process of individuals pursuing their own interests and learning in an informal and self-directed manner. Zoos can provide an excellent environment for free choice out of school learning because they offer a wide range of educational opportunities and experiences for visitors of all ages. The Irula groups will be encouraged to share their experience with feedback when they return to their homes in the evening. In this way a visit to the zoo enables children to self learn about animals and effectively, foster cognitive development and promote empathy and compassion for animals. In addition the group visit provides opportunities for societal bonding between children and their mothers, between children and between families. This is a general starting point for building a bottom-up democratic learning community facing up to a world deprived of animals.
A Managing Trustee of Children Watch, with 3 volunteers, will facilitate, coordinate and implement the project activities of ToTheZoo. Volunteers, and the Managing Trustee will report on the project activities on a day to day basis and a report on the whole project will be produced by the Children Watch Team. There will be reviews to evaluate and compare the future of ToTheZoo to spark an interest in learning for its own sake. In this connection, an important learning target for ToTheZoo is to make a bilingual picture dictionary of animals.
2 The Hunter Gatherer Legacy
In 2018 Joseph Berger and Trevor Bristoe, published a paper entitled ‘Hunter-gatherer populations inform modern ecology’ which highlighted questions for understanding how humans have rapidly transitioned from a sparsely inhabited planet of hunter-gatherers to the densely populated agricultural and industrial lifestyles of today. Hunter-gatherers hunt animals in the wild. To hunt food successfully requires the application of knowledge about the human ecosystem from close day-to-day contact with wild animals as prey and the intergenerational learning of a local cultural ecology of animal behaviour. Often nomadic, this was the only way of life for humans until about 12,000 years ago when human lifestyles began to change. Groups formed permanent settlements and tended crops. Few of these tribal groups survive and those that do are well aware of the social, economic, environmental and political challenges that they are facing. They are seeking to address these challenges along with support organizations and researchers in an attempt to ensure their long-term security and well-being in biodiverse managed landscapes.
People who recently have had to define themselves as former indigenous hunter-gatherers are well placed to consider both past and present in their education systems. In this context, ‘being an animal’ is the unifying theme for successful resettlement in an industrial society, where they also have to focus on the non-hunter-gatherer societies with whom they are interacting. They must do both these things with pride in their tribal origins when they may be viewed as conservationists who coexisted closely with animals as did the whole of humanity. When humans coexist with animals, avoiding persecuting them in and around communities, they safeguard ecosystem health, agricultural stability, food security, and the creation of new sustainable economies (e.g., ecotourism). Ultimately, coexistence with animals is essential for human survival in a hot, hungry, and crowded world. Increasingly obvious are the impacts of education’s old negative attitudes towards animals as competitors. We can no longer separate humanity from nature, fail to consider long-term effects of our actions, and perpetuate conflict by indiscriminately killing wildlife. Inter-species harmony is required to sustain life on Earth in the Anthropocene, imparting what can be learned from living with animals, such as how to share and give fair treatment to others regarding compassion with moral values.
3 Societal importance of interacting with animals
Five principal categories of benefits that people may seek during a zoo visit are family togetherness, novelty seeking, enjoyment, education and escape.
Interacting with animals almost always has a positive influence on children because animals play a role in socializing and humanizing people. Many researchers and writers have noted the value of utilizing animals as mediators to help people who are not being reached by other methods. That is why everyone should have the opportunity to build their own personal body of knowledge to live sustainably. This means sharing Earth with other animals in a global network of protected sites governed by conservation management systems. The network is really a huge animal sanctuary, keeping those under threat from human activities safely until sometime in the future when they can be free. This is the essence of how modern zoos see themselves, being on a par with UNESCO biosphere reserves, oceanic fishing stocks and local nature sites. Visiting a local zoo from these perspectives can make visitors think that maybe there isn’t that much that makes us uniquely human. Maybe we need to pay more attention to what animals are doing, and try to view the world through their eyes. And, perhaps our ability to consider animal’s feelings and hope for the well-being of these other creatures is our best, and most uniquely human ability to bridge the gap between people and other animals.
Nowhere is this gap wider than in the Indian tribal Irula community of Tamil Nadu who for millenia, have had a close relationship with the forest of India’s Western Ghats. Due to forest conservation policies and environmental protection laws, these people are actual forest dwelling conservationists who have been displaced and forced to leave their homeland, becoming rootless migrants. The Irula tribe is one of the victims within this process of deforestation. As forest resources are destroyed, Irula are denied the rights to collect minor forest produce they had as as hunter gatherers, and their activities have shifted to unreliable unorganised bonded manual labour available in farming and allied activities outside the forest, such as quarrying stone, making bricks, milling rice, making charcoal, cutting wood for fuel and harvesting sugar cane. As the vast majority of Irula adults are now uneducated and illiterate it is essential for Irula children to be allowed the opportunities of a formal education. Irula parents as a community do not understand the values of education as it’s never been a part of their unsettled lives. Irula who want their children to attend school face many obstacles. The concerned authorities hesitate to provide the children with the Community Certificates to access free education boarding facilities and scholarships earmarked by law for all Scheduled Tribes in India. Therefore admission and enrolment in schools, attending examinations, moving to other levels of school and higher education is being prevented. A lack of money for uniforms, school equipment and text books as well as social discrimination within educational institutions remains a block to their participation.
Irula self-esteem and mutual respect is lost as individual and local powers develop and expand to leave no room for displaced tribal peoples. They follow tradition, keeping their few customs with them. However, there is a gradual erosion of these practices in today’s India making them even more isolated and the poorest of the poor. Hence, enrolling in schools, attending classes regularly, listening to teachers, interacting with classmates from other communities is alien to the Irula children. Under these circumstances, the Government encourages Tribes to put their children in residential schools where children will stay in hostels and attend free schools under the Scheme for Scheduled Tribes. Children in other low income castes have opportunities to travel to villages, towns, festivals and other important historical places, with hill walks, and amusement parks. In contrast the Irula are living out of touch with modernity.
Under these circumstances, ToTheZoo is working in partnership with Children Watch, a local Indian NGO, to sponsor a new kind of humanitarian aid where the local zoo becomes an education window on a wider societal development. For Irula children, an outing to the zoo will open their eyes to a new understanding of the world of animals which they can explore through guided self education to reconnect them with the workings of the Western Ghat forest, now under protection as one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.
4 A Democratic Learning Community
A democratic learning community is one in which each member has equal opportunity to influence change and contribute to the learning environment in a real and respected way, one in which learning is understood as something that every single person is capable of doing and has the right to access. In a democratic learning community the educator is no longer the omniscient teacher, telling students what to know and how to learn it. Teachers become facilitators of daily learning,who understand the many ways in which individuals learn and value the opinions/ideas/knowledge of each learner while providing them with ample space to share that knowledge with the rest of the community. Simply put, a democratic learning community is one in which learners are educators and educators are learners. Both contribute to the educational discourse of the learning space and both share power, never yielding it to those who want to control or manipulate learning or the space in which it occurs.
5 ZooPost
ToTheZoo is about involving communities in the educational process to provide real-world opportunities to make learning more memorable and impactful. ZooPost is about using a visit to a zoo to enhance ecological awareness using words and pictures to describe the natural world and our impact on it. It becomes a resource for students to observe, feel, enjoy and communicate to others. ZooPost uses the exchange of postcards, analog or digital, to reveal an attachment with the wider world, which can increase their motivation to learn. In a time where the world feels more divided than ever, connecting children with a global community of junior zoologists holds a whole wealth of positives for their education and wellbeing. It increases their motivation in school, giving them a sense of belonging. Students can see a reason as to why they’re learning what is being taught. Zoology is the easiest of the ‘ologies’ to democratise in this way.
6 The Welsh Connection
The ideas underpinning ToTheZoo, as an exercise in conservation education have emerged in Welsh schools where the Well-being of Future Generations Act requires public bodies in Wales to think about the long-term impact of their decisions, to work better with people, communities and each other, and to alleviate the persistent problems such as poverty, health inequalities and climate change. Teachers are free to design a humanities syllabus that is relevant to the needs of their learners and communicate their ideas and achievements with ZooPost across continents.
International Community Understandings (ICU) is an expression of cosmopolitanism that gives an opportunity for education to bridge worlds and to work in the interest of human beings at all ages. Cosmopolitans consider themselves as world citizens. So, they “resist the temptations of the narrow nationalisms of the countries where they were born. They would never go to war for a country; but they will enlist in a campaign against any nation that gets in the way of universal justice. Hence, cosmopolitanism can be considered as the foundation of a People-based International Community. (Bado Arsène Brice).
2 Education Objectives
(i) Groups:- Make local conservation plans and share them.
(ii) Individuals:- Become a good steward of local biodiversity.
(iii) Groups and Individuals: Create a permanent sense of place.
The Schools Communities and Nature project (SCAN) developed in Wales UK as a practical response to the Rio environment summit in the 1990s. It originated within the Dyfed County Council’s teacher’s advisory service from the response of schools in Pembrokeshire to the local Sea Empress oil spill. It involved primary and secondary schools in Pembrokeshire piloting simple classroom methods for pupils of all ages to probe the quality of life in their communities. The aim of SCAN was to alert children to the character of their surroundings, and establish a features database that lists the good and bad things in their neighbourhood. It failed to take root because it was a pre-INTERNET paper system that was eclipsed by the long drawn out development of classroom IT.
4 Rationale
(i) Why India?
India is the first country to adopt the idea of a Citizen’s Environmental Network (CEN). It is centred on the concept of ‘Smartpur’ for villages. ‘Smartpure’ emerged from the underlying idea of integrating IT into the existing practices, processes of community life. The aim is to enable people of the community to make their lives better and contribute to the overall well-being of the village. The IT roll out is funded by Nokia in partnership with the Digital Empowerment Foundation (https://www.defindia.org/). The content is managed locally by the community, its schools and businesses.
Smartpur stands on the foundation of six cultural pillars, namely education, health, finance, governance, livelihood and entertainment. Each of these pillars is further supported by wireless broadband access-enabled digital infrastructure, leading to efficiency in daily lives, transparency in governance, economic prosperity for households, and ease of access to various kinds of services and information.
Examples of Smartpur objectives:
communities have access to affordable medical diagnoses and consultation through digitally literate ASHA workers and telemedicine services;
youth have relevant skills to find jobs or become entrepreneurs;
people have timely and relevant access to welfare schemes or entitlements;
households have access to digital financial services;
the community has access to arts workers to help local communities plan and take part in activities like drama, dance, painting and photography and there is access to high quality audio-visual entertainment;
people have access to digital content for self learning about unfashionable school subjects, such as zoology, to gain an understanding of the natural world and how this can help consider ways to face global challenges such as climate change and food security, seeking to find solutions that help both animals and humans alike.
(ii) Why Kanchipuram?
‘Smartpur’ is aiming to reach Kanchipuram and become embedded in 10 villages with Asoor as the hub center and remaining 9 villages as the spoke centers. These locations may be considered as pilots for modeling a CEN.
HUB: Asoor
SPOKES: Kilpermunalur, Tennari, Kavathndagllam, Periyanattham, Kolathur, Vitchanthangal, Avalur, Chiniwalkam, Pallavaram. Asoor village is in Kancheepuram district of Tamil Nadu located on the north east coast of the state. Kanchipuram is home to 3.9 million people.
Eliminating social exclusion is one of the goals of the Indian constitution, wherein the masses can completely participate in all aspects of life with dignity. Actually, the increased usage of the Internet and information and communication technology (ICT) in contemporary times has resulted in a newform of social inequality. This social inequality is arising because of the disparities between and among the individuals in terms of digital skills, use of the Internet, and access to digital devices. This divide is referred to as “the digital divide”, which is more visible today, especially in the form of social exclusion in India.
The nexus of the climate crisis and socioeconomic and political inequalities is at the root of various climate injustices, making India an archetypal site for their manifestation. The worst impacts of the crisis are being denied, ignored and normalised, because these burdens fall on the poor, women, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and others with little political voice.
Internet usage by the masses largely depends on factors such as the availability of affordable devices, network coverage and connectivity, along with data costs. Today, when India is encouraging the digitalization of services, affordable data availability becomes crucial. However, even after the improvement in availability and accessibility of affordable devices and data, there are certain sections of society who, because of their social and cultural capital, have greater access to resources as compared to others. Because of its social, economic, and political implications, the digital divide has recently stimulated the interest of academics and policymakers in community/school strategies to engage with an international community.
6 Digital literacy
.ICT, or information and communications technology, is the infrastructure and components that enable modern computing to occupy a substantial role in all our lives (especially in Covid-19 times). Digital literacy and successful use of Internet technology have become essential in today’s world. India is known for its social diversity, and the concept of social inclusion is enshrined in the Indian constitution. However, some groups and categories of people have historically been excluded and continue to be excluded today. There are varied reasons for such exclusion (e.g. caste, gender/transgenderism tribe, disability). The challenge to Smartpur is to focus on the assessment of the impact of the digital divide on Indian society, specifically on the phenomenon of social exclusion because of the coming digitalization of almost all aspects of our lives. The notion of digital inclusion is not only about access to the technology and Internet sources, but also how access directly and indirectly influences the lives of the marginalized and deprived sections of the society. The phenomenon of social exclusion has a deep impact on a person’s access to opportunities, especially in the context of power relationships. Just reducing the financial and social hindrances towards Internet access would not reduce social inequalities until and unless equal efforts are made towards supporting the population and providing them the necessary digital skills. As a result, it’s critical that digital economic policies conceived and developed for sustainable growth should include initiatives to bridge these digital inequalities. Further research in the area will be more effective in addressing India’s hurdles to digital inclusion.
7 Richness of a digital learning environment
Our rapidly changing world has posed the long-standing question to education, ―How can today’s schools be transformed so as to become environments of teaching and learning that makes individuals lifelong learners and prepares them for the 21st Century?” The response to this question is the focus of the OECD project, ‘Innovative Learning Environments’, and has produced a sampling of the rich array of new visions for education around the world. As one might imagine, many learning environments have looked to technology in their efforts to redesign teaching and learning. While technology integration has long been a key area of concern in education, the intersection of technology with our rapidly transforming educational landscape is framing the nature of technology in education in profound, new ways. New and emerging technologies are provoking a re-conceptualisation of teaching and learning, while also serving as catalysts for transformation and innovation. Successfully preparing all learners with the skills and capacities for 21st century citizenship— global awareness, creativity, collaborative problem-solving, self-directed learning—is no small order, and many educational leaders are finding that the traditional forms of education that have evolved through the end of the last century are simply inadequate for achieving these goals. At the same time, while our outer world was transforming, considerable advances have been made in the learning sciences, forcing educators to reconsider how they approach learning, instruction, and the environments created to foster these. Finally, dramatic advances in educational technology have inspired powerful new ways for learners to engage with all kinds of content and activities in their own self-direct learning experiences. The juxtaposition of these three events creates a very interesting challenge and opportunity—a space to reconsider, re-imagine, and re-invent learning environments able to prepare and excel each individual for effective life-long learning.
Consumer culture has been defined as an economic arrangement in which the lived cultural experience of everyday life depends on social resources, plus the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, entering households (Fig 1). The environment is thereby brought into the home as part of a process of cultural ecology mediated through markets. Consumption, a set of behaviors found in all times and places, is dominated by the purchase of commercial products. The socio economic system is largely understood to be carried out through the exercise of free personal choice in the private sphere of everyday life. Social democratic actors are deemed to be individually free and rational. Furthermore, consumer culture is also bound up with the idea of modernity, that is, it develops in a world no longer governed by the traditions of generation-on-generation stasis, but rather by year-on-year flux in fashion. Consumer culture denotes a dynamic ever changing global economy in which value has been divorced from the material satisfaction of wants and the sign value of goods takes precedence. The term sign value denotes and describes the value accorded to an object because of the prestige (social status) that it imparts upon the possessor, rather than the material value and utility derived from the function and the primary use of the object. In this process of the global marketing mass produced goods the local artisan producer has become an ‘endangered species’.
Globalization is a process driven by multinational companies embedded in capitalism, which extinguishes old production systems to make way for the new. It entails the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour around the world. Currently both capital and goods move freely, and services such as banking, telecommunications, media and advertising will do so increasingly. Labour mostly moves freely but the vast majority of working people in the world congregate in towns and cities where they are static.
Stasis used to be a feature of rurality which transmitted existing cultural values, norms and customary ways of doing things unchanged from generation to generation. Its mainstay was access to the local countryside. Countryfolk were sustained by its biophysical resources within an artisan ecosystem defined as the creative interactions beteen a wide range of practices, organizations, resources, activities and connections. The interlocking elements of this rural ecosystem enabled culturally significant designs, products and practices to flourish in small communities.
Artisan ecologies are focused on communities that are bottom-up and human centred aggregations of families embodying the craft atmosphere of a territory due to proximity of resources and a shared material cultural background. Such communities based on artisanship are engaged in giving form and meaning to local natural resources and managing the process of making culturally and socially significant products.
Clay is one such natural resource. An abundant and accessible material, clay is sustainable. Humans have used it for centuries to produce ceramics. Easy to excavate from the ground, clay requires very little processing .
Ceramics is one of the most ancient industries on the planet. Once humans discovered that clay could be dug up and formed into objects by first mixing it with water and then firing, the industry was born. As early as 24,000 BC, animal and human figurines were made from clay and other materials, then fired in kilns partially dug into the ground.
In the present day, artisan ceramics is in decline in a world of global consumers fed by mass production. From a 21st century perspective, where the cultural focus is now on the sustainable use of natural resources, there can be no doubt that an understanding of the cultural ecology of ceramics should hinge on the relationships of ceramics and their production to the rest of the sociocultural system and the broader ecosystem. Frederick R. Matson first suggested the term ceramic ecology in the published papers of the “Ceramics and Man” symposium held in 1961 under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He expressed a desire to move ceramic studies toward a more human focus—ceramics and man—reflecting the symposium’s title. Matson thus coined the term ceramic ecology to represent “… one facet of cultural ecology, that which attempts to relate the raw materials and technologies that the local potter has available to the functions in his culture of the products he fashions” (Fig 2).
Fig 2 A mind map of ceramic ecology
Invention of Eduardo Williams
Since his formulation of ceramic ecology more than half a century ago, Matson’s ideas have inspired a number of studies and the publication of several volumes. In particular, In 1985, Dean E. Arnold broadened the ceramic ecological perspective to include a systems paradigm and identified a number of systemic relationships between ceramic production and the physical environment, on the one hand, and the sociocultural system of which it was social focus on the other. These relationships consist of basic feedback mechanisms that stimulate and/or limit ceramic production in a cultural-environmental system. Based on certain chemical, ecological, and social phenomena that underlie the nature of pottery itself, these relationships occur in many of the societies of the world and are isomorphous cross-culturally. Thus, it should be possible to explain the development of an ancient craft and the maintenance of a modern craft in a broad intercultural conceptal framework, which is applicable to all crafts.
In 1989 Lorette Mouat and Deane E Arnold, reporting on their research into the potters of El Porvenir, Honduras, revisited Matson’s ideas. They took a viewpoint that the concern with raw materials, technologies, and products in Matson’s definition implies a focus on ceramics as objects. There is no explicit recognition of the relationships that exist between ceramic production and society on the one hand and the environment on the other. In their view, if ceramic ecology is truly one facet of cultural ecology, as Matson states, then one would expect a wide range of relationships among the production of ceramics, society, and the environment (like weather and climate), distance to resources, and sedentariness as well as the functions of the ceramic product in society.
Thus, the term ceramic ecology implies a broader relational paradigm beyond Matson’s narrow definition and represents an important conceptual change in the way that ceramics traditionally have been viewed.
With respect to choosing a suitable operational model to construct a cultural ecology of ceramics, pottery in the Indian subcontinent has an ancient history and is one of the most tangible and iconic elements of Indian art. Artisan family potters are one of the largest castes, spread across 212 districts of India, predominantly in the states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra, parts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. They are known by different names in each state. All are facing decline.
2 What’s in a name?
The castes and sub-castes of India are mainly based on occupations and the associated skill levels. The potter caste is very ancient and widespread throughout India and is concerned with the production of earthenware utensils and images of deities which are essential for domestic wellbeing and efficiency.. These terracotta handicrafts have been recovered in archeological excavations, particularly at the ancient sites of the prehistoric Indus Valley Civilization. This was an early example of urbanisation located in what is Pakistan and northwest India today, on the fertile flood plain of the Indus River and its vicinity. Evidence of religious practices in this area date back approximately to 5500 BCE. Farming settlements began around 4000 BCE and around 3000 BCE there appeared the first signs of urbanization. By 2600 BCE, dozens of towns and cities had been established, and between 2500 and 2000 BCE the Indus Valley civilization was at its peak. Harrapa was one of these flourishing cities with a thriving population of terracotta potters. The glazed Harappan pottery is the earliest example of its kind in the ancient world showing a great inventive genious. Terracotta, taken from Latin terra cotta or baked earth, is the art of creating glazed or unglazed porous earthenware, figurines, and other decorative materials from clay which is dried and fired in temperatures of around 1000°C giving it a distinctly orange, red, brown, yellow, or grey colour. It is then covered in sand to allow it to cool down. This colour depends not only on the type of clay found in the beds of the water bodies in the area where the artist is based but also on the firing process. For example, if the smoke from firing is allowed to get out through the vents in the kiln, a red or orange colour is obtained. On the other hand, if the vents are sealed, it gives the items a black colour. Decorative pieces are either left with their original colour or painted in multiple hues to make them more attractive.
Polychrome pottery is rare and mainly comprised small vases decorated with geometric patterns mostly in red, black and green and less frequently in white and yellow. Incised ware is rare and the incised decoration was confined to the bases of pans. Perforated pottery has a large hole at the bottom and small holes all over the wall and was probably used for straining liquids. Some pottery was ornamented on the outside with knobs. The Harappan pottery includes pans, goblets, dishes, basins, flasks, narrow necked vases, cylindrical bottles, tumblers, corn measures, spouted vases and a special type of dish on a stand which was an offering stand or incense burner.
The people of India who worked as family potters, making utensils, tiles or any related products from earth were called, “Kumbhkar.” Kumbh means clay utensils and kar means maker. Therefore, Kumbhkar later became,”Kumbhar.” Many of them belonged to the ancient “Jati” people of the mythical Prajapati community, named after Prajapati the Hindu god of creativity which positions potters at the heart of Hindism.
Some Prajapatis/Kumhars trace the origin of their community to the beginning of civilization when humankind started using utensils to prepare and eat food. As potters they proudly consider themselves to be the initiators of the world’s first industry. They also situate themselves in one of the most famous stories of Hinduism which is known as the great churning of the primeval ocean by the gods and demons in the quest for the nectar of immortality. This tale has deep dimensions, capturing insights into the nature of existence.
According to a Hindu myth, the first Kumbh (earthen pot) was a gift from the Gods to collect the Nectar. Another mythological story says that when Lord Shiva was about to marry Parvati he realised he had forgotten the water carrier integral for the ceremony. Therefore, he gave a part of his skin for clay to Prajapati to make a pot and Parvati gave her blood to decorate the pot. That is when the first kumbh (earthen pot) was created and Prajapati became the first potter.
The classification of Kumhars in the Hindu social caste system differs from region to region. For example, because the making of a pot was the first creative act of HIndu mythology, in some temples in Rajasthan, only a Kumhar can lead the worship, not the traditionally priestly Brahmins.
The geographical location of pot-making is revealed by mapping the distribution of family names, such as Sorathia, Ladwa, and Varia. The potters who lived in Sorath were known as “Sorathia Prajapati. Today, the Kumhar caste is mainly found in Pakistan and Punjab, Bijnor(U.P.).
The following surnames of Prajapati. potters have persisted through the centuries;
Bhalsod, Bharadwa, Bharadwaj, Buhecha, Chandegra, Chavda, Chhaya, Chitroda, Chohan, Dabhi, Devalia, Dhokia, Dodia, Fatania, Gadher, Gadhia, Ghadhvana, Ghedia, Girnara, Gohil, Gola, Jagatia, Jethwa, Jogia, Kamalia, Kansara, Kataria, Kholia, Koria, Kukadia, Ladva, Majevadia, Mandora, Mavadia, Maru, Nena, Oza, Pankhania, Parmar, Pithia, Poria, Rathod, Ravat, Sarvaiya, Savania, Shingadia, Solanki, Taank, Vadher, Vadukul, Vara, Vegad, Visavadia, and Yadav. Some of these family names are often spelt in a variation for example, Gohil is spelt Gohel and Ladwa is spelt Ladva, etc.
3 Decline and revival in artisan potters
Down to the late 20th century the Indian potters worked as families with division of labour between men, women and children, each contributing a particular skill. At the beginning of the 21st century it became apparent that throughout India the art of family potting was dying in the face of mass production of factory glazed wares. In recent years, the decline in artisan potters has followed the decrease in the number of artisans engaged in the handicraft industry using clay, metal or stone. These artisans are now employed in manual labour or are unemployed, giving up their high skills. One of the major reasons for this change is the commercially and machine-made cheaper alternatives available in the market. The limited exposure of artisans to the market, loss of urban consumer interest, and factory competition has also added to the decline of the handicraft industry. Today India adds only 2% to the global handicrafts market. Thus, many of these artisans are living in abject poverty and economic conditions.
The government, the private, and the non-profit organizations have played a major role in trying to revive the handicraft industry. However, the impact has been isolated and limited. Much effort is required to completely revamp the rural handicraft industry using local resources. Various organizations are helping by setting up exhibitions both domestically and globally to showcase the crafts produced by these artisans. These organizations are creating marketing opportunities for craftsmen and craftswomen, to sell their products at a better price to a wider consumer base. They are using unique business models to create these market linkages from artisan to consumer, thus being profitable to all involved, especially the artisan.
With the advancement of communication networks across the country, networking can be used positively to the artisan’s advantage. New designs, ideas, orders, and markets can be within the reach of the artisan with the right training. Educating customers too is an important part of revitalizing the handicraft industry. Today online marketing is a buzzword to buy and sell artisan products. Some organizations are already connecting buyers and sellers directly online.
The handicraft industry is very important for India as it is the second largest employment generator in the rural sector. Efforts are being made to revitalize and develop it to its full potential. It is also an industry that helps to showcase the rich cultural heritage of the country. New initiatives have the potential to boost the lives of millions of Indian artisans, not just the potters. An estimated 7 million artisans according to official figures (and up to 200 million artisans according to unofficial sources) are engaged in craft production to earn a livelihood. It further states that the global market for handicrafts is $ 400 billion with India’s share below 2 percent, representing a tremendous growth opportunity. The report further adds that 39 percent of artisans incur production expenditures of less than Rs 12,000/ $ 215 a year and only 19 percent spend above Rs. 50,000/ $ 900 a year.
Gujarat
Because of their proximity to the prehistoric Indus valley, Gujarat potters have always been regarded as as continuity-inheritors of ancient terracotta working skills. It was significant in this respect that in 2010 the Gujarat government funded a scheme to train artisans to fine tune their art to meet modern needs. The state government acted through the Matikam Kalakari Rural Technology Institute (MKRTI), with the help of the Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute (CGCRI) and designers from National Institute of Design (NID) and National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), to impart training to potters in reinventing their products and designs so that they can be sold in the domestic as well as international markets
Delhi
A large number of the potters in Delhi have migrated from the neighboring states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. They are located in Govindpuri and Hauz Rani: Kumbhar Basti. A number have settled in the Prajapati Colony in A Uttam Nagar that was set up in the 1970 to house the potters coming from the countryside. As most of the potters had names connected with their caste occupation the colony was called Prajapati. Currently over 400 families practicing this craft in the colony and provide their products across Delhi and NCR. The methods adopted by the potters are similar to those employed in the pottery tradition(s) of their ancestral homelands. Black, red, and yellow clay in the form of small pieces is obtained from Rajasthan and Delhi. This is mixed and dried, after which water is added to it. The resulting mixture of wet clay is filtered through a fine sieve to remove pebbles. After the clay has been kneaded into homogenous flexible dough, the prepared clay is made into a variety of artifacts using either the throwing technique. Coiling techniques are used in making large products that are too big to be thrown on the wheel and to make those with shapes that cannot be turned on the wheel. After giving shape to the item and drying it in the shade, it is baked in the kiln.
Aruvakode in Nilambur, Kerala
Pottery making in Aruvacode is the story of Jinan, a rebel, activist, designer. Moreover this is the story of lives that he touched and changed positively for ever.
A news report on how the destiny of Aruvacode, from being a simple potter village had changed to becoming a hub of sex-workers, impelled Jinan to proceed to Aruvacode, a sleepy village by the river in Nilambur in Kerala.
According to Jinan,“the reason for such a drastic transformation in the village was the rush of cheap substitutes of steel, aluminum, and plastic products to pottery in the market. The rush had pushed the demand for earthenware off the edge and the artisans were left a troubled and distressed lot. Seized of their traditional labour, women of the village were forced into sex-work.”
Several years with the potters of Aruvacode had revealed to him that the issue of development lies deep in preserving the self-respect and creativity of the concerned community.
In his presentation in “De-colonising the Aesthetic Sense: The story of craft revival in Aruvacode potters’ village”, Jinan argues that “any community, armed with an absolute sense of self-respect and untarnished creativity, is well able to sail through all their problems. It is a dilemma of the ‘educated’ and the culturally uprooted sections of our society that development is perceived more on an economic plane. It is these sections that genuinely consider the distressed community as incapable of confronting and solving their own problems”.
“The advent of consumerism had held out its stakes and the artisans failed to keep pace with the fancy needs of the new consumer. In earlier times the artisans had always responded excellently to the local needs of the people, as a strong cultural bond held the user and the producer in unison. But every nuance of modernity brought with it newer difficulties for the potters”.
Treading therefore very carefully, not to step on to the much-travelled path of the interventionist agencies, he took up work with the potters. Honouring his own integrity, he ensured that the aesthetic quality of whatever they made was to be rooted in their own culture. He therefore limited his role to encourage the incorporation of novel utilitarian aspects into their creations. It was a slow process and the products that emerged were evolved at a natural pace (Fig 3).
Fig 3 ‘Kathakali depicted in terracotta tiles
. Designed by artisans and potters trained by social entreprenuer K.P. Jinan Posted by GP (The Blue Wonder blog:March 2011)
Jinan concludes ; “My journey into the world of the rural artisan communities was not with the intention of ‘developing’ them or educating them. I went to them to regain that which I had lost in the process of getting educated; to learn from them. Having escaped ‘education’ and ‘development’ they were still original and authentic and were holding on to the culture and world-view, which sustained them for centuries. I perceived the rural / tribal communities as being wise and evolved; and recognised that only by learning from them could we lead sustainable lives.
The basic ideas behind their training programmes were to help the individuals regain their wisdom and confidence which lies embedded within their own communities and culture, believing that creativity can and does solve many a problem related to self-esteem. Jinans work has created a demand for the unique products developed at Aruvakode and products from this small ‘colony’ are being displayed publically and privately in several cities in India”.
4 An ecological model of artisanship
In a recent debate at London’s Tate Gallery about when craft becomes an art, it was suggested that perhaps intention makes the distinction. If a maker intends to express something perhaps that makes it art. However, makers often felt that it was the material they worked with that made it craft – textiles, ceramics, glass seem to fall into the craft category, never mind if their intention as maker might be an artistic one.
On the other hand, ….”perhaps it’s how a maker learnt their skill. As an apprentice coming through a process of learning a skill, hand to hand, as it were? That’s craft. As a fully formed genius honing an expressive talent? That’s art. Perhaps it’s use. Something wearable or useable – jewellery or furniture for example – seems to fit neatly under the craft label, while something that has no clear practical purpose might be called art. However, this doesn’t take into account the decorative crafts, nor the artists who produce practical items”.
Trying to answer such apparently simple questions misses the point that creativity arises in the maker’s environment. Ceramics, for example, has a cultural ecology that presents an holistic, conceptual understanding of how people, craft and art connect in the environment through the creativity in families. The diversity of the artisan’s immediate landscape is an essential resource. Instead of endlessly debating the question, what defines an artist or a craft maker, or even divides an artist from a craft maker, an environmental approach leads to a total understanding of artisanship as an expression of communities’ creative ways of organizing and triggering social interactions. The broad aim of ‘making’ is to master local ecosystem services to improve livelihoods.
Increasing, global competition from mass production is leading many artisans to live in a precarious, fractured and marginalised condition. Artisans are even more endangered in the developing world, where they often face subjection to large monopoly businesses, market corruption and unreliability, as well as lack of perception of international consumers’ trends. To face the complex challenges of the current and future world, the activities of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of production, described as service design, have to change. They have to move towards strategies and systems that address social and environmental problems, particularly those associated with living sustainably.
Within this dynamic arena, there is a general upsurge of interest in artisanship. Artisanship is defined as the human-centred economic activity of giving form and meaning to local natural resources. Hand work or the control of mechanised and digital tools, are applied to the process of making small, unique and flexible batches of culturally and socially significant goods. The new aim of service design is to improve quality of the products and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. This is considered as a necessary resilient response to the increasing demand for flexible, customised and redistributed manufacturing that reconnects communities to their local material culture and reaches out to global markets. These ideas may be summarised in a concept map of ceramic ecology Fig 4).
Fig 4 Concept map of ceramic ecology
The map may be generalised for other expressions of artisanship. For example, the textile sector has its own artisan ecology. It encompasses a high level of employment of skilled workers, has a wide range of applications and ever-increasing consumption trends. These all cause urgent environmental and social challenges. Also, it is one of the most complicated productive artisan ecologies, involving many different actors (i.e. farmers, manufacturers of fibres, yarns, fabrics and apparel/carpet retailers), service sectors and waste management issues.
Several service design approaches could be adopted by textile artisanship to produce textiles which are environmentally responsible, socially just and economically fair, as well as culturally meaningful and enriching at a personal level. The weaver’s imagination could be summoned to encourage sustainable development, building resilient interconnections between environmental, technological and economic resources, social and cultural values. This could be achieved through the shared efforts of policy makers, NGOs, artisans’ communities and individuals, as summarised in Table 1.
Jaipur artisan weavers
Jaipur Rugs Foundation (JRF) is a non-profit organization that catalyzes sustainable livelihoods for people engaged in an entire carpet making chain by empowering them to establish collective enterprises through enhancing their artisanal and business skills. The overall work mandate of JRF is to reach out to remote rural areas of India and establish bonds with destitute communities, especially the women, enabling them to start weaving not just rugs but also their own lives. NK Chaudhary established JRF to promote economic prosperity among marginal communities. Starting with two looms and an extraordinary vision, he has been able to connect people around the world with craftsmanship of Indian village weavers.
Most of the artisans are women and the JRF enables them to gain economic independence working at home. The goal is to bring positive sustainable change in the lives of artisanal communities ‘providing a life of happiness and dignity’. To achieve this, the JRF concentrates on providing work for unemployed and unskilled women living in rural villages and seeks to give training in the craft of rug-weaving. Once a woman becomes a working artisan, she also gets an opportunity to integrate with the Jaipur Rugs inclusive development business model. The subsequent phase is to deliver technical training and augment their skills and knowledge and release their artistic creativity (Fig 5). For the first time ever, weavers get to be the designers of their own rugs. Each rug is a masterpiece for the design inspiration it weaves. It is imbued with the individuality of the artisan who made it and evidence of the release of her unique artistry.
To release this creativity every weaver is part of a grassroots network that requires specialised logistical support. Raw material is dropped off at an artisan’s home where they work on the product. To ensure customers receive high quality products, quality supervisors inspect looms to help ensure a consistent output while tracking progress. These supervisors also ensure the artisans are serviced so they are not interrupted by the shortage of yarn or any other such factor limiting their earning capacity. When completed, the rug is picked up at the weavers doorstep and sent on to the next stage of the rug making progress. These visits also ensure that weavers are paid every month at their looms. At present, these networks stretch across 600 villages in five Indian states connecting 40,000 artisans.
Jaipur’s weavers thus have the ability to work creatively from their rural home in a more comfortable working environment than most entrepreneurs and corporate employees across the world! However, one of the biggest challenges faced by artisans is the lack of awareness and knowledge regarding opportunities intended for them under various social welfare schemes. JRF has been playing an instrumental role in facilitating access to artisan cards. These are issued to the artisans by Development Commissioner, Handicrafts (Government of India) with support from District Industries Centers (DICs). The cards recognise the recipient is a skilled worker and eables them to receive various benefits provided by the government. JRF also seeks to equip artisans with basic knowledge and skills that help them save money to shape a brighter future for their families. The focus is on improving well-being of artisans and their communities by providing access to various socio-economic educational and medical benefits. This entails assistance in formalities like filling forms, providing supporting documents and linking them with banks. In addition, a system of payment, ‘M-Pesa’ by Vodafone, has been promoted for weavers to facilitate their financial transactions. M-Pesa means “m-money” in Swahili and is the global brand for Vodafone’s Mobile Money service. The service is now present in 10 countries. Mobile money is a digital representation of cash which Vodafone stores safely in a ring-fenced bank account (a “trust” account). The mobile money account of each customer is linked to their mobile phone account. M-Pesa is specifically designed to benefit customers who have no access to banks.
To summarise, the Jaipur Rugs project is a very sucessful process of engaging village artisans with the vision of a commercial organization with a charitable arm that promotes empowerment through instilling an entrepreneurial mindset. The purpose is to enable artisan weavers acquire higher responsibilities and take control of their lives with an owners’ mindset. The is realised in the last facet of entrepreneurship development that creates leaders at the grassroots who create more leaders as they spearhead the mission of enabling sustainable livelihoods to all those in need.
Jaipor rugs are marketed globally with the motto ‘purchase with purpose’. In effect JRF is helping to shift urban wealth from the rich to the rural poor!
The mission of the University Consortium of Small Island States was operating 2014-18 to enhance its education institutions. The aim was to facilitate development of the capacity needed to implement the UN’s Programme of action, popularly referred to as the Barbados Program of Action (BPOA). BPOA is an important historical policy document that comprehensively addresses the economic, environmental, and social developmental vulnerabilities facing small island states. It outlines a strategy that seeks to mitigate those vulnerabilities. BPOA remains the only internationally approved programme specific to Small Island Developing States (SIDS), which has been collectively and unanimously endorsed by SIDS since the 1990s.
The full text of the BPOA was produced in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1994 at the first Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island States. This was a conference mandated by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 47/189. The need for an island’s specific conference was highlighted some two years previously at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro where 179 governments voted to adopt Agenda 21. Chapter 17, section G of Agenda 21 acknowledges that small island developing states are a special case both for environmental protection and education for sustainable development. We now know that SIDS are considered extremely vulnerable to global warming and sea level rise, with predictions of social upheavals that will be associated with climate change. Local communities must meet this situation with hope (Fig 1). In this context the BPOA is the global model for learning how to live sustainably.
Fig 1 Creating a community syllabus of radical hope
Survey what is good and bad about where you live. Design an action plan to celebrate what is good and improve what is bad. Reflect on what the community has learned about local culture and its ecology as the basis for a community syllabus of radical hope linking schools with the communities they serve.
Hope can be defined as ”the belief that circumstances in the future will be better.” It allows us to be optimistic about a positive outcome and increases our chances of realizing our goals and dreams. Although there are many obstacles in life, hope allows us to approach them with a successful mindset. Radical Hope is an idea that helps us to imagine the future after a moment of upheaval and change. The term was first defined by philosophers looking at the big questions of human existence, knowledge, reason and the mind. They wanted to better understand how people can recover after a traumatic experience, such as the loss of their culture. Jonathan Lear illustrates this idea with the experience of the North American Crow Nation after the 19th Century destruction of the buffalo herds upon which these peoples were totally dependent. The Crow were faced with the end of their traditional way of life, yet with firm leadership, they reimagined a future without buffalo.
Everyone needs a personal syllabus of radical hope to focus their values that will carry them successfully into a post 2030 future. This blog outlines a syllabus of radical hope produced for teaching the new Welsh Humanities Area of Learning and Experience (HALE). HALE encourages learners to engage with the most important issues facing humanity, including sustainability and social change, and helps to develop the skills necessary to interpret and articulate the past with the present. The aim is to awaken a sense of wonder, fire the imagination, and inspire learners to grow individually in knowledge, understanding and wisdom.
The Welsh HALE is being presented to members of the Green Forum as an online educational resource that could be developed for meeting the two key objectives of the BPOA. namely:
improved information flow between SIDS on courses offered, facilities available, student needs and relevant online content.
cooperative curriculum development through research into managing, indigenous knowledge and outreach in the key areas of sustainable development of SIDS that support resilience building for sustainable development.
Strengthening a pedagogy for environmental issues requires action in two main areas: training for educators in environmental issues and syllabus development with the production of appropriate indigenous teaching materials. Both areas introduce environmental issues unique to SIDS. These can be mind mapped across a range of disciplines (Fig 2) , to support an anthropological syllabus of radical hope.
2 Starting With Anthropology
Fig 2 Anthropology online
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values.A portmanteau term, sociocultural anthropology is commonly used to explore how people, variously positioned within the world today, live and understand their world. It includes their aspirations and struggles to share systems of ideas (i.e., culture) which are related to the structured ways that people act and interact in society (i.e., power) and the environment (i.e.natural resorces).
Anthropology of art is a sub-field in social anthropology dedicated to the study of art in different cultural contexts. The anthropology of art focuses on historical, economic and aesthetic dimensions in non-Western art forms, including what is known as ‘tribal art’
The anthropology of art studies and analyses the wide range of material objects produced by people around the world. These are considered not merely as aesthetic objects but are understood to play a wider role in people’s lives, for instance in their beliefs and rituals. The materials studied include sculpture, masks, paintings, textiles, baskets, pots, weapons, and the human body itself. Anthropologists are interested in the symbolic meanings encoded in such objects, as well as in the materials and techniques used to produce them. Perhaps the simplest, yet most appropriate distinction between artefact and art would be that an artefact is primarily the product of craftsmanship and skill, while a work of art is invested with an emotional, philosophical, spiritual or aesthetic quality that reaches beyond. It has an ambiguous something that is not always easy to define, perhaps a special element that elevates it from the realm of workmanship to a more-significant level, where arts reasoning is applied to explain sustainability. In this respect the culture of members of indigenous communities in SIDS directly relates to a specific way of being, seeing, and acting in the world. Their culture is developed on the basis of a close relationship with their traditional territories and the resources they harbour, not only because they are their main means of subsistence, but also because they are part of their worldview, and therefore, a part of their culture as an ecological entity. Objects in human life can become integrated into social relationships: for example, strong emotional attachments are found between people and material culture that is connected to ancestors. Such objects transmit culture with them, creating and reinforcing cultural norms: this kind of object needs tending, this does not. Scout badges, fraternity pins, even Fitbit watches are “symbolic storage devices,” symbols of social identity that may persist through multiple generations. In this manner, they can also be teaching tools: this is how we were in the past, this is how we need to behave in the present. Those objects leave “traces,” that have established narratives associated with them.
3 Cultural Ecology
Culture and ecology merge in cultural ecology as a sub-discipline of anthropology that sets out the complex relationships between humans and the environments which they inhabit. This takes many shapes and forms. For example it includes examining the hunting/gathering patterns of humans tens of thousands of years ago and, archaeological investigations of early agriculturalists and their impact on deforestation or soil erosion. In modern times it deals with how human societies are adapting to climate change and other anthropogenic environmental issues. Cultural Ecology is a growing subfield of anthropology because of the challenges of understanding and addressing human-caused environmental problems. Like climate change, species extinctions, plastic pollution, and habitat destruction all require an understanding of the complex cultural, political, and economic systems that have created these problems (Fig 3).
Fig 3 A mind map of cultural ecology as the managerial balance between conservation and exploitation of natural resources.
Cultural Ecology developed in the 1960s as anthropologists borrowed methods and terminology from growing developments in ecology and applied them to understand day to day issues of living in an overcrowded polluted world. In the first decade of the 21st century, there are publications dealing with the ways in which humans can develop a more acceptable cultural relationship with the environment. An example is sacred ecology, a sub-topic of cultural ecology, introduced by Fikret Berkes in 1999. It seeks lessons from traditional ways of life in Northern Canada to shape a new environmental perception for urban dwellers. This particular conceptualisation of people and environment comes from various cultural levels of local knowledge about species and place, resource management systems using local experience, social institutions with their rules and codes of behaviour. It takes a world view through religion, ethics and broadly defined belief systems. The global message is that culture is a balancing act between the mindset devoted to the exploitation of natural resources and that which conserves them. Perhaps the best model of cultural ecology in this context is, paradoxically, the mismatch of culture and ecology that have occurred when Europeans suppressed the age-old native methods of land use and have tried to settle European farming cultures on soils manifestly incapable of supporting them.
There is a sacred ecology associated with environmental awareness, and the task of cultural ecology is to inspire urban dwellers to develop a more acceptable sustainable cultural relationship with the environment that supports them.
As a knowledge framework, cultural ecology can be customized with information from environmental anthropology to assemble a personal syllabus of radical hope about human adaptations to rapidly changing social and physical environments.Human adaptation refers to both biological and cultural processes that enable a population to survive and reproduce within a given or changing environment.This may be carried out diachronically (examining entities that existed in different epochs), or synchronically (examining a present system and its components). The central argument is that the natural environment, in small scale or subsistence societies is a major contributor to social organization and other human institutions concerned with sustainability.
Cultural ecology is expressed physically in a group’s material culture, a term used to refer to all the corporeal, tangible objects that are created, used, kept and left behind by past and present cultures. Material culture refers to objects that are used, lived in, displayed and experienced; and the term includes all the things people make, including tools, pottery, houses, furniture, buttons, roads, even the cities themselves. One focus is the meaning of the objects: how we use them, how we treat them, what they say about us. Some objects reflect family history, status, gender, and/or ethnic identity. People have been making and saving objects for 2.5 million years. Material culture studies, however, focus not just on the artifacts themselves, but rather the meaning of those objects to people. One of the features that characterize humans apart from other species is the extent to which we interact with objects, whether they are used or traded, whether they are curated or discarded .
4 Circularity
Fig 4 The environmental outcome of a linear economy
Circularity is a topic within cultural ecology which models human systems of production and consumption. It involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. Circularity aims to manage global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution by implementing the three base principles of the model. These principles are: eliminating waste and pollution, circulating products and materials, and the regeneration of nature. Circularity is defined in contradistinction to the traditional waste-generating linear economy (Fig 4).The idea and concepts of circular economy have been studied extensively in academia, business, and government over the past decade. Circularity has been gaining popularity since it helps to minimize emissions and consumption of raw materials, opens up new market prospects and principally, increases the sustainability of consumption and improves the efficiency of the use of natural resources.
5 Degrowth: a syllabus for a democratic pedagogy
All economic value is derived from nature by way of society. Economic value is therefore rooted in human values and ultimately in the spiritual values that give purpose and meaning to human life. In the absence of purpose, there is no logical motivation for sustaining human life or sustaining human economies. Thus, economic sustainability is deeply rooted in spirituality. So fundamental challenges in achieving sustainability are ethical, moral, and ultimately spiritual rather than technological or economic. Therefore, sustainability ultimately depends on creating a moral and ethical culture that gives long term economic sustainability priority over short term economic expediency.
“Deep sustainability” goes beyond the normal shallow or instrumental strategies, which focus on resource efficiency and substitution, motivated by economic incentives. Deep sustainability explores the philosophical, ethical, and transcendental roots of ecological, social, and economic integrity. In so doing, it calls for a spiritual-rooted, cultural revolution. This revolution must be motivated by an understanding that the pursuit of economic sustainability is synonymous with the pursuit of authentic happiness—which is inherently social and spiritual as well as material. A degrowth economy would be one which simply provides the material requisites and means for a pursuit of happiness motivated by a spiritual sense of wellbeing.
Spiritual wellness comes from having connections to something greater than yourself. It is about having a set of values, principles, morals and beliefs that provide a sense of purpose, hopefulness and meaning to life. Applying those principles to guide your actions generates a personal prosperity that can make life worthwhile in a steady state economy. However, currently we are demanding more from Earth than it can regenerate. For more than 40 years, humanity’s demand on nature has exceeded what our planet can replenish. We would need the regenerative capacity of 1.6 Earths to provide the natural resources and ecological services we currently use. Only for a brief period can we cut trees faster than they mature, harvest more fish than the oceans can replenish, or emit more carbon into the atmosphere than the forests and oceans can absorb. The consequences of “overshoot” are already clear: habitat and species loss, and accumulation of carbon waste we throw in the sky. In order for the poor world to get richer, the rich world has to become poorer. These are the outcomes of the rich nations signing up to a global strategy of equal shares for all nations.
6 Teaching with hope
Hope is about the belief that you can make an impact. Hope is about allowing students agency in their own learning. Hope is about ensuring that students are looking ahead, identifying for themselves what needs to be improved, and giving them the skills and confidence to go out and do it. There are many different curricula for teaching a syllabus of hope, most of them hoping that science will lead the way. ‘Starting from within anthropology’ is just one of them.
In his keynote address to the Royal Anthropological Institute Conference entitled ‘Art, Materiality and Representation’, on 1st June 2018, Tim Ingold presented his view that art and anthropology potentially afford new ways of thinking about democracy and citizenship — ways that could give hope to future generations. The universal goal is to reach a zero waste in ways that are ethical, economical, efficient and visionary. Education guides people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for other systems to use. Zero waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them. Implementing a zero waste strategy will eliminate all discharges to land, water or air that are a threat to planetary, human, animal or plant health.
Regarding a curriculum that applies arts reasoning to explain sustainability (AARTES), Ingold believes that this approach has been pushed to the margins, above all by the relentless expansion of big science, aided and abetted by multinational corporations and neoliberal globalisation. With them has gone the question from which all inquiry must begin and indeed from which Ingold began his lecture: how ought we to live? His standpoint is that big science is not interested in this question because it believes it can deliver the answers that will maintain a growth economy through mega-projects of geoengineering, if not already, then within the not too distant future. Ingold’s parable is that, when the dinosaurs went extinct, it was the small mammals that inherited the earth, among them were some weasel-like carnivores. On 29th April 2016 it was a weasel that bit through an electric cable, putting the largest machine ever built, CERN’s vast £4bn Hadron Collider, out of action for a week.
For many, the collider is the greatest expression of scientific hubris we have yet seen. Its interaction with the weasel…
“…is the delusional project of our time, truly a machine for the end of the world. But when big science collapses, as it is bound to do, along with the global economy that sustains it, art and anthropology, like that famous weasel, will hold the future in their hands”
Educationalists must be ready for it with a syllabus of radical hope.
7 The Green Forum
The growth economy is now failing in two ways:
1. positive growth is becoming uneconomic in our full-world economy;
2. negative growth, resulting from the bursting of financial bubbles inflated beyond physical limits, though temporarily necessary, soon becomes self-destructive.
This leaves a non-growing, or steady-state economy, as the only long-term alternative. Herman Daly has articulated the basic rules of a steady state economy as follows:
It should exploit renewable resources no faster than they can be regenerated.
It should deplete non-renewable resources no faster than the rate at which renewable substitutes can be developed.
It should emit wastes no faster than they can be safely assimilated by ecosystems.
Presuming depletion and regeneration rates and resilience of ecosystems can be accurately determined, two basic strategies follow these steady state rules:
(1) an economizing strategy
(2) an innovating strategy.
Economizing involves reducing the inputs used in economic activities and minimizing the waste outputs. It entails conserving, re-using, maintaining, and generally embracing the wisdom of ‘enough’ rather than succumbing to the consumer demand for ‘more’.
Innovating entails doing things more efficiently. It means learning, inventing, adapting, and using appropriate technologies to achieve desired ends. Innovation (and the increased efficiency it engenders) in a non-growing economy, is the basis of conservation management.
A steady state economy, therefore, will adopt some combination of economizing and innovating to achieve sustainability, supported by a local syllabus of radical hope.
To discuss this proposition an international Green Forum has been created to connect schools and the communities they serve, across the globe who are interested in making local action plans to adopt a circular, steady state, zero waste economy. It is for those who require space to discuss Ideas for a sustainable economy in a world of finite resources. To participate in The Green Forum, which is free, go to- https://thegreenforum.org/group/288/stream
Circularity, is an economic model that follows the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. It is a more relevant education concept for the future than linearity, which follows the dominant common economy of Take, Make and Dump. The transition to a circular economy will require a qualified workforce with specific and sometimes new skills, with opportunities for employment and social dialogue around conservation management. If the right skills are to be developed, they will have to support job creation in the green economy at all levels of education and training.
Fig 1 Entropy
In particular, if small island developing states (SIDS) are to improve the quality of life of their citizens and achieve sustainable long term development of wellbeing, education has to be made relevant to their future in a post-2030 circular economy. Education is not an independent discipline, but is intimately connected with the functioning of society, with its porous boundaries of history, economics and politics. For example, education systems in small island states are commonly legacies of old colonial powers. As such they are dominated by external summative examinations that drive a top-down subject-dominated didactic pedagogy. This legacy is irrelevant for promoting sustainable low and non-chemical development in small Island states (the Green Forum’s ISLANDS acronym). Here entropy is a relative lifecycle measure of the energetic efficiency of maintaining the utility of products and services, or reusing the constituent materials (Fig 1).
The beginning of the global environmental crisis in the eighties marked an important turning point for educational design. Paralysed for too long by the failures in relevance of centralised and standard-setting approaches, a few researchers and practitioners seem to have been imbued with a new spirit of educational reform. It was characterised by flexibility of approaches, enhancement of participatory processes, and adoption of objectives that were no doubt less ambitious, but more pragmatic. In response to this movement for educational reform, which promoted systems thinking about the environment, the University of Cambridge launched a new interdisciplinary subject for their International GCSE entitled ‘Natural Economy.’ Dealing with the organisation of nature for production, the subject was to stand alongside Political Economy (the organisation of people for production).
Natural Economy was taken up by some International Schools but proved too radical for most institutions in the 1980’s when developing national state curricula were given a political boost. However, Namibia adopted natural economy wholeheartedly, where for a while it replaced Biology and Geography. Part of the problem was the novel, off beam concept of strategic classroom piloting, where, by encouraging independent thinking, teachers had to become mentors, guiding each student to plan and build their own body of knowledge, It was only in 2020 that UK teachers began to deliver a personalised national curriculum. This happened in Wales, where the pedagogy became fully inclusive of humanism in 2002-3. Welsh state schools are now empowered to design their own bottom up curricula, tailored to each individual learner’s needs, while supporting their social wellbeing.
With the advent of the Internet, Natural Economy was renamed ‘Cultural Ecology’ and is now freely available as a flexible, on line ideational scaffold for individualised distance learning. It is not a subject but a cross cultural knowledge management system, a mind map for learners to customise. It is an holistic syllabus. The concept of circularity accommodates a body of inter connected knowledge from rusting of metal to wrinkling of skin. The central cultural pillars are ‘people’, ’ecology’, ‘place’, which articulate three socioeconomic actions for tackling climate change, ‘eliminate waste and pollution’, ‘circulate products and materials at their highest value’, ‘regenerate nature’. Waste in this context is the central feature of urban ecosystems dominated by cultural, political, and material relationships. Therefore, Cultural Ecology provides a flexible, interdisciplinary toolkit to help individuals and organisations transition to a circular economy. They embrace learning and innovating to apply what they’ve learned in the real world of work and home. However, cultural ecology is only one of many frameworks that could express the needs of localism. For example, the UK’s Royal Society of Art’s Area Based Curriculum indicates that the important thing is for schools to develop a ‘local school curriculum’ in partnership with the communities they serve.
2 The quest For Circularity
Regarding the SIDS, each island is a unique expression of ecology and culture. Education at all levels should reflect this diversity, However, what all islands have in common is their quest for circularity to manage physical wastes, such as plastics, used oil, end-of-life vehicles and e-waste. Solid waste includes garbage, construction debris, commercial refuse, sludge from water supply or waste treatment plants. Solid waste can come from industrial, commercial, mining, or agricultural operations, and from household and community activities (Fig 2).
Fig 2 Diagram of a cross curricular knowledge management system for wastes
The transition to a circular economy is based on three kinds of conservation management plans;
eliminate waste and pollution;
circulate products and materials at their highest value,
and regenerate nature.
How circularity operates is dependent on how individuals and organisations learn to innovate and apply what they’ve learned in the real world, which is driven by design. A circular economy moves away from the ‘take-make-consume-dispose’ model to one in which products and materials are maintained in circulation for as long as possible, and waste and resource use are minimised. In a circular economy this approach is built into the product life cycle from the beginning, starting with the choice and quantities of materials used and the design of products that minimises their impact on the environment both during their production and their use. Underpinned by a transition to renewable energy sources, “growth” in a circular economy is decoupled from the constant consumption of finite resources. It places a higher value on quality and service rather than disposable goods and it involves sharing, repairing, reusing and recycling existing materials while encouraging the regeneration of natural systems and the adoption of a gifting society.
3 The Green Forum
This international forum is managed by the Green Growth Knowledge Partnership (GGKP) – a global community of organisations and experts committed to collaboratively generating, managing, and sharing green growth knowledge. Led by the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the World Bank Group, GGKP draws together more than 75 partner organisations.
The Green Forum is an open, online interactive community space for professionals to share and discuss insights in the pursuit of a sustainable economic transition. The Forum includes discussions on global topics and the ability for users to create dedicated groups focused on specific themes, initiatives, and projects. In addition to posting the latest events, opportunities, and blogs in relevant fields, there are also Discussions and Groups that host focused dialogues based on community interest and demand.
4 The ISLANDS Knowledge System
The Green Forum is the virtual space for Implementing Sustainable Low and Non-Chemical Development in Small Island States (the acronym is ISLANDS). ISLANDS supports thirty-three Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Oceans to pursue safe chemical development pathways.
The overarching objectives of ISLANDS are to:
prevent the build-up of materials and chemicals in the environment that contain harmful chemicals in SIDS;
and soundly manage and dispose of existing harmful chemicals and materials in SIDS.
ISLANDS seeks to address the sound management of chemicals and waste through:
strengthening the capacity of sub-national, national, and regional institutions,
strengthening the enabling policy and regulatory framework in these countries,
and unlocking resources for implementation measures.
It is a virtual space to learn about the ISLANDS Programme and to link with colleagues in all SIDS regions. The Coordination, Communication and Knowledge Management project (CCKM) coordinates this space as well as the Plastics, End-of-Life Vehicles, E-Waste and Used Oil groups.
‘Learning Circularity With SIDS’ is an educational sub division of the ISLANDS group in the Green Forum, where information about circularity is exchanged as posts and links to URLs. The aim is to create a knowledge management system to connect people across the globe who are making action plans to adopt circularity with a green growth economy. Green growth means fostering growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which a country’s well-being relies. Bringing circularity to the center of learning at all levels in SIDS is of increasing importance if these countries are to thrive. Therefore SIDS may be regarded as Eco Learning Centres. They are digital spaces where people of all ages, working across disciplines and environments, go to exchange knowledge, experiences and ideas about how to build a place-based body of knowledge for life pro 2030. The objective of Learning Circularity With SIDS as an ISLANDS sub group is to help them design their particular bit of planet Earth for sustainable circularity, applying the suite of free Google tools for learners to communicate their learning experience in the form of documents, websites and blogs.
SIDS as a network of ECO-learning Centres (ELCs) is a new idea. They are digital spaces for individuals, community groups/schools, specialists, businesses, young people, officials and elected representatives to marshall green skills and curricular improvements. The objective is to create connections with peers and experts learning how to apply their knowledge to design and manage a waste-free environment, identifying governance challenges and business opportunities . ELCs have holistic, flexible pedagogies to frame circularity within and between cultures and their diverse ecologies. In this wider view, they also present ideas and achievements from all small areas designed sustainably (SADS) e.g.biosphere reserves. The mission of ‘Learning Circularity With SIDS’ is to create a global education network of SIDS-based school/community centres for lifelong learning about how to manage local ecosystem services to live sustainably. They function on the principle that knowledge is wealth.
A few words of caution from the educational teformer, Tim Oates. We need to look at resilience in exams, the balance of forms of assessment, student well-being and the way in which we report attainment. But moving prematurely to major system reform would be a huge mistake. We should be very cautious about formulating new arrangements before we know what the post pandemic world and education scene looks like. In particular, we need to understand the real character of remote learning and of the novel national assessment arrangements, then work out the means of establishing stable national standards. “Let’s avoid the cycle of planned failure, not lapse into it”
5 Eco Learning Networks
The following propositions from David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa highlight what they think is distinctive and hopeful about environmental education within SIDS as ‘islands for hope’.
1 environmental education initiatives on islands are markedly eclectic in their rich blending of practice from within the different school/community localities.
2 Environmental education on different islands, especially in the Pacific, is marked by a return to indigenous, community-based learning.
3 There is a distinctive island pedagogy regarding the greater weighting given to relational, socio-affective and action-orientated learning about circular economies.
4 There is a paucity of inter-island cosmopolitan dialogue. Questions are asked about how to ensure islanders, steeped in learning about place, can be brought to connect with the global culture of mass consumerism and its environmental impact.
5 The frequency of cross-curricular, interdisciplinary, even trans-disciplinary framing of environmental education initiatives is identified as bringing a distinctive syllabus and curriculum of hope to island practice.
These educational propositions reject the idea of an open, ever-expanding economy, which inevitably depletes Earth’s finite natural resources every time we create something, leaving behind waste and toxicity when we dump it or burn it. The hope of education for conservation is that by encouraging a circular way of thinking we repair and reuse as much as we can, and remanufacture and recycle to save resources, reduce waste, and reduce costs.
The article, “The Circular Economy Runs Through Basel,” by Paul Hagen, Russ LaMotte, and Dacie Meng, discusses the emergence of the Basel Convention as the key international legal system governing anthropological relationships between culture and ecology. This system is exemplified by the management of toxic waste set out in the Convention’s business plan for 2020-23. With this level of detailed planning and global action the ISLANDS Green Forum created by the Convention can be a virtual classroom for developing island models to bring cultural ecology to the centre of education at all levels. The educational aim is for young people to discuss and promote the adoption of a post-2030 circular economy, communicating ideas and achievements for local environmental sustainability. An eco-learning network (Fig 3) with this aim can rally and unite young people to make realistic, but dynamic change, creating positive impacts for our planet now. It supports them by teaching the skills and knowledge needed to benefit and improve planet Earth throughout their lifetimes. This requires a community development workforce that can support the creation of an inclusive society that encourages individuals to achieve their potential and contribute to society and their communities. The 2030 objectives therefore are to transform learning for young people and adults by facilitating communities to identify their own needs and aspirations, take action to exert influence on the decisions which affect their lives, improve the quality of their own lives, the communities in which they live, and societies of which they are a part.
Fig 3 An online community of practice communicating ideas and achievements to establish a school/community Eco learning network for living sustainably
The blue field in Fig 2 represents a small island developing state which has created an online community of practice consisting of schools and the families they serve networking as an eco learning society. Their objective is to produce and apply neighborhood action plans to promote a local closed cycle economy. People use blogs. e.g. Google Blogger, and the Green Forum to share ideas and achievements. They work with local governance to keep their activities in line with national initiatives and model local businesses that have adopted closed cycle practices, as educational resources. The CCKMS is the cross curricular knowledge management system for mind mapping a school/community Eco learning network (Fig 3).
6 ‘TheBrain’ Knowledge Management System
Traditional directory trees confine information to a strict hierarchical organization and are incapable of expressing the multi-layered relationships that exist in the real world, which people think about and draw meaning from in their ordinary thought processes.
‘TheBrain’ takes the opposite approach—it enables linking information into a network of logical associations. Any piece of information can be linked to any other piece. The power of TheBrain lies in the flexibility of these links. Users can quickly create structures of information that reflect the way they think about information. With ‘TheBrain’ learners can drag and drop files from folders or folders themselves. So they don’t have to abandon their filing system but can visualize it in a manner that reflects their unique thought processes.
With conventional mind mapping software, each map cannot practically be larger than a few hundred items. ‘TheBrain’ is designed to allow tens of thousands of items and files to be integrated into a single workspace. The software offers a dynamic, sharable visual display that is infinitely scalable (Fig 4).
Fig 4 Example of ‘TheBrain’ as across currcular knowledge management system for a conservation management curriculum
The term ecumene comes from the Greek word oikoumene, which means inhabited land or inhabited world. Ecumenes are bounded geographical areas where people have made their permanent home. Ecumenes contain all work areas occupied and used by the population for agricultural or any other economic purpose. They also include areas or features of special interest protected and managed for purposes of conservation. They provide opportunities for study or research into social heritage. The UK town of Grimsby is a good example of an ecumene with dire economic issues (Fig 1). The coastal landscape around it has been characterised by mudflats and salt marshes. The town was mentioned in the Domesday Book, when it had a settled, self contained population of just 200 and a priest, a mill and a ferry. It stands on the creek of a small river which flows into the Humber. For many years and at the end of the Middle Ages, the town itself was virtually an island with only one road into it from the South. Grimsby’s economy was built on fishing the River Humber and the North Sea The arrival of the railway in 1848 made it easier to transport goods to and from the port. Direct rail links to London allowed for fresh ‘Grimsby fish’ to arrive at London’s Billingsgate Fish market and became renowned nationwide. The demand for fish grew to such an extent that at its peak in the 1950s, Grimsby became the largest fishing port in the world.
Five decades later, Grimsby’s socio economic problems were manifold. All that remained of the once 700-strong fleet from its 1950s peak were a couple of crabbing boats and maintenance vessels for the offshore wind industry. To this picture of the economic decline of the fishing industry could be added skills shortages, long-term jobless families, deprivation, drugs, homelessness, empty homes, fly-tipping and children in care. The government’s indices of deprivation ranked Grimsby’s East Marsh as the fourth worst place in the UK for employment, the second for crime and the worst for education, skills and training. These statistics highlight a post industrial educational deficit, which is common to developed and developing ecumenes world wide and requires classrooms in nature with a local syllabus, focussed on the concept of ecological islands, that blends prosperity with ecological localism.
Fig 1 The Grimsby UK ecumene
2 Ecological islands
Nature reserves within ecumenes may be described as ecological islands of high biodiversity in a ‘sea’ of low biodiversity (Fig 2). Nevertheless, whether they are nature sites or urban parks they can form the base of eco learning networks. Such projects reflect current theories of learning including those focusing on the ways people construct understanding of phenomena they encounter in everyday life (constructivism) and those that describe learning as an outcome of interaction with the socio-cultural and bio-physical environment (social learning). Case examples illustrate the myriad of community learning arenas adopting a culture of gifting in which civil society groups, local government, and volunteers collaboratively engage in environmental stewardship, communicating through learning hubs. A gift economy, or gift culture, is a system of exchange where valuables are not sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards.
Fig 2 Wink’s Meadow: a local nature reserve
In general, the concept of ecological islands drives the application of conservation management to protect and enhance nature sites within four key interwoven strands of environmental education (SEEs):
science-framed education, focussed on the conservation management of biodiversity;
place-based, indigenised and bioregional education;
education for climate change and disaster risk;
education for sustainable economic development.
These strands of knowledge are an outline syllabus of radical hope to deliver a widespread consciousness on the fragility of the environment, which can have a very strong impact on people’s quality of life. There are few places in the world where the need for hope about the sustainable use of Earth’s resources is as acute as in islands. Islands should therefore be positioned at the centre of education as socioeconomic models of sustainable development and biological evolution.
The idea of ecumenes provides an overarching, integrative, flexible, humanistic approach for describing and analyzing the inhabited world and its densely populated parts that may be described as big island states. Small island developing states (SIDS) were first recognized as a distinct group of developing countries at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in June 1992. The Barbados Programme of Action was produced in 1994 to assist the SIDS in their sustainable development efforts.
3 Eco Learning Networks
The following propositions from David Selby and Fumiyo Kagawa highlight what they think is distinctive and hopeful about environmental education within SIDS as ‘islands for hope’.
1 environmental education initiatives on islands are markedly eclectic in their rich blending of practice from within the different SEEs.
2 Environmental education on different islands, especially in the Pacific, is marked by a return to indigenous, community-based learning.
3 There is a distinctive island pedagogy regarding the greater weighting given to relational, socio-affective and action-orientated learning about circular economies.
4 There is a paucity of inter-island cosmopolitan dialogue. Questions are asked about how to ensure islanders, steeped in learning about place, can be brought to connect with the global culture of mass consumerism and its environmental impact.
5 The frequency of cross-curricular, interdisciplinary, even trans-disciplinary framing of environmental education initiatives is identified as bringing a distinctive syllabus and curriculum of hope to island practice.
These educational propositions reject the idea of an open, ever-expanding economy, which inevitably depletes Earth’s finite natural resources every time we create something, leaving behind waste and toxicity when we dump it or burn it. The hope of education for conservation is that by encouraging a circular way of thinking we repair and reuse as much as we can, and remanufacture and recycle to save resources, reduce waste, and reduce costs.
The article, “The Circular Economy Runs Through Basel,” by Paul Hagen, Russ LaMotte, Dacie Meng, discusses the emergence of the Basel Convention as the key international legal system governing anthropological relationships between culture and ecology. This system is exemplified by the management of toxic waste set out in the Convention’s business plan for 2020-23. With this level of detailed planning and global action the ISLANDS Green Forum created by the Convention can be a virtual classroom for developing island models to bring cultural ecology to the centre of education at all levels. The educational aim is for young people to discuss and promote the adoption of a post-2030 circular economy, communicating ideas and achievements for local environmental sustainability. An eco-learning network (Fig 3) with this aim can rally and unite young people to make realistic, but dynamic change, creating positive impacts for our planet now. It supports them by teaching the skills and knowledge needed to benefit and improve planet Earth throughout their lifetimes. This requires a community development workforce that can support the creation of an inclusive society that encourages individuals to achieve their potential and contribute to society and their communities. The 2030 objectives therefore are to transform learning for young people and adults by facilitating communities to identify their own needs and aspirations, take action to exert influence on the decisions which affect their lives, improve the quality of their own lives, the communities in which they live, and societies of which they are a part.
Fig 3 An online community of practice communicating ideas and achievements to establish an eco learning network for living sustainably
The blue field in Fig 3 represents a small island developing state which has created an online community of practice consisting of schools and the families they serve networking as an eco learning society to produce and apply neighborhood action plans to promote a local closed cycle economy. People use blogs and the Green Forum to share ideas and achievements. They work with local governance to keep their activities in line with national initiatives and model local businesses, that have adopted closed cycle practices, as educational resources.
A procedure to develop an eco learning network from a grass roots level can begin with a school and the communities it serves according to the following protocol.
the local governance organisation e.g. the parish council;
a local business operating, or working towards, a circular economy.
(iii) The School follows Ecoschool’s 7 steps to an interactive action plan using toolkits, such as those designed for neighbourhood disaster planning, to visualise and meet the plan’s objectives.
(iv) The School communicates its ongoing achievements and ideas to other Ecoschools via blogs and the Green Forum to make the network grow.
To summarise, the educational outcome is to transform learning for young people and adults by facilitating communities to identify their own needs and aspirations. They take action to exert influence on local decisions which affect their lives. These local operations, through a neighbourhood action plan, improve the quality of their own lives, the lives of communities in which they live and work, and the societies of which they are a part. This plan is created by the local Ecoschool and its community, which regularly monitors its performance indicators.
In 2011 the Scottish philosopher Alastair McIntosh curated a conference entitled ‘Kandinsky in Govan’. Govan was, and is still, a part of Glasgow that ranks among the most economically deprived areas in Europe. This was the geographical cultural focus of the conference, to make things better. Keynote speakers included leading art experts and the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, The aim was to reveal how art can speak positively in places of poverty today.
The conference was hosted by community groups that suffered from high unemployment and many social problems, but which retained a powerful community spirit and much artistic talent. For example, since 2001 Plantation Productions, a registered charity, has delivered a wide range of arts and media activities and events in the south-west area of Glasgow. The objective has been to provide opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds to benefit from engaging in the creative arts, where access to such services may otherwise be limited. The projects were aimed at delivering outcome-based programmes to increase the life chances of people facing disadvantage; improve opportunities for families and communities and raise the profile of the area they serve.
In the long history of Govan ‘Kandinsky in Govan’ could be seen as just another top down, short term, charitable initiative. But its novel aspect was an attempt to embed arts reasoning to express sustainability. The importance of Wassili Kandinsky, (1866-1944), in this process is that he was one of the inventors of abstract art (perhaps more accurately, non-representational or object-free art). In 1911 he produced the first abstract watercolor that concentrated on colors and shapes free from the usual subjects or objects of the outside world (Fig1).
Kandinsky writes:
“It has been said… that art is the child of its age. Such an art can only create anartistic future, which is only a child of the age and cannot become a mother of theFuture. She is transitory and to all intent dies the moment the atmosphere alters which nourished her. The other art, that which is capable of educating further, springs equally from contemporary feeling, but is at the same time not only echo and mirror of it, but also has a deep and powerful prophetic strength.”
The ‘other art’ is abstraction, which he saw as a language that was not only capable of expressing deeper truths but also of communicating them to all the senses. Abstraction applied arts’ reasoning to help draw forth a more sustainable and humane world. In particular, Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode and language to express the “inner necessity” of people. ‘Inner necessity’ is a major principle of art dealing with the foundation of forms and the harmony of colours. Kandinsky defines it as the principle of the efficient contact of form and colour with the human imagination to embed and convey universal human emotions, ideas and values. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal of inner necessity with the world for the betterment of society. He realised he was placing new demands on his viewers, declaring that ‘an evolution in observance was necessary’. This meant the spectator had to take part in the creation of a meaning for the work, almost as if in a mystic ritual. In other words, the role of ‘Kandinsky in Govan’ was to acknowledge and apply abstract art as a social service to build an innovative cluster of learning, research and industry. The long-term objective was to stimulate community engagement with the future of Govan starting with the arts, inspiring social change to make it a more attractive place to live, visit and work. This had to begin with providing proactive, ‘go to spaces’ for people in areas characterized by poor availability of good work who want to discuss how to build good work which binds communities as one. In this respect, McIntosh wrote in The Guardian.
“I hear people yearning for what Kandinsky saw as prophetic art. Art that reveals hope. Art that breathes the flow of life into the veins.”
2 Spiritual Activism
Matt Carmichael and Alastair McIntosh, in their book ‘Spiritual Activism: Leadership As Service’ use the expression ‘spiritual activism’ (2015) to mean the spiritual underpinning of action for social and ecological justice.
“It is an underpinning, because it is not sufficient to think of spirituality – that which gives life, – as an optional “dimension” or “element”. If activism is not grounded in spirituality it cannot be sustained in the long run: we either burn out or sell out as the oil of life runs low. We need replenishment from the wellheads of life itself. No matter what religious tradition we may or may not be coming from, this re-sourcing is a question of depth psychology and, we argue, ultimately one of spirituality’.
In October 1911 Kandinsky had gathered his ideas to promote spiritual activism in a little book that he called “Über das Geistige in der Kunst” – usually translated as ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’. Until the invention of abstraction artists were concerned with depicting human physicality. Physicality is a noun that defines the physical body and the needs to make connect with the body through exercise, meditation, massage, dancing, eating and drinking, or sexuality
Spirituality is a broader concept with room for many perspectives. In general, it includes a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, and it typically involves a search for meaning in life. As such, it is a universal human experience, something that touches us all. People often describe their spirituality simply as a deep sense of aliveness and interconnectedness with people and nature.
Spirituality is a noun. It defines thoughts and beliefs about how we should think, feel, or behave about a particular group of people, an activity, a time, or a place. It goes with the claim that abstract art frees our brain from the dominance of reality. Rather than trying to figure out what the painting looks like, just allow yourself to be taken in by it. See what emotions, sensations or memories emerge. Let your eyes relax and travel around the piece without expectation. Examine the colors, forms, materials, surface, and how they interact with each other and produce the third dimension. Take your time. Let the work “speak” to you, enabling it to flow within its inner states. Create new emotional and cognitive associations, and activate brain-states that are otherwise harder to reach. This process is rewarding as far as it enables the exploration of yet undiscovered inner territories of mental spirituality that generate our values.
What we value exerts an important influence on our behaviour. Intrinsic values are those which are inherently rewarding; such as creativity, social justice and connection with nature. Extrinsic values are centered on external approval or rewards; for instance wealth, social status, self image and personal security. We’re each motivated by all these values to some degree and our dominant personal values can change through our lives..
These are just some of the ways in which people can express and cultivate their spirituality where making and viewing abstract art is the catalyst.
relate to friends, family, and neighbours in ways that give and receive love, support, kindness, guidance, loyalty, and forgiveness;
Express yourself creatively or artistically (e.g., woodworking or sewing, writing poetry or making music, painting or sculpting);
appreciate visual or performing arts (e.g., attending a concert, visiting an art gallery, or going to a movie);
read books and engage in conversations about the meaning of life;
Pay attention to the movements of your emotional life, the stirrings of the spirit evident in sadness, longing, love, anxiety/fear, anger, joy, pride, hope, and compassion;
enjoy the natural world (e.g., gardening or hiking, watching songbirds or sunsets, traveling to scenic places, spending time at a cottage, savoring the first snowfall or spring buds;
enjoying comedy and humour (e.g., light-hearted banter in everyday conversation, the capacity to see the joke in life’s discouraging moments, or comedies on the stage or in books or movies);
trying to live ethically, by integrating justice and fairness, peace-making, or green practices into their lives.
Love, trust, and forgiveness are important in your search for meaning within relationships. You grow spiritually as you learn to do these things:
love and care for yourself, express compassion for others, delight in the natural and human-made worlds, and cherish your place and participation in the web of life;
trust your intuitions and conscience, develop trustworthy relationships, trust that meaning can be found in every moment and place of your life, discern whom you can trust, and trust that the universe (or higher entity) is friendly no matter what happens;
forgive yourself for failures and wrongdoing, seek justice when you have been abused or wronged, let go of the desire for revenge when you have been hurt, accept that in the big picture you are accepted and valued just as you are.
3 Adaptable Blogging Clusters
There are currently no real grassroots spaces, institutions or methods to enable people to talk about their future of work, as individuals looking to change their lives, or as members of a community looking for a sustainable future. This hampers meaningful involvement in the design of work futures and is probably the reason why past top down community initiatives, like the ones in Govan, have failed to take root . However, we now live in a world driven by social media, there is no escaping it. So ignoring social media’s potential to advance and enhance adaptive bottom up communication is a dangerous oversight.
This potential can be realised by the formation of blogging communities. These are groups of bloggers formed around a central idea, commonality or interest. Such communities exist to help writers connect around shared characteristics and blog topics, offering them a chance to grow together and learn from one another’s experiences. A suitable mantra is “all failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation”.
We are at the beginning of using blogging for social and educational purposes. Blogs allow others to easily interact and converse in a public setting. They allow Internet users to communicate more easily than most websites, through tools such as comments, trackbacks and social network bookmarking. Interaction is the key to building a successful blogging platform as the go-to places for spiritual activism. In this connection, the Adaptable Blogging Cluster (ABC) (Fig 2) has been established on the Google Blogger platform by International Classrooms On Line to exemplify the data basing logic of a citizen’s environmental network
Fig 2 A blogging system using Google Blogger
The ABC is a group of organisations, families and individuals signed up independently to Google Blogger. They create free blogs and posts and can invite comments on the posts. It is an adaptive micro learning, tool where people and organisations can upload authored information packages and download selected bite size pieces of content according to their ability level.
4 Purposes Of An ‘ABC’
An ABC should:
• provide support to those who want to undertake career transitions, working with and promoting adult education and work placement opportunities with skills providers and local businesses.
• disseminate information about how local and national government shapes the futures of work. This is a precursor to residents effectively engaging in opportunities to shape their collective work future and the architecture and infrastructure that supports it.
• provide space for community led dialogue about how to build futures of work which match the community.
• ensure a strong level of youth participation in conversations about the future of work.
The role of public art reflects a community and its surroundings working to cultivate a cultural identity by setting a community apart and attracting people to its uniqueness. Artwork of any kind helps express a community’s values and creates an elevated sense of awareness for community members and visitors. The special role of abstract art is to encourage the brain to respond in a less restrictive and stereotypical manner, exploring new associations, activating alternative paths for emotions, and forming new creative links in the brain. Therefore, abstract art will always remain popular and current because it is not defined by the artist, the time in which it was created or a subject. Abstract art is emotionally and aesthetically malleable according to the needs of its makers and viewers. In other words every community should ‘Go Kandinsky and create a citizen’s environmental network’.(CEN)
The following three ideas for CENs could provide the basis for ABC solutions,
(ii) The UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP), first published in 1994, proposes a national (CEN) consisting of groupings of schools, communities and individuals to celebrate local nature sites. The Plan suggests that local nature can be protected and promoted in many ways; through the media, tourism and local Government policy. In the longer term it might also reflect the growing interest in building design in harmony with local landscape, materials and traditions.
The Government’s idea was that a CEN could help mobilize the community and individuals as a collective devoted to local conservation management. In particular, it could emphasize the role of biodiversity in local culture and foster personal understandings of being at one with nature. The BAP states that Government will continue to work with voluntary bodies, Local Agenda 21, and business and will vigorously promote the schemes for which it is directly responsible. In addition the BAP says that Government will aim to increase awareness of environmental issues, including conserving and enhancing biodiversity, enlisting support and commitment. These initiatives can take a variety of forms. They may be led in some instances by a local authority, in others by voluntary groups, the Chamber of Commerce, local churches and so on. The BAP goes on to say that the action taken could include round table discussions of local problems and opportunities, public awareness campaigns and practical projects.
For England the idea was that the Department of the Environment would select a small number of voluntary groups, institutions, and consultancies and invite them to tender for a commission to act as a central secretariat to this process. The secretariat would build a register of the local initiatives and put people in touch with each other – creating an informal and varied Network. These schemes did not materialize.
(ii) After the 1992 Environment Summit thousands of young people from nearly 100 countries worked together summarising the outcome as a book entitled ‘Resque Mission Planet Earth’, lavishly illustrated with their artwork and writings. In the section called Getting It Together they described their aims and aspirations for a global network of youth Fig 3.
Fig 3 A global democracy of Youth.
They described their vision as follows
“The first thing to do is to select issues not representatives. That way, we can all choose whatwe want to talk about, after which the question of who does the talking is less important. The first place to organize is in our schools. Each Rescue Mission will start with a conference where we would decide the issues and elect a small action council to see things get done. Like the children’s councils in France, we will have regular access to local government and work with them, perhaps to organize the Local Agenda 21.
With experience at the local level, we’ll be ready to ask for access to state governments.
Representatives from all local councils in our state, region or province will take priority issues decided by local conferences and discuss them at a state conference, again, electing a council to see that things get done. This council would work with state governments to make sure things get done. The final goal is to move on to national, continental and international levels – a step-ladder the things that concern you and me can be carried to the highest levels of power. This is the kind of structure we need to make the Rescue Mission work.
The key to it all is keeping in touch with each other. This is hard to do with the language differences, distances, phone bills etc. The solution is to set up a series of Youth Centres around the world, run by young people from different countries. Their job would be to help set up and promote the Action Councils and to keep in touch with each other. The Rescue Mission will be promoted chiefly through the many existing eco-groups, scouts, guides etc. The Youth Centres will simply promote and network their work and success around the world. Children and governments in the rich world must help pay for centres to be set up in developing countries. Young people from rich and poor countries will work together to making each centre like a youth United Nations – a place where anybody can get the information they want on global problems. It would also be a place where local young people can meet, hang out and chat. Working there for 6 months to a year should be an option to replace National Service. Al Gore sees the Rescue Mission as a way of collecting eco-information. Many of us do that already and it would be good to network that information globally. But this structure could do other things, especially help developing countries. If Mr Gore is serious about partnership, we hope that he will sit down and hear our ideas as well.
That means access. Something we’ve never had. Sure we’ve had photo-opportunities: politicians standing surrounded by kids, or kissing babies. Now we need them really to listen to us. The day could be on different days in different countries but once a year, perhaps on the International Day of Peace (3rd Tuesday in September), we would gather all the results and tell the general public what our leaders have said – how far they kept the promises they made to us the previous year.
Who can participate? Anyone under the age of 18. Non-voters. Older people will be welcome as staff and advisers; (remember -Agenda 21 is about making partnerships!) But under 18s will be in control”.
(iii) Postcards are fundamental learning tools for collecting and organizing paper information. Working with a postcard database does not need a computer but there is always an option to integrate it seamlessly into an electronically networked information society. Indeed, as a basic teaching tool, every postcard has a story to tell about the culture of its maker. Using postcards in class can be a motivating writing task and add a level of stimulation for students. A person sending and receiving postcards at home can quickly build a personal body of knowledge about environmental issues and the skills to tackle them.
Postcards were the first global social network binding the world together with common interests, creating links between people, places, and beliefs. Today they can alert people of all ages about the wonder of creation and the need to bring the climate crisis to the centre of education at all levels for living sustainably. There are forums where you can talk in your own language and share information/cards across social and political boundaries about what you are doing, or should do, individually or collectively to make the world a better place. This means defining social action and active citizenship.
5 Blogging About Social Action & Active Citizenship
Historically, citizenship education has been understood in two ways: as promoting responsible citizens through reflective inquiry, and as active citizenship learned through social action. The responsible citizen approach proposes that schools can prepare students for their civic role by developing their ability to form thoughtful opinions on matters of public policy. Advocates of active citizenship agree that reflective thinking about public matters is important but suggest that students should learn to act on their beliefs. Active citizenship within an ABC challenges students to identify, plan and carry out responsible community actions. Participation in responsible social action is necessary if students are to become participatory citizens. By putting reflective inquiry “to work”, using social media, active citizenship provides students with opportunities to test their ideas and learn about personal efficacy through social action.
The logic for making community action plans to change things for the better Version 1 05/07/2012
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1 Advantages of community engagement
A national government view
In 2010, the Social Justice Department of the Welsh Government produced an action plan to develop a high quality and responsive community development sector in Wales, with a focus on bringing about change founded on social justice, equality and inclusion. The aim is to strengthen Wales’s economic performance and transform the life chances of people in Wales. This requires a community development workforce that can support the creation of an inclusive society that encourages individuals to achieve their potential and contribute to society and their communities. The objective therefore is to transform learning for young people and adults by facilitating communities to identify their own needs and aspirations, take action to exert influence on the decisions which affect their lives, improve the quality of their own lives, the communities in which they live, and societies of which they are a part.
A local government view
Wrexham Borough Council Leader Aled Roberts has illustrated through a series of examples how his own local authority had benefited from involving residents in setting up and running local services. This experience also demonstrated that there is no single model of neighbourhood regeneration because communities are best placed to decide how it should be done. Quoted from ‘’Bringing Neighbourhood Centre Stage in Wales; 2008′
A community view
‘Come Outside!’ was a Wales-wide scheme, which enables communities to gain the benefits that the outdoors has to offer. By addressing community needs and aspirations through outdoor activities, participation becomes valued and the benefits are sustained. Dave Horton, Senior Community Development Worker Ely/Caerau, where this scheme was tested in Cardiff, said:
“This project is aimed at uniting the communities of Ely and Caerau and giving people the confidence to enjoy their local environment.
“It also offers the local community a chance to learn new conservation skills such as planning and managing green spaces.”
A school view
“Schools should engage with families and the broader community, including businesses, other statutory agencies and the voluntary sector. Schools also need to work with other agencies to address the well-being and citizen aspirations of individual learners. When schools work with other agencies to deliver joined-up programmes, the full range of resources and expertise can be harnessed to deliver improved learner outcomes and well-being.”
2 General logic model for community change
A logic model is a story or picture of how an effort or initiative is supposed to work. The process of developing the model brings together stakeholders to articulate the goals of the program and the values that support it, and to identify strategies with desired outcomes of the initiative. These strategic plans are turned into action plans using an operational planning and recording system.
As a means to communicate a program visually, within a coalition or work group and to present it to external audiences, a logic model provides a common language and reference point for everyone involved in the initiative.
A logic model is essential for collaborative community planning, implementing a plan and evaluating the initiative. It helps stakeholders in the neighbourhood to agree on short-term as well as long-term objectives during the planning process, decide on activities and actors, and establish clear criteria for evaluation during the effort. When the initiative ends, it provides a framework for assessing overall effectiveness of the initiative, as well as the activities, resources, and external factors that played a role in the outcome.
To develop a specific model, it will probably be necessary to use both forward and reverse logic. Working backwards, a start can be made with the desired outcomes and then identify the strategies and resources leading to projects that will accomplish them. Combining this with forward logic produces an operational pathway to produce the desired effects (Fig 1).
Fig 1 General community planning logic
The model will probably be revised. This is precisely one advantage to using a logic model. because it relates program activities to their effect,. It helps keep stakeholders focused on achieving outcomes, while it remains flexible and open to finding the best means to enact a unique story of change. For these reasons it is important to start with a prepared document template. It is important that this template produced a ‘live’ document that is kept up to date and does not gather dust on the shelf.
An understanding of planning logic is necessary for all human activities, from baking a cake to running a multi-national corporation. The basic procedure for making a community action plan is to set a measurable objective for a feature of the neighbourhood that raises a local issue, schedule the work to be done to meet the goal, and report what was actually done. Monitoring is then carried out to check how close the outcome is to the objective. Plans are essentially diaries of what to do, what was done, what the outcome was and what remains to be done.
Making a start with local ‘green’ issues is good beginning because the increase and maintenance of local biodiversity is the central principle of sustainable development on all geographical scales and is closely associated with the establishment of a sense of place. This could be tidying up waste ground, tree planting etc.
Sense of place encompasses the meanings that a given place holds for people and the attachments that people develop for that place. It is expressed when people say they feel good about where they live.
There is a broad environmental element, pinpointed by what have come to be known as ‘front door issues of environmental poverty’ and an economic element (the ‘back kitchen’ issues of traditional poverty.
Environmental justice seeks solutions to front door issues of environmental poverty. These issues are usually defined in the ‘square mile’ where people live, walk and socialise.
The overall aim of a logic model for making an action plan for community change is therefore to increase the proportion of people who feel good about their square mile/neighbourhood’. Success in achieving this objective is measured with simple before and after surveys that can be done within the community. Valid and reliable surveys for measuring sense of place exist and have been tested successfully as assessment instruments. These yield outcome performance indicators of the community action plan.
Factors influencing community well being are many and varied:
i Sociability, which includes:
Number of women, children and elderly
Social networks
Volunteerism
Evening use of the neighbourhood
Street life
ii Uses and activities, which includes:
Ownership of local business
Land use patterns
Property values
Rent levels
Shops
iii Comfort and image, which includes
Crime
Sanitation rating
Littering/refuse collection
Condition of buildings
Trees, gardens and grass
Graffiti
Local history/heritage highlights
Signage
Recreation/play areas
Creative arts groups
iv Access and linkages, which includes
Traffic
Public transport
Pedestrian and cycling activity
Condition of roads and pavements
Parking patterns
Success in creating a good sense of place depends on bringing many different providers of expertise and finance together to enable community volunteers to address one or more of above factors in an action plan.
“Action plans express the passions people have about their neighbourhood”
3 Co-production
Co-production as a system
A Definitions of co-production
“On a simple level, co-production is about involving people in the delivery of public services, helping to change their relationship with services from dependency to genuinely taking control.” – Communities in Control, NHS Tayside Health Equity Strategy
“Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours.” – New Economics Foundation It recognises and aims to combine and strengthen different kinds of knowledge and experience, changing the balance of power from the professional towards the service user.” – Scottish Community Development Centre
“I dislike the term co-production…..but absolutely support the concept. It is about involving people not only in the rowing and the steering of the boat, but also in actually building it.” – Mr Sandy Watson OBE DL, Chairman NHS Tayside
“Co-production is the process of active dialogue and engagement between people who use services, and those who provide them” – Sir Harry Burns, Chief Medical Officer for Scotland
“On a personal level it’s about learning to let go of my control, and rely instead on my influence, as an equal partner, over the things which affect the lives of other people.” – Dr Drew Walker, director of Public Health, NHS Tayside
‘For me it’s about combining our mutual strengths and capacities so that we can work with one another on an equal basis to achieve positive change’ – Fiona Garven, Director, SCDC
‘…co-design involves many actors with different knowledge and backgrounds who get together to improve on each other’s ideas and develop something new. In co design, we often use the term ‘rehearsing the future’,”
B Co-production as a 3-step procedure
Step 1 Social engagement to exchange ideas and values
• Gaining insights of the community’s needs
• Gaining insights of the community’s assets to meet the needs
Step 2 Technical enablement to reach desired outcomes
• Setting objectives as desired outcomes and making a plan to gather and schedule assets to reach these outcomes
• Review the actual outcomes against the desired outcomes
Step 3 Modify the plan if necessary
4 The LEAP for Wales action plan logic
LEAP stands for ‘learning, evaluation and planning’, which is the title of a community framework document designed by the Scottish Community Development Centre (SCDC) to support a partnership approach to achieving change and improvement in the quality of community life (Fig 2).
‘LEAP for Wales’ is a development of the Scottish initiative as a community planning/recording procedure, which incorporates the feedback logic of the conservation management system (CMS) software, used by UK Environment Agencies and Wildlife Trusts to produce conservation management plans for nature sites. Making a community LEAP for Wales is based on answering the following seven questions (Fig 3).
1 What are the issues that bug the community?
(Identifying the need)
2 What does the community want to see happen?
(Setting the vision and the specific objectives)
3 What are the barriers preventing the community getting where it wants to be? (Determining the limiting factors of the objectives)
4 How will the team know when they have overcome the barriers?
(Setting measurable outcomes as performance indicators)
5 What work has to be done?
(Scheduling resources and actions)
6 What progress is being made?
(Monitoring by measurement of outcome performance indicators)
7 Who needs to know the outcomes?
(Feedback reports to the team, partners and funders)
The SCDC says their LEAP framework should be useful to community organisations; local authorities; voluntary sector organisations; and policy makers, particularly those involved in community well being programmes, community planning partnerships, community regeneration programmes, and social inclusion and social justice initiatives.
• It encourages critical questioning to ensure that all those with a stake in taking action for environmental improvements are working to a shared agenda.
• The LEAP framework emphasises self-evaluation, encouraging participants to take joint responsibility for planning and evaluation throughout a project or programme. • It is a learning-based planning and evaluation framework to support good practice in community working to improve the quality of community life.
• It helps identify the difference a community hopes to make, to plan more effectively, work in partnership with each other and other members of the community, and learn the lessons from the experience.
• The LEAP framework can be used in different contexts, to support the work of different sectors, and at project, programme and policy level. It is particularly useful as a tool to support partnership working and the production of community action plans.
Fig 2 The original LEAP logic diagram (2005)
Fig 3 The LEAP for Wales logic diagram
5 Networking for community action
Plans can be made on paper, when a community sets out to answer the seven questions of the CMS logic, but using software as a set of spreadsheets or a dedicated database-diary is better for continuity and reporting. In a wider community context, conservation management is equated with planning for sustainability in all aspects of community life. Every nook and cranny of a neighbourhood becomes a distinctive place worthy of environmental surveillance and a community action plan. A plan can be modelled on the preservation or enhancement of the community’s core green heritage assets, no matter how small. The plan can then be extended to include the management of other community assets/issues, such as health, transport, security, energy use, tidiness, and opportunities for employment and recreation. In this context the basic planning logic unifies action and recording across sectorial boundaries.
When the UK strategy for sustainable development was first launched, the idea of a national citizen’s environmental network was proposed. The aim was to unite people to share their ideas and achievements in making and running community action plans for living sustainably. It was envisaged that a ‘copycat network’ should be initiated and controlled at the community level to ensure good ideas and practices are copied and multiplied. However, the idea as it was originally proposed, did not materialise; the Internet was in its infancy and freely available social networking software did not exist.
An environmental network needs to have the following two features:
(i) A system for social networking
(ii) A freely accessible database for presenting the community’s planning process and its current state of progress towards meeting outcomes of citizen-led environmental improvements.
The Internet is now available to accommodate these two features on line. The first requirement is exemplified by text-based screen presentations such as ‘wikis’, blogs and ‘conversational threads’; the second is illustrated by the ‘web viewer’ for presenting versions of the databases that are used to record planning and its outcomes as a process, which can both be interrogated on line by every member of the community.
An Internet community consists of:
• People, who act socially as they strive to satisfy their own needs or perform special roles, such as leading or moderating;
• A shared purpose, such as an interest, need, information exchange, or service that provides a facility for the community;
• Policies, in the form of tacit assumptions, rituals, protocols, rules, and laws that guide people’s interactions;
• Software systems, to support and mediate social interactions and facilitate a sense of togetherness”
These common activities help to create a sense of community by providing a common feeling of identity, with which the members of the community can associate themselves. This growth of trust between members of a community is an important factor in the success of an online
community. The common factors that help shape the behaviour of community members become practiced habits that help to construct the norms and identity of the community as a whole. The strength of such a network is frequently perceived to impart a heightened vitality to the community, and contributes to a strong sense of community identity.
Social networking
Social networking is the process of initiating, developing and maintaining friendships and collegial or project sharing relationships for mutual benefit. Current discussions surrounding social networking deal with web-based or technology-mediated tools, interactions, and related phenomena, but social networking really takes place in many forms, including face to face. A community that is active in strong in planning and acting grows through social networking, a process in which the Internet is now a primary driver.
Much technology-facilitated social networking is done in the form of person-to-person exchanges that can be classified as question and answer, point and counterpoint, announcement and support, action and feedback.
Technologies that facilitate social networking tend to emphasize ease of use, spontaneity, personalization, exchange of contacts, and low-end voyeurism. Some technologies that are often considered social networking technologies may not be socially oriented in and of themselves, but the communities that form around such technologies often demonstrate key elements of social networking (for example, the discussion communities that form around collaboratively authored wiki content).
Online community networks are often developed and deployed to supplement residential face to-face communities in an effort to revitalise and grow neighbourhoods and to revive civic engagement and local community identity in society. In this context, the ubiquity of the Internet enables and encourages users to pursue ‘personalized networking’ which leads to the emergence of private ‘portfolios of sociability’. ‘Proximity’ is the factor in on line residential communities, which produces networked individualism. This gives online residential communities a competitive advantage over dispersed online communities. Residential networks allow residents to interact online and to continue developing online interaction offline, in real life and face to face. This offline and place-based dimension introduces challenges to the design, development and rollout of online community networks.
Reaching a critical mass of users is considered to be the key criterion of success and has been reported as one of the most common stumbling blocks: “If you build it, they will not necessarily come”. However, other studies have shown that a critical mass of interconnected users alone is not sufficient for a community network to live up to higher expectations, such as increasing social capital in the community, fostering sociability and establishing community identity. Those geographic communities already rich in social capital may become richer thanks to community networks, and those communities poor in social capital may remain poor, or simply put, connectivity does not ensure community. Something else has to be done. The Internet neither destroys nor creates social capital, people do, and the Internet will not automatically offset the decline in more conventional forms of social capital, but it has that potential.
Some examples of popular social networking technologies include:
• asynchronous discussions via discussion boards or newsgroups
• instant messaging, e.g. MSN, AIM, and ICQ
• text-messaging or SMS
• message logging and sharing, such as Twitter
• document sharing and controlled collaborative authoring, such as Zoho or Google Docs & Spreadsheets
• loosely structured collaborative authoring and information sharing, such as wikis. • photo sharing, such as Flickr and Picasa
• video sharing, such as YouTube
• blogs (life-sharing, news analysis, and editorialising)
• online communities, such as Nings, Facebook, etc.
• Second Life – sort of a combination of many of the above communication and collaborative tools.
Electronic networks may help support human networks and combat social exclusion provided there is sufficient access and support. Experience shows that most communities start as small emergent clusters organized around common interests or goals. Usually these clusters are isolated from each other. They are very small groups of 1-5 people or organizations that have connected out of necessity. Many of these small clusters are found in under-developed communities. If these clusters do not organize further, the community structure remains weak and under-producing. Without an active leader who takes responsibility for building a network spontaneous connections between groups emerge very slowly, or not all. This network leadership role is known as a network weaver. Instead of allowing these small clusters to drift in the hope of making a lucky connection, the weaver actively creates new interactions between the clusters. Through this activity useful community structures emerge. This process is not easy to start, to maintain and to spread.
Spreading know how, good ideas and achievements is vital so that a community knows where it stands. This requires groups coming together in geographical nodes, which then make connections with other nodes. Nodes can appear and coalesce in community facilities, such as churches and heritage centres. Establishing nodes is also vital for bringing new communities on board and to provide local training in the planning logic and how to use software. It was to serve these purposes that the ecomuseum emerged as an idea to promote the establishment of self-sustaining citizen’s environmental networks.
“The greatest limiting factor in setting up a regional citizen’s environmental
network is to establish local training centres”.
6 Neighbourhood ecomuseums
Introduced by the French museologist Hugues de Varine in 1971, the word ecomuseum is used to define a very special kind of museum based on an agreement by which a local community takes care of a place (M.Maggi, 2002, Ecomusei. Guida europea, Torino-Londra Venezia, Umberto Allemandi & C.), where:
• agreement, means a long term commitment, not necessarily an obligation by the law; • local community, means a local authority and a local population jointly; • take care, means that some ethical commitment and a vision for a future kind of local development are needed;
• place, means not just a surface but complex layers of cultural, social, environmental values, which define a unique local heritage.
According to “Declaration of Intent of the Long Net Workshop, Trento (Italy), May 2004” an Ecomuseum is a dynamic way in which communities preserve, interpret, and manage their heritage for a sustainable development.
A ‘dynamic way’ means to go beyond the formal aspect of a museum, and beyond a simple set course, designed on paper. It is about designing real actions, able to change society and improve the landscape.
Community means a group with:
• general involvement;
• shared responsibilities;
• interchangeable roles: where public officers, representatives, volunteers and other local actors are all playing a vital role in an ecomuseum.
Ecomuseums are more properly defined by what they do rather than by what they are. Interest in ecomuseums is growing all the time. Museums of this type are now springing up all over Europe. Over 80% of such initiatives saw the light in the last 30 years, and the phenomenon multiplied notably in the 1980s. After the Second World War, the entire landscape and the economy of European countries had been turned upside down: factories closed, unemployment reached new levels, trades disappeared, traditions, customs and modes of life were wiped out. It is during this period of rapid transformation that the concept of the “Ecomuseum” came to life; partly to protect some of this complex heritage and also as a tool to help the concerned populations that gave a meaning to this heritage. Examples of abound in Europe and notably in France around the industrial parks of Eastern and Northern France that had been abandoned during the early 20th century.
The basic tasks of the ecomuseum do not differ from those of traditional museums and heritage centres to collect, document, study, conserve and communicate a given heritage. However, “new” museums differ from conventional museums in that they ascribe utilitarian value to the tasks of preservation and connect the work to non-museum aims, such as the presentation of ideas to promote living sustainably.
The area for the ecomuseum is referred to as a discrete territory, which can be a parish or electoral ward, or a region consisting of a group of these communities networked to a regional node, which could be a conventional museum (Fig 4). In the context of LEAP, the ecomuseum is could be seen as a virtual on-line entity using social networking software to present and explain its exhibits, in the form of pictures, videos, audio files and text documents.
Fig 4 Necklace models of ecomuseums
“To connect is to be human”
7 An integrated model of localism
Organisations of all sizes suffer from the consequences of internal functional barriers. This is a major pain point in government because because most major strategies require support from many different support groups. In order to break down these silos, each functional group and
the individuals within it must understand how they fit into the core functions of bigger strategic frameworks. The problem is variously termed as Silo Thinking, Silo Vision, Silo Mentality or the Silo Effect. This is evident when departments, teams or staff, who may be high performers individually, fail to choreograph their activities to deliver their resources required to integrate with the inputs from others. This symptom is so widespread that it is often accepted as an inevitable problem within all organisations. Except that it is not inevitable. The problem with organizations that are trapped in this siloed mentality is that employees rarely study how their function relates to the inputs of others.
Silo thinking of this kind can only be overcome by all providers working to a common systems model, which for community development is described as a community resource map. The map defines the connections between stakeholders and those in support. It shows the alignment and deployment of the resources from a particular agency or department towards a clear set of objectives, with accountability for the efficiency and effectiveness of their application. Managers will then take responsibility for defining clearly what has to be achieved for their group to secure its successful integration into the mission.
Community resource mapping is a strategy for promoting inter-agency collaboration by better have access to a broad, comprehensive, and integrated system of services essential in achieving desired outcomes defined by the stakeholders. Community resource mapping can be used to improve education, workforce development, and economic development in a community by aligning available services and resources, streamlining those services and resources, and identifying areas of need. The idea of resource mapping builds on the community’s strengths by increasing the frequency, duration, intensity, and quality of services and supports in the community. It is a route map to organize information and give direction to meet a common community goal. As a result of resource mapping, people have more flexibility and choice in navigating the system, whether they be providers or stakeholders.
Community resource mapping is particularly important as a strategy for improving outcomes for communities with complex and varied needs. When collectively pooled, resources for such communities can create a synergy that produces services well beyond the scope of what any single provider can hope to mobilize. The alignment of resources, streamlining of resources, and identification of service gaps within the community enables educators and service providers to (a) understand the full range of services available to different members within a community, (b) more efficiently provide the specific supports needed by each, and (c) develop new services and supports targeted to fill existing gaps.
An example of a community resource map is presented in Fig 4. It is a system designed to funnel services from departments within the Welsh government, local government and partner agencies, so that national community development strategies can be more effectively integrated into communities who are making action plans to increase their well being. It was outlined at the ‘Environmental Event’ held in Cardiff, in May 2012 and was later developed into the ‘cynefin’ system for promoting place-based community action plans.
Fig 5 Community resource map for integrating top-down support for bottom-up needs
Wales has many firsts in environmental education and a postcard educational database was invented by Welsh teachers in the late 1990s as “Postcards for Our Planet” (POP). This was a pre INTERNET communication system linking schools in Wales and Portugal. The objective was to model a global democracy of youth to access leaders with young people’s ideas and concerns about how to ‘rescue’ planet Earth. It was a postcard version of the citizen’s environmental network proposed in the first UK strategy for sustainable development. The idea was to help young people identify the good and bad things about where they live, then work to improve the bad things and share their ideas, achievements and experiences globally with handmade postcards.
‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ (NNP) began in the 2010s as a microlearning scheme linking primary and secondary schools in Wales with their European counterparts. NNP revisits POP. It is a model in environmental education to encourage people to have empathy for the conservation of wildlife. This is achieved by individuals telling stories about the environment by combining sight-sized data in pictures, with text to make bite-sized topics of knowledge that can be assembled into the meal-sized subject of conservation management (Fig 1).
Fig 1 Making a meal of data and knowledge
In IT, symbols, characters, images, or numbers are data. These are the inputs an IT system needs to process in order to produce a meaningful interpretation. Data in and of itself is not useful until human intelligence is applied to convert it to knowledge through the identification of patterns and trends, relationships, assumptions, and relevance. In other words, data in a meaningful form becomes knowledge.
Generally speaking, bite-sized e-learning modules are small, self-contained pockets of knowledge, usually defined as topics. They are shared with other topic-makers in a microlearning environment; i.e. a classroom or on line. They typically range in duration from 1 to 15 minutes and are usually focused on one or two tightly defined learning objectives. Here are a few examples.
We are now in the where visual content plays a big role in every part of life. It is estimated that 65 percent of the population are visual learners, so graphics are key to engaging students in eLearning courses. Sight-sized visuals summarize content in smaller, and easier to process chunks, and when the right visuals are selected to make a bite-sized knowledge nugget, they offer more comprehensibility than text-based explanations or stand alone audios. Also, students effortlessly relate emotions with visuals, which make eLearning courses based on pictures more impactful and memorable than only using text.
Between 1875 and the 1940s, cigarette companies often included collectible cards with their packages of cigarettes. Cigarette cards (fag cards) are one of the earliest examples of bite-sized knowledge nuggets in a system of mass production. The BKNs are small trading cards issued by tobacco manufacturers to stiffen cigarette packaging and advertise cigarette brands. Regarding their use as educational materials one side contains the visual representation of what the card is about. The reverse side of the card would have a short description of the subject of the card. Albums could be bought to hold collections of cards relating to different topics (Fig 2).
Fig 2 . An album of 50 fish species found in the coastal waters of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, issued by John Player and Sons
All kinds of BKNs can support classroom and distance learning about how to live sustainably. The differences between them are the systems of delivery. In this context, BKNs can be assembled as narratives to engage practically with the United Nations 2030 sustainable development goals. These put nature first in all that we do and orientate civilization toward non material ends. In terms of pedagogy, BKN’s can be thought of as the basis for new life skills packages for teaching ecocacy. Ecosacy defines the relationships between culture and ecolog to be taught alongside literacy and numeracy, for people to prosper within an overcrowded planet. In the new Welsh humanistic syllabus of hope, life skills are essentially those abilities that help promote mental well-being and competence in young people as they face the realities of life.
2 Postcards and other knowledge nuggets
(i) Postcards
A postcard holds tangible memories with pictures and words to amuse and delight. ‘Networking Nature With Postcards’ is a hybrid analogue/digital version of classical postcarding. It is part of a social platform that utilizes the mailing, networking technology of the 21st century to preserve the old-fashion handwritten bought postcard, but illustrating it with a unique handcrafted personalised image. These postcard pictures aren’t squashed versions of bigger, bolder artworks and photographs, like Twitter and Instagram. They are public works of art and you can display the pictures you make in your own gallery. Also, postcards are valued because we can hold them and look at them over and over without the need to open a computer screen to search and scroll. It is Instagram and Twitter in one and every bit as lovely and keepable as the art we frame and hang on walls. On the other hand, any kind of picture/text on screen package is a powerful tool for classroom learning and communicating between classrooms, particularly where it brings art and science together, to apply arts reasoning to express sustainability.
As an individual sending and receiving postcards all you have to do is to compose an information package, consisting of a picture and some text, to make a postcard and send it to the recipients saying how nature makes you feel, why you enjoy nature and what you are doing locally to put nature first in all that you do. As a teacher you can make nature postcards as a classroom exercise and post and receive cards from other classes on behalf of your class. Initiating or joining a topic forum allows ideas and achievements to be presented for discussion and development by attaching a picture/text package to a post.
(ii) Tweets
Digital platforms for making knowledge nuggets are exemplified by Twitter. Twitter is a really a microblogging platform that allows individuals to communicate by sending short messages of up to 280 characters. Although it enables people to be in constant contact, its value in an educational context is less clear. Twitter as an educational tool is able to open up totally new worlds for students and allows Tweeters to collaborate and participate in meaningful hashtag chats.. The advice given today by Twitter to increase your reach as a twitterer is to ‘add a picture; people like pictures!’. Additional information is accessed through an URL link. An entire suite of Tweets is extractable using #-tagged filters. Feedback is available using ‘Twitter Analytics’, which displays day by day ‘impressions’ and ‘engagements’ for each Tweet. An ‘impression’ is a Tweet that has been delivered to the Twitter stream of a particular account. An ‘engagement’ could be a click to a landing page, a reply to a Tweet, or a comment on a Facebook post. Either way, the record of an engagement means that someone has the Tweeter’s attention and they have become engaged in a positive way. In Twitter-speak, a ‘Moment’ is a set of Tweets curated in a sequence that tells a story. It is a personal linear narrative; a mind map incorporating the personal Tweets of its maker. It can also include other people’s Tweets. ‘Moments’ have their own URLs and can be shared and developed with others.
To summarise, Tweets are sight-sized pieces of information that are turned into a body of knowledge when they are packaged as a Moment. Here is an example of two year’s tweeting on the topic of Climate Change.
(iii) Flashcards
Making flashcards in a classroom is akin to making postcards. The former can be considered as virtual postcards because the act of making flashcards is a way to “work” the information of picture and text,, challenging students to think about which picture to have on one side and the related description on the other. Like postcards, flashcards can be swapped between classes to establish a network.
Flashcards are small note cards used for bite size information retrieval which can then be used for improving memory through practiced information retrieval. Flashcards are typically two-sided, with the prompt on one side and the information about the prompt on the other. This may include names, vocabulary, concepts, or procedures. A flashcard is the ideal medium for a visual learner, because it presents the essence of an idea or concept in a clear and precise image. Whether a flashcard contains text, pictures, or a combination of the two, it is in an ideal format for visual learners.
4 The System
This picture/text system is being assembled and tested in a school context to network classrooms in Wales to support the new humanities-centered Welsh curriculum.
The system (Figs 3 & 4) consists of three components;
a geographic mother hub, which is a place that exemplifies conservation management in action;
a technical hub which provides the facility for sending, receiving, saving and displaying postcards or other kinds of BKNs;
a topic forum which stores knowledge and records discussion about a topic in environmental education;
To begin, a teacher should have:
a topic to discuss; e.g.global warming
a fact to present; e.g. national ecological footprints
an opinion to state; e.g. syllabus development
a request to make; e.g. please send information about….
a destination to reach; e.g. an individual or an organisation;
a technical hub as a collection of resources to facilitate the project e.g. a social medium;
and a geographical hub as a place to refer to that exemplifies conservation management in action; e.g. a designated nature site.
The rationale for exchanging BKNs involves the seamless integration of the process of making and sending them with the Geographic Mother Hub and the Technical Hub (Figs 3 ).
Fig 3 Networking nature with postcards: the basics.
Fig 4 Relationships of topics with the mother hub
Fig 5 The complete system
The mother hub, which if the hub is a nature reserve is called a nature hub, is the source of ideas and information to distill into BKNs as distinct packages of knowledge about how the reserve functions as a managed ecosystem . In this connection, animals protected in a hub can be said to be the watchers of the world, the gatekeepers of the environment. Animal BKNs are the prime messengers of the state of the ecosystem and its management backed up with a library of copyright free digital resources..
5 The History
In its promotion of Networking Nature with Postcards the sponsors are revisiting the young people’s syllabus of hope produced by an international youth group immediatley after the Rio 1992 environment summit. The Schools in Communities Agenda 21 Network (SCAN) was a spin off from this in Wales, where it was funded by Texaco, the Countryside Council for Wales and Dyfed County Council. SCAN now exists as three Google Sites, ( nowSCAN , Rescue Mission Planet Wales and Skomer Island). SCAN also led to the schools phenology network managed by the National Museum in Cardiff, SCAN Spring Bulbs For Schools.
Appendix 1
Puffins and Pandas
1 History
In 2020 a wildlife competition, The Puffin Prize, was sponsored by The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales (WTSWW) & International Classrooms On Line (ICOL). The organizers of the competition were trying to understand why young people enjoy nature. What do they find interesting and exciting and what would encourage them to explore further, to spend more time with nature?
All that the entrants had to do was to share one of their favourite experiences of nature. It could be a visit to a nature reserve, or a walk through an urban woodland, a hedgerow or a field full of flowers. The nature experience could be submitted as an art poster, an essay, a poem, a picture or a combination of any of these.
The hope was that the submissions would signify why the applicants enjoyed nature, what they find interesting or exciting and what makes them want to get close to wildlife. Perhaps they would come up with ideas that would make it easier for them to explore the countryside and its wildlife.
2 ‘Puffins And Pandas’
‘Puffins And Pandas’ is a new project that developed from reflections on the responses to the Puffin Prize’. In particular, feedback pointed towards the need to boost the use of IT networking for people to engage seamlessly with environmental issues by creating digital stories about nature conservation. Inspired by the blogs ‘Kate On Conservation, and Nerworking Nature With Postcards, ‘Puffins And Pandas is a group of bloggers, each using Google Blogger to create a personal informational website for sharing discrete diary-posts about ideas and issues of managing Earth for wildlife conservation.
To take this viewpoint brings nature writing into focus. Because of developments in IT, illustrated digital stories are now both easy to produce and simple to publish and are an ideal way to energize learning and engage people of all ages in blogging at a deeper level. Digital storytelling creates space for individuals to pursue personalized topics about which they are passionate. It grows their learning around assigned topics, and showcases their learning for peers, teachers, and audiences beyond school, all of whom are able to network with the storytellers.
Puffins and Pandas are the world’s most well known animals and they are universally recognised as being charismatic symbols of nature conservation. They are beautiful, endangered, and loved. Like the Giant Panda, Puffins carry messages of hope that humanity will eventually put nature first in all that we do before it is too late.
Oliver Prince, Puffineer in the UK Puffin Project says: “Puffins are lovely and remarkable birds. They have so much character with their handsome appearance, their behaviour around burrows, the lovely noises they make and the astonishing effort they go to feed their young pufflings!”
Puffins are wild animals that are easy to anthropomorphise so they can bridge the communications gap between humans and the wild and free. In particular, they can spark interest in addressing climate change, reducing and cleaning up plastic waste, and other human-caused challenges that threaten their existence. In this sense we can have conversations about nature conservation on behalf of puffins..
‘Puffins and Pandas’ is a conceptual vehicle to allow the power of storytelling to blossom in learning spaces. The nature hub, is the small Welsh island of Skomer. The technical hub is Google Classroom, and/or Google Blogger.
To help these conversations along two flipbooks are available as copyright free resources, ‘The Atlantic Puffin’, provides a detailed study of the natural history of puffins.on Skomer The book is illustrated with over 70 colour photographs of puffins showing fascinating pioneering shots of them both underwater and underground. The other flip book, ‘Skomer Island’, is the readable report of the first field survey of the island carried out in 1946.
‘Puffins And Pandas’ is not a competition. The aim is to encourage Micro-learning, which involves learning in small steps. School activities based on micro-learning usually feature short-term lessons, projects, or coursework that is designed to provide the student with ‘bits’ of information. For example, rather than trying to create a broad subject all at once, aspects of the subject are broken down into smaller pieces of data and reassembled as personalised topics, thus recycling eye-sized information into knowledge and networking it via the Internet.
The copyright free digital resources to help people along are:-
To participate all you have to join the coll;ective do is create a free account with Google Blogger, create your very own Blogger and send its Internet address to
Zoe and bios both mean life in Greek, but they are not synonymous. Zoe… refers to life in general, without characterization. Bios characterizes a specific life, the outlines that distinguish one living thing from another. Bios is the Greek root for ‘biography,’ zoe for ‘zoology.
Zooetic, or zoetic, means living or vital. It is in use today to address the paradigm shift in science, culture and society expressed in the concept of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Project is a multidisciplinary body of work combining fine art photography, film, virtual reality, augmented reality, and scientific research to investigate human influence on the state, dynamic, and future of Earth. It is a quest to explore new ways of engaging human knowledge and research for humankind to exist along with the rights and freedoms of other forms of life and to imagine designs, prototypes and interfaces to apply artistic reasoning for the conservation management of future interspecies ecosystems.
Applied Zooetics can be understood as “Framing the Anthropocene in Art”. Once an impaired ecological interface of the transition/contact zone between humans and ‘nature’ is framed as art, a work of art emerges. The process never leaves the viewer unaffected Understandings of the meeting place and its cultural value are consolidated and expressed in love, respect and care.
In his book, The Silent Earth, Dave Goulson, writing about the cultural value of insects says:
“For me, the economic value of insects is just a tool with which to bash politicians over the head. They only seem to value money, so I point out to them that insects contribute to the economy. But if I’m honest, their economic worth has nothing whatsoever to do with why I try to champion their cause. I do it because I think they are wonderful. The sight of the first brimstone butterfly of the year, a flash of golden yellow wings in my garden on the first warm day in late winter, brings joy to my heart. Similarly, the chirrup of bush crickets on a summer’s eve, or the sound of clumsy bumble-bees buzzing among the flowers, or the sight of a painted lady butterfly basking in the spring sunshine after her long migration from the Mediterranean — they all soothe my soul. I cannot imagine how desolate the world would be without them. These little marvels remind me what a wonderful and fascinating world we have inherited. Are we really willing to condemn our grandchildren to live in a world where such delights are denied them?”
A special feature of zooetics is that the concept engages with shifts in contemporary understandings of nature by applying arts reasoning to express sustainability. Works of art are not merely representations of the way things are seen but function to reveal and evolve a community’s shared understanding of its environment. Each time a new artwork is added to any culture, the meaning of what it is to exist in that culture is inherently changed. From this point of view all art is ecological. While borders draw divisive lines, frontiers are ecosystem transitions and contact zones. Diversity is always richest in areas where different ecosystems meet: This is the edge effect which attracts artists.
An example of applied zooetics is the pioneering project launched in 2016 by the UK National Trust and the GoldenTree production company to express the impact of coastal erosion on the loss of landscape heritage along the Cornish Coast. It demonstrates the application of arts reasoning to express a complex system of conservation management Five artists worked at three different harbours and beaches that are protected by the National Trust – Penberth, Mullion Cove (Fig 1) and Godrevy. Each artist’s residency produced a performance or installation that became part of a program of public activities during the final weekend of October. It costs the National Trust around £3,000 per mile along the coast to care and maintain these outstanding coastal areas for the benefit of people and wildlife. It is thanks to membership, donations and volunteers that the charity is able to attempt this. Their message to the public was; complete protection is desirable, but beyond their financial resources. They are in retreat.
Fig 1 Mullion Cove
The objective was to offer people a chance to experience the outdoors in a different way, beginning with art, to deepen their understanding and value of the science of care and conservation that goes into preserving the outdoors and the future these coastlines might have.
Introducing the project, Ian Marsh, general manager for West Cornwall said: “The National Trust’s core purpose as a charity is to look after special places for ever, for everyone. But under the influence of the sea many places along the Cornish coast are crumbling, shifting and falling away and we need to be able to understand this and respond to the challenges this poses to us”.
“With climate change and rising sea-levels the issues of erosion are becoming increasingly stringent. Perpetually reinforcing harbour walls and cliff faces has proven to be unsustainable. So, as part of caring for a place we sometimes have to let nature take its course. As part of this process we have commissioned GoldenTree to start communicating with local communities, exploring the changes we can expect to see in the long-term.“
Penberth Cove saw the creation of a film by renowned Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin and Interviews with local people. Images of the cove were captured on a clockwork camera, and the black and white film was hand-processed and set to an original soundtrack by a local musician, Rick Williams.
At Mullion Cove performance-maker Louise Ann Wilson transposed ideas of palliative care of people onto this ‘dying’ harbour. Learning from a palliative nurse and engaging local residents by creating ‘rituals of retreat’, she created a walking performance. Called Mulliontide, it was based on a walk from Poldhu Cove to Mullion Cove that focused on a much-loved landscape and explored the places where land, sea and people met. The performance noticed the effects of tide and time, acknowledged deep feelings for place and recognised the challenges of change – personal and topographical. Mulliontide was created by Wilson in collaboration with residents of Mullion who also performed the work. Moving from station to station along the coastal path, the performance invited participants to notice specific landscape features and layered them with memories, photos, songs and actions in order to think about belonging, loss and repair.
At Godrevy, Dutch artist Titia Bouwmeester made a work that responded to and worked with the tide and sea. For more than a month Bouwmeester filmed the coastal landscape of Godrevy, capturing how the tide drew patterns on the beach, the daily choreography of hikers, surfers and farmers and the moon’s arc across the sky. Monumental projections were screened in the closed setting of a barn where 24 hours became 24 minutes. The audience witnessed how the landscape changed from dawn till dusk. A specially composed soundtrack completed the cinematic experience, immersing the audience in a hypnotic flow of image and music.
The natural environment is under pressure, and the thinking behind Mulliontide was that artists would be able to tell these stories and the story of the Trust’s part in sustainable conservation care, that will bring a new experience and understanding to people who visit these places. All events became part of a three-day programme, subtitled ‘Miss You Already’ assembled, around the theme of coastal change. People were able to visit the installation at Godrevy and join the performance at Mullion, enjoying the artwork and reflect on questions such as what is the best way to retreat? What will we lose when? What does change look like exactly? How can one reduce the pain that comes with losing something that is loved? The message was that the intellectual content of art is altogether different from the intellectual content of science.
Addressing the problem of defining art and science the 19th century the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley said “The subjects of all knowledge are divisible into the two groups, matters of science and matters of art; for all things with which the reasoning faculty alone is occupied, come under the province of science, all things which stir our emotions, come under the term of art.”
However, the pleasures one receives from the application of either art or science, have a common source. These pleasures arise from the satisfaction received in tracing the central theme of whatever a person is interested in at the moment in all its endless variations. They demonstrate the truth of unity in variety. The process of comprehending the symbols used to express an idea of the moment is both intellectual and aesthetic. It is intellectual because it is the mental picture which comprehends the laws governing any particular science or art; and it is esthetic because it is the feelings which determine the amount of emotional pleasure one can derive from them. But the ends are different. Scientific reasoning has as its end in the attainment of truth. Artistic reasoning has for its end the attainment of pleasure.
2 Education in the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene (Fig 2) is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of the significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, human induced climate change.
Fig 2 A landscape of the Anthropocene
The UNESCO publication ‘Rethinking Education Towards A Global Common Good (2015), asks three questions relevant to education in the Anthropocene. What education do we need? What is the purpose of education in the current context of societal transformation? How should learning be organized?
UNESCO’s answers are :
Question 1 Education should be constructed on four pillars:
learning to know,
learning to do;
learning to be
and learning to live together.
The belief is that giving equal attention to each of these four pillars will ultimately enrich all the facets of education, including those that are more narrowly professional.
Question 2 The one continuing purpose of education, since ancient times, has been to bring people to as full a realization as possible of what it is to be human. Other statements of educational purpose have also been widely accepted, namely:
to develop the intellect;
to serve social needs;
to contribute to the economy;
to create an effective work force;
to prepare students for a job or career;
to promote a particular social or political system.
The broader humanistic purpose of education includes all of the above to encompass every dimension of human experience and take every opportunity in curricula to connect with the targets of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Strategy
Question 3 Let students lead the learning because learning takes place best in environments where students feel empowered to learn. Effective teachers are more like moderators/mentors, offering inspiration and guiding students to discover for themselves. Giving students the opportunity to be self-learners guarantees lifelong learning.
Question 4 Create an inquiry-based classroom environment. If students are to lead the way to learning, they need to be able to ask questions – and then find the means to answer them. Students (and teachers) need to “wonder out loud” as they reflect on their learning, answering questions such as What do you Know? What do you Want to know? What have you Learned?, which can guide students toward true self-motivated learning.
Question 5 Encourage collaboration because we are greater than the sum of our parts. An effective classroom is a sharing classroom. Students are social beings. Find every opportunity to allow students to form pairs and small groups. Not only does this encourage the development of speaking and listening skills, but it also teaches students how to effectively achieve goals together.
Fig 3 Curriculum development in the Anthropocene
At a basic level, the pedagogy for curriculum development in the Anthropocene is founded on assembling and distributing authored information packages (AIPs), each consisting of a picture/graphic with a legend, which can be assembled as zooetic mind maps about how to live sustainably (Fig 3). An IT slideshow is a collection of virtual AIPs. A ‘flash card’, a ‘tweet’ and a postcard are also AIPs. They can all be traced back to Orbis Pictus, or Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), a book for children written by Moravian-German educator John Amos Comenius and published in 1658. It was the first widely used children’s textbook with pictures, published first in Latin and German and later republished in many European languages. The revolutionary book quickly spread around Europe and became the defining children’s textbook, imparting life skills, for centuries.
All kinds of AIPs can support classroom and distance learning about how to live sustainably. The differences between them are the systems of delivery. In this context, AIPs can be assembled as narratives delineating learning pathways to engage practically with the United Nation’s 2030 sustainable development strategy. This puts nature first in all that we do and and orientates civilization toward non material ends. It is a new life skills package of ecocacy, to be taught alongside literacy and numeracy for people to prosper within an overcrowded planet. Life skills are essentially those abilities that help promote mental well-being and competence in young people as they face the realities of life.
Most development professionals agree that life skills are generally applied in the context of health and social events. They can be utilized in many content areas: prevention of drug use, sexual violence, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS prevention and suicide prevention. The definition extends into consumer education, environmental education, peace education or education for development, livelihood and income generation, among others. In short, life skills empower young people to take positive action to protect themselves and promote health and positive social relationships across cultural divides.
William Ophuls calls the picture/graphic a ‘pattern’ and a collection of AIPs is a mind map delivering knowledge in ‘pattern language’. A pattern language is needed to make ecology the master science of our age. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow above or outside the natural systems that support us.
3 Hope, ecology and art
In 2016, Amy Franceschini was shortlisted in the Artes Mundi competition at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales. She traveled to Cardiff from Oslo by boat, retracing the migratory journey of seeds, to explore the politics of food production and the countries that our foods originate from. Her legacy was the idea that an art installation can apply arts thinking to explain sustainability. In Wales it led to the formation of the S.K.O.M.E.R Collective, linking art with science to demonstrate sustainability knowledge organised to manage environments responsibly. Inspired by Futurefarmers and the Flatbread Society the S.K.O.M.E.R Collective is centred on a free forum entitled ‘Educating for Change’ allowing people to freely participate in creating a syllabus of radical hope .The knowledge framework is cultural ecology, an interdisciplinary, social concept (blog). It contrasts the old sustainable relations of people to the land with the present-day worldwide scramble for scarce natural resources and the global environmental damage of unsustainable mass production. These days, everyone has their own mind map of cultural ecology. These personal projects, under the acronym S.K.O.M.E.R, chart the behavioural changes required to manage the flows of materials and ideas between people, ecosystems and place for a smooth social continuity of belonging between generations. Skomer is also a small Welsh island nature reserve where ideas of syllabus reform first emerged in the 1950s and eventually led to UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme
In early July 2017, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, together with University of Texas, Austin hosted a two-day workshop on “Radical Hope.” It brought together 21 people from a variety of continents and disciplinary perspectives to explore and exchange ideas on ‘hope’ as a renewable and essential educational resource in an age of change.. Their proposition put to an abused world was that it…..”is hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope”.
Ultimately we cannot rely solely on a science-dominated syllabus to provide intellectual content for human survival. In science, intellectual content is truth to fact and the deductions and generalizations which can be made from facts. Science has little to say about meaning, love and hope. The intellectual content of art is truth to nature. But this truth is relative for it depends entirely upon the intellectual culture of the artist and the person to whom art is addressed. A syllabus of hope for life post 2030 requires a flexible curriculum that integrates art and science, alias culture and ecology, in equal measure.
Fig 4 Reflecting and developing empathetic practices in a post fossil fuel world
Four years before the radical hope workshop, ‘Frontiers in Retreat’ (Fig 4) had begun as a five-year long collaborative inquiry, funded by the European Commission, into the educational intersections of art and ecology. It was a collaborative enquiry involving 25 artists working between nations’ frontiers and network of arts residencies. Their aim was to generate an understanding of the connections between local ecological concerns and processes of global warming. The proposition was that ecological concerns cannot be considered as purely environmental concerns, but should be understood as complex problems that transgress the borders/frontiers of disciplines and nations. The assumption was that artists uniquely have an innate ability to develop modes of knowledge for the understanding of complex co-dependencies between ecological, social, economic, and political phenomena. This ability to cross frontiers between long established subject disciplines is required in general for humankind to adapt to climate change, harnessing the richness in artistic reasoning as a critical form of engagement with people, places and change. Indeed, we might hope to find the three activities‒art, science, politics‒triangulated in a syllabus of radical hope through our lives.”
In this context, Ann P. Kahn, Former President of The National PTA, wrote, “The creative arts are the measure and reflection of our civilization. They offer many children the opportunity to see life with a larger perspective… The moral values we treasure are reflected in the beauty and truth that is emotionally transmitted through the arts.” Furthermore, Shawn Ginwright, an national international expert on youth development, has pinpointed the crucial role of hope and healing in achieving positive youth outcomes. He says, “Youth development and civic engagement strategies designed to engage America’s most disconnected young people will only be successful to the extent that they address hopelessness and create opportunities to heal from socially toxic environments and structural violence. Success is dependent upon healing from these issues.”
Arts education is uniquely effective at meeting this need because it is a natural source of healing, hope, imagination and agency. Learning how to identify and creatively address the effects of psychological, physical, emotional and historical trauma is becoming a critical aspect of the work of art educators, both in and out of school. Imagining, but also having a space to create, is essential to adapt to social change and understand civics. Community art-based educational programs that express sustainability sow the seeds of social change, progressive ideas, and a sustainable future. Therefore, art instruction integrated with science provides more to communities than just the art itself: it is the key ingredient to a better world. In this context, prosperity is gaining something that was hoped for and is not focussed on accumulating monetary wealth.
4 A provisional syllabus of radical hope
The world is changing rapidly at the speed of Arctic’s melting ice – education must also change to keep up with global warming. Societies everywhere are undergoing deep environmental transformation, and this calls for new forms of learning to foster the competencies that societies and economies need, today and tomorrow. This means moving beyond literacy and numeracy, to focus on ecosacy to gain competence or knowledge in conservation management of ecosystems and take new approaches to learning for greater justice, social equity and global solidarity.
Education in the post 2030 Anthropocene will need to be interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary cross-disciplinary, intersectional, ecofeminist/posthumanist, indigenous, and participatory. Participatory approaches are needed because people have to learn to work together and live with climate change and the other local features of the environmental crises, as well as working across cultures and genders in addressing environmental issues. In particular, any kind of syllabus has to be unified by the theory of evolution with its roots in human ecology. The idea that human activities have launched Earth into a new geologic epoch is an attempt to encourage a deep view of the coevolution of life and planet, as well taking a long systemic view of the future, which requires calling for a fundamental rethinking of human-habitat relationships.
Broadly speaking a syllabus of radical hope is defined in relation to two biochemical categories of Earth’s life forms, autotrophs and heterotrophs, separated by the way in which they feed on carbon compounds (Fig 5). Autotrophs are organisms that synthesize their own carbonaceous food from carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis. Heterotrophs are not capable of photosynthesis and so have to obtain food by eating autotrophs or other heterotrophs. All heterotrophs are animals, including humans, and all plants are autotrophs. This is the modern biochemical knowledge framework for living sustainably. It recognises human heterotrophy is a cultural adaptation that taps into Earth’s ecosystems, competing with other animals and plants for space. Humankind is winning the competition and species extinction is now unfolding because of it. We are witnessing the sixth such event of mass extinction in Earth’s history and humankind, which is just one among millions of “cousin species”, has initiated the die-off heralding the age of the Anthropocene. To survive, humankind has to define and manage an interspecies democracy in solidarity with non-human “people”.
Fig 5 Autotrophs and heterotrophs; humankind’s cousins
More and more we are hearing that we have to find new ways to become sustainable and the Anthropocene debate is behind one of the most ambitious global scientific programmes of the past two decades. The main argument is that, from a geological point of view, humans are considered the major force of nature, thus implying that our current geological epoch is dominated by human activity. New cross curricular knowledge frameworks that transcend 19th century single subject curricula are needed to help people find a meaningful life in decarbonised economies. Education in the Anthropocene requires examples of participatory, collaborative approaches to cultural ecology for living with global warming. Routes for out of school individualised learning are urgently needed now for people to cross cultures and genders, assembling their own personal body of knowledge, through lifelong learning, as they go. Earth has already reached its first tipping points like the Antarctic glacier melt and each of us has to adopt a unique way to manage our way out of the crisis within the targets of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
Wolfgang. Haber, reflecting in 2007 on economy and competition as general driving forces of human social evolution, framed the issue of human survival as follows:
“Energy, food and land are the principal, closely interrelated traps; but the absolutely decisive resource in question is land whose increasing scarcity is totally underrated. Land is needed for fulfilling growing food demands, for producing renewable energy in the post-fossil and post-nuclear era, for maintaining other ecosystem services, for urban-industrial uses, transport, material extraction, refuse deposition, but also for leisure, recreation, and nature conservation. All these needs compete for land, food and non-food biomass production moreover for good soils that are scarcer than ever. We are preoccupied with fighting climate change and loss of biodiversity; but these are minor problems we could adapt to, albeit painfully, and their solution will fail if we are caught in the interrelated traps of energy, food, and land scarcity. Land and soils, finite and irreproducible resources, are the key issues we have to devote our work to, based on careful ecological information, planning and design for proper uses and purposes. ”
Conservation management is the activity that binds planning and design to the targets of the 2030 Agenda. A conservation management system (CMS) is simply a recording and filing tool that aids and improves the way in which heritage assets are managed and kept in a favourable condition (Fig 6). Its prime function is to keep track of the inputs, outputs and outcomes of projects to meet measurable objectives. The aim is to promote efficient and effective operations, and allow recording of the work that was done and reporting on whether or not the objective was achieved. A CMS also enables the exchange of information about methods and achievements within and between organisations. These are essential components of a CMS of any scale, whether a national park, or a village pond.
Fig 6 The UK conservation management system: the planning cycle
Twenty-first century students at all levels live in an interconnected, diverse and rapidly changing world. Emerging economic, digital, cultural, demographic and environmental forces are shaping young people’s lives globally, increasing their intercultural encounters on a daily basis. This complex environment presents an opportunity and a challenge. Young people today must not only learn to participate in a more interconnected world but also appreciate and benefit from cultural differences. Developing a global and intercultural outlook is a process – a lifelong process – that education can shape. Also, education must now be about learning to live on a planet under pressure. It must be about cultural literacy, on the basis of respect and equal dignity, helping to weave together the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. This is a humanist vision of education as an essential common good inspired by the UNESCO Constitution, agreed 70 years ago. Education is key to the global integrated framework of sustainable development goals. Education in environmental management is at the heart of our efforts both to adapt to change and to transform the world within which we live. Indeed, a quality basic education within the logic of environmental management is the necessary foundation for learning throughout life in a complex and rapidly changing world.
David Greenwood, in 2014, voiced the question: “Are schools relevant to the complex realities of a changing planet? Or, do they mainly serve an outdated vision of an industrial society that is turning rapidly into a complex mix of decline and transformation?” They are probably irrelevant with respect to the way they operate. Technology, screens, devices and the internet have become almost ubiquitous in our lives, and that is as true for infants as it is for adults. Students feel comfortable interacting online with others and often see it as a similar experience to being in-person interaction. While it is impossible to recreate the entire in-person learning experience online, advances in technology and the comfort level of students and teachers in using these technologies make it more likely that online learning will continue to spread.
Changes in curricula are defined by the speed of internationalism. New knowledge is being produced ever more rapidly year on year, and there is continuous pressure to turn that knowledge into new skills, new career paths, new business models and new lifestyles. The big issue is that students are spending too much time in classes that will get them nowhere and not enough time in classes that will actually help them in life and their careers. Personalized learning addresses the latter issue by tailoring pedagogy, syllabus, curriculum and learning environments to meet the needs and learning styles of individual learners. Personalization is broader than just individualization or differentiation in that it affords the learner a degree of choice about what is learned, when it is learned and how it is learned. Therefore students should be able to choose their own classes because it would prepare them better for the real world. Students would have more motivation to learn and come to school if they were given the opportunity to choose their own classes instead of being required to take certain classes in order to graduate. When students have the ability to choose what they would like to learn about, it makes them more eager to engage with the material. To take a military metaphor, schooling prepare learners for the review rather than the battle. In essence, personalized eLearning enables students to customize a variety of the knowledge elements involved in the online education process. This means that they are asked to set their own goals, go at their own pace, and communicate with instructors and other students to personalize the learning process. Ideally, the student is placed in charge of managing his/her own learning and is able to customize the experience by having a direct say in the processes and content that is being provided. Mind mapping is vital to making a personal understanding.
The following five provisional pillars of an international democratic syllabus of radical hope were produced by a group of international students sponsored by International Classrooms On Line. They can be customised by individuals to assemble personal pedagogies and curricula for lifelong learning to live sustainably (Fig 7).
In order to obtain information on the variety of curricula that might emerge for individualised learning a polled forum was created which listed the following ten themes.
1 Become a citizen managing change
2 Redefine Economic Growth
3 Learn To Be Inclusive
4 Link Culture With Education (currently has the least hits)
5 Create New Knowledge Frameworks
6 Learn About Empathy
7 Promote Education For Change
8 Apply Arts Reasoning To Explain Sustainability (most hits)
1 
“The greatest limiting factor in setting up a regional citizen’s environmental 
