Archive for October, 2013

Dwelling with nature

Thursday, October 24th, 2013
Diagram of a nectar point network

Diagram of a nectar point network

1 Valuing urban wildlife

The history of wildlife conservation tells us that the approach to promote nature appreciation by urban dwellers has been to invite them to visit rural nature reserves. This has led to people thinking that the wildlife in their urban streets and gardens of is of lower value and has produced small groups of knowledgeable people who economically can visit and take advantage of these rural-based opportunities. The rural bias of nature conservation has compounded to isolate urban communities from nature who are in poverty without these resources, so resulting in greater environmental inequalities. Therefore, as a whole, urban populations loose out on the benefits of increased mental and physical health, access to green jobs and social benefits arising from contact with nature. Also, they are distanced from enhancing the biodiversity of their neighbourhood. Further, the framing of access to nature as being available only in special places, where it requires interpretation by experts, reinforces ideas that neighbourhood green spaces are not worth visiting or using as community assets.

The bigger issue is that regional, national, or global conservation initiatives are invariably developed by agencies launching projects from the top. They are typically identified and defined locally by an outside public agency, which has no direct investment in their success. A project is reviewed, refined, and its priority established within a bureaucratic organization. Legislation at some level is usually required to fund it, and there is usually no exit strategy for long-term continuity. This inevitably involves delay, red tape, political negotiation, and development of an expensive top-level management infrastructure. The top-down model provides little or no opportunity for local citizen input during the development phase or, often, afterward for local caretaking. Thus, local stakeholders commonly become alienated. This is in sharp contrast to community-based initiatives, where local people are already involved through caretaking. Often, this indigenous ownership extends to community education-related benefits for the long term. Community-based conservation is typically a grassroots effort, and one that is initiated because of specific concerns about an environmental or natural resource issue that affects a local population. This bottom-up conservation works well, because, in part, it is a collaborative process building on the caring relationships local activists have with the land. Top-down conservation projects often cost more, and seldom achieve as many benefits for the local communities they impact. The latter model has been described as the Protect and Enforce Model and the former model as the Love and Steward Model.

The challenge of living sustainably is therefore it to develop place-based Love and Steward Models that counteract the historical isolation of urban populations from their green infrastructure by starting within the green infrastructure itself and the people who define its value because they are in day to day contact with it. The aim is to promote ecological connectivity between families and their neighbourhoods, thereby realising the benefits of dwelling with nature by interacting with local biodiversity.

There are various ways this grass roots process of awareness and behaviour change can be supported centrally with information about street trees, garden bird feeders, ponds, bee tubes, and garden plantings for pollinators. The necessary information and merchandise is readily available but there has been no concerted nationally to focus this plethora of resources to promote urban campaigns to embed and network it into bottom-up growing schemes run by urban communities.

2 Objective

The objective of ‘Dwelling with Nature’ is to boost ecological connectivity between urban dwellers and their neighbourhood to secure maximum health, economic, social and ecological benefits from nature as an ecosystem service. To achieve this a network of stakeholder activists is essential for delivering resources and spreading ideas and practical know-how. The following scheme to establish and spread a nectar point network is just one example of how a Love and Steward model might be developed.

3 Nectar Point Network

There are few people who do not take more than a fleeting interest in butterflies and beetles and have the common sense to see that the availability of suitable food sources is limiting the insect life in their gardens. Some have spent a lifetime of exploration of a group of animals that truly can be said to have conquered the planet. The proposed scheme involves mobilising people of diverse ages and backgrounds to manage the biodiversity of local populations of insects. This will be achieved by establishing a network of streets and neighbourhoods that will boost insect populations through creating nectar points. A nectar point is a location e.g. a garden, park, school ground, shop front, wasteland, roadside verge or roundabout with plants that produce nectar for feeding insects. The network would focus families, schools, businesses, academic institutions and others to a common purpose of enhancing and sustaining local biodiversity and change the perception and experience of what is valuable in their urban surroundings.

This scheme would include incentives for behaviour change including rewards, such as best street, best young grower, best school/business contributor, best level of participation etc and for community and citizen participation through time banking. There would also be a strong element of citizen science to communicate know-how and ideas about how to carry out the plantings and assess their impact on wildlife

4 Habitat gardens

Gardens are a venue to exert and maintain control of nature in contrast to the world beyond the garden fence. Vegetation managed by citizens in their private gardens forms a significant component of all urban plant assemblages. Gardens cover about one-quarter of a typical UK city, and form up to a half of all urban green space coverage, as well as affecting patterns of global environmental change. Research shows that enhancing the quality of garden habitat is more likely to improve ecological connectivity than the specific establishment of green corridors across urban landscapes. Plant species composition, richness, evenness and density are continually influenced by human intervention in private gardens and floras are typically dominated by non-native species. Heavy inputs of nutrients and control of competition by gardeners leads to the persistence of species at lower densities than could occur in unmanaged populations. Human control over urban plant assemblages therefore appears to overwhelm geographic, historical and climatic variation among cities.

Making gardens for wildlife entails reorientating conventional ideas about planting to consider the garden as a habitat and answering the following questions.

Given that the optimal garden patch to establish a ‘habitat garden’ will comprise a group of adjacent gardens, what mechanisms exist for the creation and maintenance of ‘habitat gardens’ that transcend the boundaries of the individual plot?

What are the social drivers behind garden management decisions and how do we reverse social norms that reinforce the detrimental management of private gardens?

Ironically, the human capacity to change the environment is responsible for accelerated losses of ecosystem attributes and functions. However, this capacity to implement change can also be tapped to address conservation problems in residential landscapes. Residential areas offer a large, capable, and mostly untapped workforce that can assist in developing and tackling scientific questions and implementing, and subsequently monitoring, outcomes of management strategies. Such schemes can operate at a scale impossible to achieve in a landscape addressed by more traditional approaches to habitat restoration.

5 Support

It is important that schemes for enhancing garden insects should be structured around local nectar point activists who, as gardeners and communicators are well placed to provide information and plants to set up the network. A nectar points network is essentially a bottom up organisation where the starting point is a group of local activists with the skills of growing and linking with their local families and neighbourhoods who wish to participate in the scheme. Support would be provided through a focus of various local individuals, organisations and sponsors with the skills, knowledge and gardening resources to provide relevant horticultural and entomological information and spread ideas and know how. There is much on line support available as indicated by the following list of web references.

A forum is being organised to model the kind of on-line facility and resources needed to establish and sustain a Nectar Point Network.

This can be joined at:
http://www.tabup.com/dwellingwithnature

6 Web References

http://www.bristol.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/leisure_and_culture/parks_and_open_spaces/information_on_parks_and_open_spaces/Flower_Margin_Info_Meadows_0.pdf

http://www.biology.ufl.edu/courses/zoo6927/2011spring/Reed/Downloads/Citizen%20science%20Cooper%20et%20al%202007.pdf

http://www.seedengr.com/Scaling%20up%20from%20gardens%20biodiversity%20Conservation%20in%20urban%20environments.pdf

http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/management/21815-bottom-up-versus-top-down-land-conservation.html

http://blog.interflora.co.uk/top-5-plants-and-flowers-to-attract-bees-to-your-garden/

http://www.rhs.org.uk/Gardening/Sustainable-gardening/Plants-for-pollinators

http://www.themelissagarden.com/TMG_Vetaley031608.htm

http://butterfly-conservation.org/292/gardening.html

http://www.butterflyfarm.co.uk/attraction/uploads/DOC4AF98EDD0010B.pdf

http://www.foxleas.com/PDF/Nectar%20plants%20for%20M.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24555853

http://www.foxleas.com/insects_flowers.htm

http://www.wildaboutgardens.org.uk/thingstodo/allyearround/nectar-cafe.aspx

http://www.conservationevidence.com/individual-study/1768

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=goulson-perspectives-in-plant-1999.pdf&site=411

http://www.permaculture-wales.org.uk/index.php/guest-writers/125-a-guide-to-pollinator-friendly-gardening

http://www.bto.org/volunteer-surveys/gbw/gardens-wildlife/gardening/invertebrates

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/ent425/library/labs/external_anatomy/anatomy_mouthparts.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nectar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect

http://www.biology-resources.com/insects-01.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16410/16410-h/16410-h.htm

http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/22201#/summary

http://iloveinsects.wordpress.com/

http://www.cyberbee.net/biology/ch2/

http://archive.org/details/concerningthehab033579mbp

http://www.valeofglamorgan.gov.uk/files/Living/Environment/Biodiversity/Insects_leaflet.pdf

http://www.pollinator.org/Resources/CoE%20Gardens%20Curriculum.pdf

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ki9djoKOm-0C&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=love+insects&source=bl&ots=ygFrPrWXZc&sig=v8v21KhILl1AJSvM8ux5fc_T9gw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=14NnUqPIMYmx0QXMy4GADw&ved=0CHIQ6AEwCTge#v=onepage&q=love%20insects&f=false

Ecology with Mystery

Tuesday, October 1st, 2013

 

Artists, poets and philosophers throughout the centuries have striven, through words and brushstrokes, to describe that which words and brushstrokes simply cannot capture. In the modern world, a mystery is something to be unravelled or a veil that is drawn across matters that are not for us to know. But Taoists have always been drawn to mystery. Just as a sheet draped over a statue reveals the shape of the statue beneath, so mystery, to a Taoist, is revealing of the secrets of the universe; you just need to know how to look. Richard Seymour.

Humanists and absolutists

Any achievable goal of recognizing culture as being indivisible from ecology as a global system of interdependency of all beings requires damping down an excessive caring focus on attachment to the immediate ‘home-place’. A singular locus for our ‘ecological footprint’ of daily living, whilst vital for fostering stability within a community, can desensitize us to the vital role of other place relationships. In the practice of pilgrimage or journeying between places, place is encountered as an end and not primarily as a means to some other ‘holiday’ end, such as improving one’s income or health prospects, gaining exercise or relaxation, escaping the problems of daily living, or meeting people who can further our personal aims. The orientation of journeying, as a project of multiple place-encounter, is dialogical rather than monological. It is a communicative project to explore the more-than-human as a source of wonder and wisdom in a revelatory framework of mutual discovery and disclosure. Pilgrimage is the ultimate model of travel referring to the mind’s journey from ignorance to enlightenment, from self-centeredness and materialistic preoccupations to a deep sense of the relativity and inter-connectedness of all life.

Eastern and western philosophers have long been divided between humanists, for whom man is the measure of things, and their opponents, the absolutists, who claim that there is a way that the world is more than human and is independent of human perspectives and interests.

One definition of humanism is any system or mode of thought or action in which human interests, values, and dignity predominate. As a philosophy it emphasises the application of scientific reasoning for individual fulfilment in the human economic niche.

The Humanist Manifesto of 2000 confirms that humanism is based on the fruits of scientific enquiry, which has expanded our knowledge of the universe and the place of humankind within it. Humanism is now able to advance and to have its findings confirmed by science and reason, whereas the metaphysical and theological speculations of the past have made little or no progress towards human well being .

In contrast, absolutists hold the view that transcendent knowledge and its intuitions reach beyond human comprehension and therefore cannot instruct us because we cannot relate concretely to them. The way in which humans accept supposed transcendent or spiritual knowledge is by arbitrarily taking a leap of faith and abandoning reason to take up wonders perceived through the mental senses. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it is empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience in order to make sense of it: the stories and worldviews we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in.

According to the philosopher David Cooper, the typical form taken by absolutist doctrines subscribe to what he calls the ‘independence’ thesis, which states there is a discursable way the world is independent of ‘the human contribution’. As the humanist sees it, however, the substance, and even the sense of that thesis, typically relies on the claims that absolutists make about human abilities. To begin with,absolutists claim that human beings have the capacity to arrive at an absolute account of the world, which captures the way the world, independent of humanity, really is. They back their claim by saying that human beings have the capacity to arrive at an account of the world which is both ‘acceptable’ and ‘clean’. An account is ‘acceptable’ to absolutists if it is true by their own criteria of truth. An account is ‘clean’ if it is suitably untainted by ‘the human contribution’; in other words if it does not bear the stamp of a human perspective or form of life. Finally, the absolutist’s claim that human beings have the capacity to produce an ‘acceptable’ and ‘clean’ account of the world is typically supported by the further claim that this capacity has been at least partly realized by physicists. That is to say they have have already arrived at an account which approximately describes how the world independently of humans is. However, the physicist Max Planck reminds us that “Science cannot ultimately solve the mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve.”

A deeper, non-anthropocentric relationship with nature emerges from Taoism and its institutions which guide absolutist ways of thinking about culture, ecology and environmental ethics. The word Tao is nothing less than an expression of the profound unity of the universe and of the path human beings must take to join, rather than disturb, that unity. The path begins with an understanding of the origin of the universe. “Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of the way,” stated the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu. The way of the Tao is the ultimate reality; a one way flow of Nature and the position of humanity in this flow. But the ultimate reality, like a draped statue, is enshrouded in mystery.

Taoists seek an attunement to the mystery of beginnings through non-interference, humility and patience. These are virtues which contrast with the aggressive and exploitative values so prevalent in our modern world because of its fixation on forcing a flow of wealth through economic growth. The older classic Taoist texts reveal a yearning for convergence with nature, nostalgia for a lost intimacy with the natural world, disillusion with humanity or its products, and a feeling for nature’s mystery. These attitudes are rooted in Taoist philosophy and have implications for our practical engagement with natural environments when we try to be good to planet Earth.

Our response to the wonders of the human ecological niche depends on the nature of the stimulus which prompted the response. Actually, a sense of wonder is only one kind of mystical feeling acknowledging the marvels of existence. Others are an awareness of being part of something larger than oneself; and an overpowering egocentrism. The latter can readily persuade an individual that the perfection of one’s own complexity could not have come about by accident.

But these are general human sensations and can have humanistic outcomes. For instance, it is wonder that drives the scientist to ask “How come?” and to seek an intellectually satisfying answer. Also, the curiosity engendered by awe and wonder has fuelled the scientific process since human beings discovered fire. The experience of being part of some larger entity has spurred us on to discover our evolutionary history and the socio-cultural context of the individual. The same is true of the egocentrism that renders us susceptible to the urge to view our own “selves” as the consciously designed, ultimate products and central concerns of the universe. Pat Duffy Hutcheon says how could we not feel thus, given the natural origin of our species and its integral relationship to all aspects of its physical surroundings and to the dynamic web of life? Our millennia-long legacy of an anthropocentrically oriented culture is reflected in social evolution of current society which, in turn, has shaped these “selves” as surely as inherited genes have formed our organic building blocks.

The glue of mystery

The impasse reached when humanism and absolutism are discussed fiercely as rival accounts of cultural ecology may only be escaped through adopting an attitude of humility and accepting a doctrine of mystery that encompasses both humanism and absolutism. A doctrine of mystery says there is indeed something beyond the human but this is not discursable. Such mysteries are exemplified by the existence of human life itself and are bound up with the question; Is human life the result of many coincidences and random chance? Or is it instead the fine-tuning of the laws that govern the universe which have led to our existence? And if this is the case, what is the origin of this fine-tuning?

In the closing pages of his book ‘Just Six Numbers’, the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, concedes that science cannot explain the fine-tuning of the physical environment that made the development our universe and human life on Earth possible.

He formulates the fine-tuning of the Universe in terms of the following six dimensionless constants:

N = ratio of the strength of gravity to that of electromagnetism;


Epsilon (ε) = strength of the force binding nucleons into nuclei;


Omega (ω) = relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the Universe;


Lambda (λ) = cosmological constant;


Q = ratio of the gravitational energy required to pull a large galaxy apart to the energy equivalent of its mass;


D = number of spatial dimensions in spacetime.

The reasons for it lie beyond anything within our universe and therefore beyond anything we can ever measure. This is an absolutist semi-mathematical mystery of the first order.

David Cooper, believes that the only escape from the rivalry between humanism and absolutism actually lies in the doctrine of mystery. He says there is a reality independent of the human contribution to material knowledge but it is necessarily ineffable. Drawing on the Buddhist conception of emptiness and Heideggar’s later writings, Cooper in his book ‘The Measure of Things’ advances the idea that it is only through appreciation of mystery that we can fully understand our beliefs and conduct particularly when we try to define what it is ecologically “good” to do. One person’s notion of the good life might clash dramatically with another person’s formula.

In support, Cooper quotes Iris Murdoch, who writes that ‘ A genuine mysteriousness attaches to the idea of goodness’ and ‘true morality is a sort of unesoteric mysticism’. She continues that ‘the most central’ of the virtues is that of humility, understood not as a ‘habit of self-effacement’ but as a ‘selfless respect for reality’ There are two components to being humble in this way, the selfless respect for reality, which includes respect for the integrity of things and what Murdoch calls ‘unselfing’. By unselfing she means humankind should abandon hubristic efforts to dominate the world by finding out how things are and planning to control the future. Unselfing is the antidote to what she calls the ‘flimsy’ creed of managerial humanism.

Concentrating on little things

Murdoch’s two humilities come together in a stance towards creatures and other living beings, and indeed towards things generally, that Heidegger calls ‘letting be’ or, following the medieval philosopher, Meister Eckhart, ‘releasement’.

First, things should be treated as what they are and not as they happen to figure in some ‘dimmed down’ vision that suits certain human purposes. For example, it is necessary to resist such practices as genetically engineering bulls. These domesticated farm animals with the bovine equivalent of Down’s syndrome (as one writer describes them), become fat, placid lumps convenient for masturbation by machines. Such practices are blind to the integrity of bulls, to the ‘place’ they have in the world, to what they are. Contrast this description of ‘ humanism running amok’ with Cormac McCarthy’s wonder at the impact of human materialism on the mountain brook trout. The following is a quotation from his book ‘The Road’:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

The second attribute of the humble person is respect for ‘little things’. Murdoch reminds us that these are ‘the little accidental jumbled things like little stones, like bits of earth’, and for inconspicuous, unglamorous activities, like eating a meal. ‘Ways of life’, she reminds us, ‘imply times for breakfast’.

In this context of allocating time, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says;

“If while washing the dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.’ What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realising the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking a cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future – and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life”.

Drawing attention to the little things and everyday actions of life, Cooper, in his ‘A Philosophy of Gardens’, suggests that gardens may contribute to what he calls ‘the good life’. He argues that many of the little things we do in gardens – ‘induce virtues’, and that gardens are hospitable to various practices many of which ‘. . . invite and attract certain virtues by providing especially appropriate opportunities for their exercise’. For example, when a plant which has been the object of our tender care flowers or fruits, there is the delight in something to which we have contributed but which we could not have achieved alone, and this induces the virtue of humility. This close connection between humus and humility dates back at least to the monastic gardeners of the Middle Ages. And this humility is related to the virtue of patient hope, an optimistic expectation that in the fulness of time things will turn out well, that the future has positive things to offer. The virtuous behaviours of feeling humble and grateful, and of putting the needs of other living things above one’s own, are all exemplified when developing and maintaining a garden with non-utilitarian aims. In looking after our plants Cooper says we are exhibiting the virtue of care, ‘a virtue that stands close to that of respect for life’. And by thus caring for our plants we enhance in ourselves a virtue, self-discipline, a virtue that ‘imposes a structure and pattern on a life that might otherwise be lacking in shape and unity’.

In contrast to concerns about these little things Heidegger thinks we have become obsessed with the ‘gigantic’ and the ‘striking’ and have become incapable of celebrating the sense of wonder in the ordinary and unassuming. Here, we have fallen victim to measuring the world by a yardstick that inflates the scale of human achievement. The humble person, will recognize that, as a Zen poet put it, there is ‘wondrous function’ in ‘carrying water and logging firewood’. Another Buddhist,the Zen philosopher Master Dogen, saw that Buddha-nature or ‘the mystical power’ is realized as much in the cypress tree, the bundle of flax or the reflection of the moon, as in more dramatic and ‘gigantic’ vehicles of human imagination. A ‘sense of the mystery of things’, evident in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, may be ‘focused on to ordinary aspects of life’. Indeed, it is attention to the ‘right mindfulness’ of something unassuming that might best attune us to the ‘gathering’ of a world in something. The reflection of the moon, writes Dogen, is a ‘place’ where ‘something ineffable exists’. It is just such an experience of a pine tree’s transparency-its ‘concentrating’ of wind, sea, night, and moon-that the poet Saigyo records:

‘Inviting the wind to carry

Salt waves of the sea,

The pine tree of Shiogoshi

Trickles all night long

Shiny drops of moonlight’.

Cooper leaves it to the reader to consider the implications of a ‘celebration of the ordinary’ as a way in which human beings might relate to one another. For example this could be a way that would call for rather ‘simpler’ and more ‘local’ forms of community seemingly required by current political and economic imperatives.

In Cooper’s final analysis, humility implies tolerance towards ‘ways of revealing’, schemes of thought and evaluation that are different from those prevailing in one’s everyday form of life.

‘This is not due to recognition of others’ ‘rights’, nor to utilitarian calculation of the benefits of non-interference, nor to ‘postmodernist’ delight in ‘difference’ for its own sake. Rather it is a humanist recognition that, as the Taoist Chuang Tzu puts it, a given way of revealing is ‘rooted’ in a given form of life. People ‘agree because they are the same’, not because agreement is imposed upon them by the independent way that reality is. It also requires an appreciation of what is beyond the human, i.e ‘The Buddhist’s Way’, ‘sends’ or ‘gives’ many ways, which are evident in the Tree of Life. The world on a given way of revealing is not our ‘possession’, but a gift from ‘something ineffable’. The person of humility will not be a triumphalist about, say, our modern democratic institutions or ‘scientific culture’: he or she will not want to see other ways of living together or thinking together automatically despised or obliterated. Humility is the virtue that exhorts us to accept that it is impossible, as Iris Murdoch warns, always to ‘limit and foresee’ what is ‘required of us’.

Here we approach the realm of artistry as a kind of pilgrimage. It is defined by the painter/attorney Paul Hampton Crockett, in terms of his experience of making pictures, where ‘… each painting is very like a journey, of a kind measurable neither in distance nor in time. And no matter the artist’s initial plans, expectations or intention, there is neither a charted course available nor any means of ascertaining how the experience will take you wherever-it-is. Not necessarily at all a comfortable or safe process, but beyond doubt one of real value. Maps are traded for leaps of faith, and smaller conceptions happily die and the existential clutter (at least to some extent) cleared, so that visions larger and more fresh may be born’.

Fig 1 Mystery as an arbitrator between humanism and absolutism

mystery

In summary, the emergence of ‘humanism is understood as the claim that any ‘discursable’ world is a ‘human world’, one whose description is relative to human purposes and perspectives on nature as an absolute economic asset. Humanism is contrasted with ‘absolutism’ which, it is argued, is a doctrine at once hubristic and implausible. However, it is also argued that a ‘raw’ humanism, which denies the existence of any reality beyond the human world, is also hubristic and ‘unliveable’. It has put humanity on the Titanic pathway to extinction. The conclusion is drawn that we must take seriously the existence of a radically mysterious order of reality, a ‘source’ for unifying our human world. It is in this perspective that a cultural ecology of mystery is an arbitrator between humanism and absolutism. It is a way of looking at the world behaviourally by adopting an attitude of humility and developing bigger picture thinking through artistry (Fig 1).

‘The Measure of Things’

David E Cooper

Clarendon Press, 2002

http://www.humanists.net/pdhutcheon/humanist%20articles/Mysticism.htm