Cultural Ecology

1  Bruno Manser’s struggle

In 1984 Bruno Manser travelled to the Malaysian state of Sarawak where he spent six years living with the Penan tribe. He learnt the language and customs of this people, who are the last on the island of Borneo to live exclusively from hunting and gathering. During the time he was there, he saw the living environment of his Penan friends being gradually laid to waste by the logging companies. Bruno supported the Penan in their fight to resist this process of deforestation, carried out with complete contempt for their property rights, and helped them to organise peaceful protests in which they blocked the roads built (illegally) by the logging companies. In the end he was forced to flee Malaysia and was only able to re-enter the country by roundabout means. In Basel he set up the Bruno Manser Fund to support the Penan and other forest peoples. In 1993 he went on a hunger strike in an attempt to halt timber imports from Malaysia, but his campaign failed. Nonetheless, he did succeed in convincing hundreds of Swiss, French and Austrian municipalities to refrain from using wood derived from unethical logging in the construction of their public buildings. In 2000, Bruno Manser tried once again to visit his friends and organise a campaign to alert world public opinion to their plight. It may be that this cost him his life. He has not been seen since 23 May 2000, two days after he crossed the wooded border into Sarawak.

2  Adding a cultural value to trees

It was during Manser’s first year living with the Penan that a joint UNEP international conference published an assessment of the role of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on climate change and concluded that greenhouse gases were expected to cause significant global warming in the next century.  Up until then the only economic value of tropical forest trees was to produce high quality timber to meet the demands of rich Western consumers.  In 1997, the value of tropical forests in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide was part of the discussions which led to the Kyoto Protocol.  The talks established legally binding emissions targets for industrialized countries, and created innovative mechanisms to assist these countries in meeting these targets (Fig 1).

Fig 1 Adding value to trees as an ecosystem service

One of these mechanisms is the carbon credit (often called a carbon offset).   It is a financial currency that represents a tonne of CO2 (carbon dioxide) or CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent gases) removed or prevented from entering  the atmosphere in a carefully designed and managed emission reduction project.  Carbon credits can be used, by governments, industry or private individuals to offset carbon emissions that they are generating.  Offset schemes vary widely in terms of the cost, though a fairly typical fee would be around £8/$12 for each tonne of CO2 offset. At this price, a typical British family would pay around £45 to neutralise a year’s worth of gas and electricity use, while a return flight from London to San Francisco would clock in at around £20 per ticket.

Carbon credits add value to forests and tree planting when they are associated with removing existing CO2 or CO2e emissions from the atmosphere.  Afforestation and reforestation activities are now universally accepted as a means by which existing emissions can be removed from the atmosphere and carbon credits can be cashed in by owners of the land on which the project is carried out (Fig 2).

Fig 2 The carbon offset system

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified five stores of carbon biomass, namely the above ground biomass, below-ground biomass, litter, woody debris and soil organic matter. Among all the carbon pools, the above-ground biomass of trees constitutes the major portion of the carbon pool. Estimating the amount of forest biomass is very crucial for monitoring and estimating the amount of carbon that is lost or emitted during deforestation, and it will also give an idea of the potential of trees to sequester and store carbon in the forest ecosystem. In 2000, the IPCC gathered the available evidence for a special report which concluded that tree-planting could sequester (remove from the atmosphere) around 1.1–1.6 GT of CO2 per year. That compares to total global greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 50 GT of CO2 in 2004.  Oliver Rackham, a Cambridge University botanist and landscape historian, describes the problem of carbon credits succinctly: ‘Telling people to plant trees [to solve climate change] is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.’ .  On the other hand, giving carbon credits to people living in forested areas is a means of transferring wealth from rich to poor countries.

The mechanism is seen by many as a trailblazer. It is the first global, environmental investment and credit scheme of its kind, providing a standardized emissions offset instrument, the certified emission reduction credit (CER).

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), defined in Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol, allows a country with an emission-reduction or emission-limitation commitment under the Kyoto Protocol (Annex B Party) to implement an emission-reduction project in developing countries. Such projects can earn saleable CER credits,which can be counted towards meeting Kyoto targets.

A CDM project activity might involve, for example, a rural electrification project using solar panels or the installation of more energy-efficient boilers. The mechanism stimulates sustainable development and emission reductions, while giving industrialized countries some flexibility in how they meet their emission reduction or limitation targets.  A CDM project must provide emission reductions that are additional to what would otherwise have occurred. The projects must qualify through a rigorous and public registration and issuance process. Approval is given by the Designated National Authorities. Public funding for CDM project activities must not result in the diversion of official development assistance.

The mechanism is overseen by the CDM Executive Board, answerable ultimately to the countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol.  Operational since the beginning of 2006, the mechanism has already registered more than 1,650 projects and is anticipated to produce CERs amounting to more than 2.9 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, 2008-2012.

As a part of the global carbon market, the voluntary CO2 market is different from the compliance schemes under the Kyoto Protocol and EU-ETS. Instead of undergoing the national approval from the project participants and the registration and verification process from the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), the calculation and the certification of the emission reduction are implemented in accordance with a number of industry-created standards.

The advantage of lower development/transaction cost makes the voluntary market especially attractive to those small and sustainable projects to which the UN certification process is too expensive.

Approximately one third of all greenhouse gases are estimated to be caused from Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) activities. These notably include methane emissions from agriculture, but also deforestation and ecosystem degradation.

Deforestation represents the largest source of LULUCF emissions (approximately 18% of total greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to 13% for agriculture). Yet, the only types of projects that are delivering carbon credits in regulated markets are afforestation and reforestation (A/R) projects in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Afforestation refers to tree planting projects in areas where there has not been forest cover in the past 50 years, and reforestation to those projects occurring in areas that were more recently deforested.

Projects that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding deforestation and/or ecosystem degradation are currently not eligible for generating carbon credits through the CDM. There are currently 4 afforestation and 14 reforestation projects in the CDM project pipeline and one registered CDM forestry project.

In the voluntary markets for carbon offsets, forestry mitigation projects are more popular investments. Avoided deforestation projects are also allowed as a project option and they account for about 5% [of overall value] and could be significant contributors to the growth of the market (Fig 3).

Fig 3  The voluntary carbon market share by project type (%), as of  2008

However, in terms of overall size the voluntary markets are dwarfed by the CDM. CDM projects hold the lion’s share (approximately 95%) of the global market value of mitigation projects – which is estimated at over $13 billion.. The voluntary market, by comparison is worth approximately $265 million. Forestry investments are estimated to represent about 15% of the voluntary carbon market.

3   REDD

REDD stands for reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and is one of the most controversial issues in the climate change debate. The basic concept is simple: governments, companies or forest owners in the South should be rewarded for keeping their forests instead of cutting them down and so neutralising their carbon footprint.

The idea of making payments to discourage deforestation and forest degradation was discussed in the negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol, but it was ultimately rejected as the major economic instrument because of four fundamental issues: ‘leakage’, ‘additionality’, ‘permanence’ and ‘measurement’.

• Leakage refers to the fact that while deforestation might be avoided in one place, the forest destroyers might move to another area of forest or to a different country.
• Additionality refers to the near-impossibility of predicting what might have happened in the absence of the REDD project.
• Permanence refers to the fact that carbon stored in trees is only temporarily stored. All trees eventually die and release the carbon back to the atmosphere.
• Measurement refers to the fact that accurately measuring the amount of carbon stored in forests and forest soils is extremely complex – and prone to large errors.

A general problem is that payments are not for keeping forests, but for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. This opens up the possibility, for example, of logging an area of forest but compensating for the rise in CO2  by planting industrial tree plantations somewhere else.

REDD developed from a proposal in 2005 by a group of countries led by Papua New Guinea calling themselves the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Two years later, the proposal was taken up at the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Bali (COP-13).   In December 2010, at COP-16, REDD formed part of the Cancun Agreements in the Outcome of the Ad Hoc Working Group on long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention.

REDD is described in paragraph 70 of the AWG/LCA outcome:

“Encourages developing country Parties to contribute to mitigation actions in the forest sector by undertaking the following activities, as deemed appropriate by each Party and in accordance with their respective capabilities and national circumstances:

(a) Reducing emissions from deforestation;

(b) Reducing emissions from forest degradation;

(c) Conservation of forest carbon stocks;

(d) Sustainable management of forest;

(e) Enhancement of forest carbon stocks;”

This is REDD-plus (although it is not referred to as such in the AWG/LCA text). Points (a) and (b) refers to REDD. Points (c), (d) and (e) are the “plus” part. But each of these “plus points” has potential drawbacks:

• Conservation in the history of the establishment of third world national parks includes large scale evictions and loss of rights for indigenous peoples and local communities. Almost nowhere in the tropics has strict ‘conservation’ proven to be sustainable. The words “of forest carbon stocks” were added in Cancun. The concern is that forests are viewed simply as stores of carbon rather than ecosystems.
• Sustainable management of forests could include subsidies to industrial-scale commercial logging operations in old-growth forests, indigenous peoples’ territory or in villagers’ community forests.
• Enhancement of forest carbon stocks could result in conversion of land (including forests) to industrial tree plantations, with serious implications for biodiversity, forests and local communities.

There are some safeguards annexed to the AWG/LCA text that may help avoid some of the worst abuses. But the safeguards are weak and are only to be “promoted and supported.” The text only notes that the United Nations “has adopted” the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The text refers to indigenous peoples’ rights, but it does not protect them.

Although much has been written about addressing these issues, they remain serious problems in implementing REDD, both nationally and at a community project level.

There are two basic mechanisms for funding REDD: either from government funds (such as the Norwegian government’s International Forests and Climate Initiative)  or from private sources, which would involve treating REDD as a carbon mitigation ‘offset’, and getting polluters to pay to have their continued emissions offset elsewhere through a REDD project. There are many variants and hybrids of these two basic mechanisms, such as generating government-government funds through a “tax” on the sale of carbon credits or other financial transactions.

Trading the carbon stored in forests is particularly controversial for several reasons:

• Carbon trading does not reduce emissions because for every carbon credit sold, there is a buyer. Trading the carbon stored in tropical forests would allow pollution in rich countries to continue, meaning that global warming would continue.
• Carbon trading is likely to create a new bubble of carbon derivatives. There are already extremely complicated carbon derivatives on the market. Adding forest carbon credits to this mix could be disastrous, particularly given the difficulties in measuring the amount of carbon stored in forests.
• Creating a market in REDD carbon credits opens the door to carbon cowboys, or would be carbon traders with little or no experience in forest conservation, who are exploiting local communities and indigenous peoples by persuading them to sign away the rights to the carbon stored in their forests.

4  Community REDD

Because of the serious issues surrounding the value of REDD to community wellbeing, real and imagined, the REDD scheme has been described by its  opponents as an example of neocolonialism. Yet many REDD proponents continue to argue that carbon markets are needed to make REDD work. The Environmental Defense Fund, for example, on its website states that,

“Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), which EDF helped pioneer, is based on establishing economic incentives for people who care for the forest so forests are worth money standing, not just cleared and burned for timber and charcoal. The best way to do this is to allow forest communities and tropical forest nations to sell carbon credits when they can prove they have lowered deforestation below a baseline.”

This is to prioritise ‘pro-poor’ REDD policies and measures. Numerous policies and measures exist to reduce deforestation and degradation (e.g. fire prevention programmes; expanding protected areas; improved law enforcement etc.). Whilst different options may have similar impacts in terms of emissions reductions in any particular area, there could be significant variation in terms of their implications for the poor. The options chosen must first and foremost be based on accurate identification of the drivers of deforestation/degradation, but there must also be a strong political commitment within a framework of cultural ecology to maximise the possible benefits for the poor. In other words, to increase the chances of REDD working for the poor, this must be explicitly recognised in the choice of policies and measures.  This was the starting point of the document ‘ Making REDD work for the poor, prepared on behalf of the Poverty Environment Partnership (PEP) in 2008.

The main thrust of the argument was to apply measures to improve the equity of benefit distribution  The distribution of benefits from REDD both internationally and within countries is likely to be highly variable due to the design of international systems and the variety of interests of investors (market actors or funders) which will drive investment decisions. For example, finance is likely to go towards ‘low risk’ countries, areas or activities where implementation is most cost effective or that fit internationally established rules, such as those related to the developing baselines.  Benefit redistribution mechanisms may be required at international levels and within developing countries. These may include options such as stabilisation funds or preventative credits, provided by international donors to countries with low historical deforestation rates; or levies or taxes placed on market mechanisms within countries that are reinvested into pro-poor policies and measures.

Within the national context, strengthening the role of local governments in benefit distribution and regulation of REDD could also help deliver benefits to the poor. Forest authorities are often one of few government departments with a physical presence in rural areas which can get information to, and receive information from, communities. The private sector could also play a part, for example through providing roles for local government staff in project monitoring and training in technical skills.  At local scales and in REDD projects, partnerships between investors and funders could be  used to strengthen equitable benefit sharing in REDD schemes, bearing in mind risks related to top down initiatives and asymmetries in information available in their negotiation.

A good example of the application of REDD aimed directly at community benefits is provided by ‘Plan VIVO’s REDD project’ in the Yaeda Valley of Tanzania, where a major aim is to protect the hunter-gatherer cultural heritage of the Hadza people..

An environmental heritage is “all the material and immaterial elements which combine to maintain and develop the identity and autonomy of its ‘proprietor’ in both time and space through a gradually evolving environment”.  Henry Ollagnon.

In other words, the heritage does not exist as such in the absence of a property relationship with a “proprietor” who invests in it and manages it.  A heritage in which there is no investment, and which is abandoned by its “proprietor”, is a heritage that is falling into ruin and disappearing. This notion is readily understandable in the context of, for example, architectural heritage, when there is someone – owner or just tenant, private or public, individual or collective – who has certain options for managing it,  But it is also the case with an ecological heritage, which is the basis of a people’s distinctive culture. Their ecological niche defines their homeland to which they have property rights resulting from a thousand or more years of occupation.  Spiritual beliefs of these ‘first peoples’ steer the powers of nature which surround them.  Their life is intimately linked to local resources that provide a substantial proportion of energy and protein requirements, as well as most vitamins,essential elements, and minerals.  Thus, traditional food is still given a significant place in determining who they are.

In the global REDD debate, many concerns have been expressed by developing countries, in particular, concerns about the rights of indigenous people and communities dependent on forests and the impact of REDD programmes on such groups. The overwhelming need of communities and people living with trees is to ensure that they are involved in a positive and mutually beneficial way in the management of these resources, since this is one of the very few effective means of controlling deforestation and forest degradation over very large areas. A principle has emerged here.  To reduce deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, it is essential to promote solutions involving local people in the sustainable management of forests; and at the same time to link incentive mechanisms with options to improve livelihoods (Fig 4).

Fig 4  Potential community level benefits from the carbon market

The establishment of a community REDD in the Yaeda Valley is one of Plan Vivo’s newest and largest projects, covering over 20,000 hectares of Hazda community land.  Plan Vivo is a registered Scottish charity, which has created a set of requirements for smallholders and communities wishing to manage their land more sustainably. Plan Vivo has developed the Plan Vivo Standard, which is a framework for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes for rural smallholders and communities dependent on natural resources for livelihoods.

The Hadza are an egalitarian society and value their land highly, however getting others to understand this value is not always easy. Creating a ‘real’ economic argument through carbon payments for the ecosystem service that includes biodiversity helps communicate this value as well as supporting the communities who depend on the land.  This project will augment the capacities of local forest users for guarding their resources, carrying out forest inventories; monitoring carbon flux; establishing equitable and transparent REDD mechanisms for sharing revenue; and understanding and actively participating in the overall REDD carbon credit process.  Already, remarkably, the project has introduced computer skills needed to manage the Hazda heritage to stand alongside the age-old hunter gatherer survival skills.

The essence of the community-led scheme is clear from the following interview with a  female coordinator of the Plan Vivo scheme..  Pili Goodo is one of the Carbon Zambia’s coordinators, or animateurs, in Yaeda and as such is responsible for project operations within each village. She compiles the data on land use and poaching brought in by the scouts,represents the project at village meetings and generally acts as the first point of call for any project activities.

She talked to Marc from Carbon Tanzania about how the project has affected her community.

Marc: How has the community been involved in setting up the project?

Pili: Marc came [to a community meeting] to introduce us to this idea of valuing trees because of the carbon inside. We had a lot of questions about how you know that the carbon is in our trees and how people in another country can pay us to help protect our trees and land, why would they do this?

We began to understand how people know about carbon in trees during the tree [above ground biomass] survey where we measured many trees and put the results into a computer. Many of the community were trained during the survey and Carbon Tanzania explained to us using maps and pictures taken from high up that our land is being changed by farmers.

Marc: What have you learned about your natural resources through this project?

Pili: We know that our resources are valuable but how can we make others see that? They want to farm because they don’t know how to live without farming. Now people are seeing us getting money and jobs and want to know how they can get money.

Marc:  Why and how did you become involved in the efforts to protect Hadza lands?

Pili: We are all involved! I have secondary education and therefore a better ability to communicate with others like UCRT and Carbon Tanzania… many women will not travel far from their homes but the men can move over a greater distance… [to] do the work of community guards and anti-poaching.  We all need to guard our land, without our land we are lost, we can’t be hadza without land, the hadza are part of environment.

Marc:  How do these carbon conservation efforts help you and your community?

Pili:  Myself and the community guards are all paid directly from the carbon project… I have started a small shop with my money and others buy things from me. The money [paid to the community] is usually spent on school fees, hospital and food. The community sits down and has a meeting to decide what the money should be spent on, we have to document this meeting and send it to Carbon Tanzania, they then put the money into the designated account. In November more of the money is spent on food reserve as it is the end of the dry season and there is very little natural food.

Marc:  Why do you feel it’s important for women to work on conservation?

Pili:  [Laughs] Why not? … this job is perfect because I am always near my home and everyone can find me to report information.

Pili is one of the local social pillars of the Carbon Zambia action plan, which is an illustration of the way in which environmental improvements, no matter their specific objectives or where they are initiated, are operated as a managed social action cycle (Fig 5).

Fig 5  Managing community betterment

Pili is clearly important as a communicator in the Hazda social betterment cycle.  Communication  is the key to the robustness and resilience of community projects.  To meet this need, PCs, and Internet connections, are becoming more prevalent and more widely adopted in rural communities worldwide.  Mobiles have been the dominant technology to date in rural areas, characterised by relatively low adoption costs and flexibility of application. Given the scarcity of alternative communication technologies in Africa (i.e. fixed telephony), and the general lack of infrastructure, ICTs, such as mobiles, have rapidly come to play an important role in rural livelihoods. Increasingly, ICTs have improved rural resilience to external stressors such as climate change: strengthening some aspects of resilience but potentially weakening others.   It’s much easier for people to get on with their work when they have a clear idea of what’s expected of them.  The role of ICTs in project management is to discipline planning, organizing, and the securing and managing of resources to bring about the successful completion of specific tasks to meet specific goals and objectives. In these respects it can be anticipated that there are going to be developments in ICTs specifically designed for communities aimed at ensuring that there is a clear plan of action, detailing who’s responsible for the work  required, when work needs to be delivered, plus any other useful information the project team may need.  Above all, ICTs designed for planning and recording have an important role in monitoring outcomes of REDD community projects.

Would REDD have made Bruno Manser’s struggle against top-down commercial deforestation any easier?.   Without monitoring enforceable safeguards, and strict controls and regulation through measurable performance indicators, REDD may deepen the woes of developing countries: providing a vast pool of unaccountable money which corrupt interests will prey upon and political elites will use to extend and deepen their power, becoming progressively less accountable to their people. In the same way that revenues from oil, gold, diamond and other mineral reserves have fuelled pervasive corruption and bad governance in many tropical countries, without public transparency REDD could prove to be another ‘resources curse’. Ultimately, this will make protection of forests and their communities less likely to be achieved and will do nothing to ameliorate carbon emissions.

5  Internet references

Trees: between nature and culture

http://coe.archivalware.co.uk/awweb/pdfopener?smd=1&md=1&did=594700

REDD Schemes

http://www.redd-monitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/08-10_REDD_An_Introduction.pdf

http://www.un-redd.org/Stakeholder_Engagement/Community-BasedREDDCBR/tabid/1058797/Default.aspx

http://www.microfinancegateway.org/sites/default/files/mfg-en-case-study-the-role-of-microfinance-in-environmental-projects-a-case-study-nov-2012.pdf

http://www.e-mfp.eu/sites/default/files/resources/2014/02/European_Dialogue_No.6.pdf

http://www.forestcarbonpartnership.org/sites/forestcarbonpartnership.org/files/Documents/PDF/May2012/Uganda%20Appendix%201c%20Component%201c%20Consultation%20and%20Participation%20Plan%20(Version%20Final%20May%202012)_0.pdf

Plan VIVO

http://www.planvivo.org/about-plan-vivo/

Plan VIVO Tanzania

http://www.planvivo.org/project-updates/an-interview-with-pili-goodo-the-project-coordinator-of-our-redd-in-the-yaeda-valley-project/

Making REDD work for the poor

http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/3451.pdf

A complete guide to carbon offsetting

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/16/carbon-offset-projects-carbon-emissions

Benchmarking rural resilience

http://www.niccd.org/sites/default/files/RABIT%20Uganda%20Short%20Case%20Study%20e-Resilience.pdf

An initial approach to this subject may be found in: Bellamy, Denis. (1980).  ‘A biological approach to the teaching of dance aimed at broadening the area of dance education within movement studies’.  Physical Education Review. Volume 3 Number 1 pp-34-40.

“It is not long since three words were repeated as a magical spell that was to change our lives drastically – ‘scientific-technical progress’. The whole idea and final goal of the progress became an end in itself and the progressive social movement for the realisation of the principle ‘Everything to the benefit of man!’ receded into the background. The intensification of the self-destructive processes was accompanied by local ecological shocks such as the pollution of the water of Lake Baikal, Caspian and Ladoga, soil amelioration at Polesye, construction of the St. Petersburg dam, etc., the logical succession of which was the global disaster of Chernobyl. Cataclysms in the nature and economy shifted humanitarian values to the background. Time will show whether it will be uncontrollable nuclear energy or a spiritual Chernobyl paralysing the aesthetic and historical processes of culture that will prove to be a more destructive force in laying waste civilisations. No doubt the triad, ecology of mankind – ecology of culture – ecology of environment, is very topical”.

Ivan Kruk. http://www.folklore.ee/rl/pubte/ee/usund/fbt/kruk.pdf

1  Learning ecologies

UNESCO defines Kruk’s three social ecologies, of ‘mankind’, ‘culture’ and ‘environment’, within its long standing programme linking humanity and the biosphere.  They comprise, all forms of traditional and popular folklore where they are the social systems of intangible heritage.  They are communicated through oral traditions, customs, languages, music, dance, rituals, festivities, traditional medicine and pharmacopoeia, the culinary arts and all kinds of special skills connected with the material aspects of culture, such as tools and the workplace habitat.   Also included are peoples’ learned processes along with the knowledge, skills and creativity that inform and are developed by them, the products they create and the resources, spaces and other aspects of social and natural context necessary to their sustainability.  These are all processes of survival which provide living communities with a sense of continuity with previous generations and are important to cultural identity, as well as to the safeguarding of the cultural diversity and creativity of humankind. In other words they are learning ecologies (Fig 1).

Fig 1 Model of a learning ecology

Barbara Kirchenblatt-Gimblett classifies these processes as metacultural heritage.  She points out that unlike other living entities, whether animals or plants, people are not only objects of cultural preservation but also the subjects. They are not only cultural carriers and transmitters, but also agents in the heritage enterprise itself. They speak of collective creation within a particular local learning ecology.

As learning ecologies they carry the whole package of collective educative humanitarian works originating in a given community in a given time period and are based on tradition. Their creations are transmitted orally or by the gestures of dance and are modified over time through a process of collective recreation.    It is intangible heritage that is dynamic.  The task of educators is not only to define it for its preservation, but  also to act as culture-makers, creating survival stories needed to embed all peoples safely in an expanding, unstable, global human ecological niche. In Kruk’s words this kind of story-telling signifies: “a progressive social movement for the realisation of the principle, Everything to the benefit of man!”

2 Behavioural coalitions

The term ‘ecology’, in our daily lives, places us in the perspective of human evolution and relates to how we have evolved humanitarianism to take care of ourselves,  to conserve and relate to what we value in our landscape and each other, and ponder on whether or not we feel ‘at home’ in relation to the daily physical and social pressures that surround us. Education through gesture defines dance in this anthropological dimension.  Dance as a learning ecology is a discipline for studying the purposefully selected sequences of human movement which have aesthetic and symbolic value, and are acknowledged as dance by performers and observers within a particular culture.  Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoire of movements, or by its historical period or place of origin.  In these ecological terms dance is a behaviour by which people have an evolutionary predisposition to form coalitions; to make a pact or treaty among individuals or groups, during which they cooperate in joint action, each in their own self-interest, joining forces together for a common cause.  R.D. Alexander believes that the ability to form coalitions arose because the  real challenge in the human environment throughout history that affected evolution of the intellect was not climate, weather, food shortages, or parasites—not even predators. Rather, it was the necessity of dealing continually with our fellow humans in social circumstances that became ever more complex and unpredictable as the human line evolved. Social cleverness, especially through success in competition achieved by cooperation, becomes paramount. Nothing would select more potential for increased social intelligence than a within-species co-evolutionary ‘arms race’ in which success depended on effectiveness in social competition.

Dance is a powerful evolved coalition-maker because it connects people to belief systems that determine our ecological niche.  It is a folkloric route to discover and transmit  the underlying cultural values of Kruk’s three ecologies, their uncertainties, fears, ambitions, motivations and morals.  Examining these archetypes of the human subconscious is important when thinking about ecological and cultural conservation: They represent the successful societal collective and inherited patterns of thought.  As one of the most powerful communication systems dance should be at the heart of a global education system to present the multiple belief systems, across cultures, which are occurring simultaneously in any given place at any given time.  These systems encompass modern folklore, which was succinctly defined by William A. Wilson.  He wrote, in his paper, ‘The Deeper Necessity: Folklore and the Humanities’ (in the 1988 Journal of American Folklore), as follows:.

“Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking us to the cultural heritage from the past than is folklore; no other discipline is more concerned with revealing the interrelationships of different cultural expressions than is folklore; and no other discipline is so concerned …with discovering what it is to be human. It is this attempt to discover the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence, that puts folklore study at the very center of humanistic study”.

While the world’s major religions are highly influential in building behavioural coalitions and include archetypes of ‘humankind’, ‘culture’ and ‘environment’, looking only at the way these ecologies are represented in organized religion leaves out a much wider breadth of collective knowledge about human survival. This is where, the examination of modern folklore, defined by stories, poetry, music and dance is valuable because of their deep spiritual, political and historical reaches. Folklore today is an important knowledge collective which speaks to common global spiritual concepts, transcending religious divisions and values.  It encompasses ideas on contemporary history and localized environments, something that religious texts alone do not; folklore should be brought to the fore as a category of knowledge that best embodies the collective unconscious of all kinds of cultures at different stages of development..

There are many subdivisions of folklore, but it is dance that, since time immemorial, societies have used for their spiritual, physical, socio-political and economic advancement. For this reason, dance means different things to different societies with underlying different preoccupations. While to some it is a channel of expression of feelings of joy, hope, aspiration, anger, hatred, sadness, happiness, etc, others see it as the transformation of ordinary functional and expressive movement into extraordinary movement for extraordinary purposes. These varied meanings explain why the physical and psychological effects of dance enable it to serve many functions.  In this context, it is commonly accepted that dance is a treasure-trove of social values.  For instance, it is against a background of multiple values claimed for ‘community dance’, that Gordon Curl highlights the relevance of its aesthetic values and their noticeable absence in current community dance dialogue. Yet, the gap between dance and understanding its community applications has been known for almost a century. This is what Rudolf Laban said in his address to a 1936 Pre-Olympic Games gathering in Germany,

‘… Interest in the idea of modern community dancing seems to be widespread, for today I am able to look on your assembly of nearly a thousand people who have come here as representatives from our movement-choirs in more than sixty cities…’

His use of the term ‘movement-choirs’ is significant because singing, like dance, is a profound coalition maker.  From Laban’s remark by we might well question the nature of the ‘interest’ of those ‘thousand people’ engaged in community dance!.   Was it social, health, sport, therapy, aesthetic, artistic, political – or a combination of these?

Rudolf Laban created a system of analysing movement characteristics, as pathways through space, and the ‘effort’, ‘shape’ and ‘drive’ of a human movement. Known today as Laban Movement Analysis, Laban also developed a system of movement notation, known as Kinetography  for documenting professional dance practice. His work, based in England after the second World War, established dance as a special form of social communication and inspired educational dance as a cross curricular subject, incorporating, acting, therapy, and workplace assessment.  An important message from Laban’s work is that if, through dance, we change our ways of seeing and believing, then our ways of doing will follow suit.  However, ‘movement analysis has failed to penetrate and diffuse naturally into the general education system at any level.

3 Coalition dancing in Tonga

Any dance gathering can be taken as an example of the multipurpose communicative value of dance. For example,  dancing in Tonga can be used as a demonstration that it is imperative that we must go back to the more basic art of poetry to understand dance.  This is because understanding poetry is essential if one is to understand the meaning of dance. On the other hand, if one is to study poetry or any other verbal art, it is essential to study dance, for today’s folklore, as ever, is expressed mainly through the medium of dance. Folklore and dance, then, are interrelated expressive human behaviours saying something uniquely important about the relationships between culture and environment.

Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga, is a Polynesian sovereign state and an archipelago comprising 177 islands.   There are two basic kinds of dance in Tonga—one which has movement as its main element, and one which accompanies poetry. The latter type can further be divided into two types. One type sings the praise of the royal family, the high chiefs, and an ethnocentric love of Tonga.  It is essentially an expression of allegiance of the many islanders to a central established political and social order.  The second kind comprises legends and folklore from Tonga’s hallowed past, and also from more recent times. Indirectly, however, this second type of poetry functions in the same way as the first.  They can be unified in terms of their function of signalling that Tongans belong together; they are a cultural coalition.

Fig 2 Tongan lakalaka

The usual kind of Tongan dance that accompanies poetry is called lakalaka, which literal­ly means “to walk” and, indeed, the leg movements are basically a walk that moves one step to the left, then one step to the right, and occasionally forward and back. The arm movements (Fig 2)  are graceful and intricate, deriving their distinctive character from the rotation of the lower arm. The dance is performed by all the men and women of a village ranged in two or more rows facing the audience. The men stand on the right side (from the observer’s point of view) and women stand on the left; the order in which they stand is determined by social status. The men do one set of virile movements while the women do another set of very graceful move­ments so that there are two dances going on simultaneously. Each group interprets the poem in a manner consistent with the Tongan view of movements suitable and appropriate for each sex. The movements dramatize the poetry. They do not pantomime the words, nor do they symbolize in the sense that one movement symbolizes one phrase, or idea. Rather they are figurative: the movements create an abstract picture to which a number of meanings can be assigned, and conversely, one idea can be alluded to by several different sets of movements. As with modern contemporary dance the meaning is in the mind of the beholder

4  Community dance

One of the problems facing any commentator on ‘community dance’ is the sheer breadth and scope of the concept itself – a breadth and scope illustrated in the Report submitted by the Foundation for Community Dance to the UK  Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2004), which affirms that:

‘Community Dance practice and provision recognises an astonishingly broad diversity of dance styles and traditions: we identify 42 different forms in our Mapping research, including Ballet and contemporary dance, folk dance, African People’s Dance, South Asian classical dance, popular social dance, as well as a range of ‘national’ dances – 4.78 million people participated in community dance activity…’

Ken Bartlett, in his article in the Laban Guild Magazine, questions the concept of ‘community dance’ by asking: ‘Is every kind of dancing community dance?’ To which he replies: ‘a qualified yes’!  If this is the case, community dance (with some qualifications) must hold hegemony over the whole domain of dance – it spreads its tentacles over a vast territory of terpsichorean space – an all-embracing ‘community of dance’!

Ken Bartlett and his colleagues have examined community dance over the years and have discovered a treasure-trove of putative ‘values’.  There are claims of: ’emotional and mental health’, ‘mood enhancement’, ‘stress reduction’, ‘anger management’, ‘energising and revitalising experience’. At a more general level there are designated values of: ‘celebration the human body’, ‘equality of opportunity’, ’empowerment and human rights’ – as well as ‘the amelioration of social exclusion’, the ‘reinvigorating pride in where people live’, ‘relieving suffering or violence’ and ‘making the world a better place’.

This remarkable list of accreditations for community dance would seem to provide a panacea for all educational ills!  But Bartlett cautiously believes that we should do a little ‘prodding and poking’ at these widespread claims, by asking: ‘Why are people so keen to involve members in community dance? Surely’, he says, ‘they can be empowered in other ways and could be members of all kinds of groups concerned with wholeness of their being’. Perhaps, some carefully controlled research would determine whether or not such groups, including community dance, were consistently – rather than anecdotally – capable of achieving such claims. Could it be that in attempting to focus on ‘stress reduction’, ‘anger management’ or the ‘alleviation of ‘social exclusion’ etc., that community dance would itself become emasculated – transformed into such specialised domains as ‘psychotherapy’, ’emotional rehabilitation’ or ‘social engineering’ – thus diverting attention away from community dance as an end in itself and thereby losing its integrity as an autonomous aesthetic/artistic pursuit?  Such a perspective points to the need for research into ways in which community dance can become the hub of lifelong learning for individuals and communities.

As an example of what community dance can achieve, In the spring of 2004, Jennifer Monson led a team of experimental dancers from Texas to Minnesota, following the northern migration pathway of ducks and geese. This was known as BIRD BRAIN, one of several ‘Navigational Dance tours’ that Monson has organized. The dancers stopped in ten communities along the Mississippi migratory flyway. Each stop was comprised of a public outdoor performance, a panel focusing on local migration issues, and a dance workshop linking migration with how the body navigates. The tour lasted eight weeks, beginning as the first waterfowl began to migrate and ending as the last birds arrived at the northern tip of the country. For this tour, Monson developed a classroom resource guide as a legacy to engage elementary schools in each community along the way

5  Evolution of dance

Behaviour is what all living things do.  It can be defined more precisely as an internally directed environmental system of adaptive activities that facilitate survival and reproduction.  Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour — particularly when that behaviour occurs in the context of an animal’s natural environment.  Ethologists observe, record, and analyse each species’ behavioural repertoire in order to understand the roles of development, environment, physiology, and evolution in shaping that behaviour for individual and group survival.  Dance is an example of human ethology.

Both information and social cohesion determine collective decisions in animal groups.  Before    there were people, swarm behaviour, or swarming, had evolved as a collective behaviour exhibited by animals which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or maybe moving en masse or migrating in some direction. As a term, swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other animal that exhibits a gathering-together behaviour. The term flocking is usually used to refer specifically to swarm behaviour in birds, herding to refer to swarm behaviour in quadrupeds, shoaling or schooling to refer to swarm behaviour in fish.  The following paragraph summarises the swarming behaviour in a group of insects, the family “Empididae”, known as ‘dance flies’.

Fig 3 Exchange of a nuptial gift between a pair of dance flies

The “Empididae” is a diverse group of flies consisting of over 4,000 described species worldwide and about 800 described species in America north of Mexico. Numerous species remain to be described and it is estimated that the total diversity of the group will exceed 7,500 species worldwide.  Many species of “Empididae” mate on the ground or on vegetation while others gather in mating swarms. The synchronized movement of adult flies within these mating swarms is the basis for the common name “dance flies”. Members of one large subfamily, the Empidinae, transfer nuptial gifts from male to female during courtship and mating. Depending on the species, these gifts include prey, various types of inedible objects, or secreted ‘balloons’ (Fig 3).  Within the Empidinae mate, choice is generally by females that visit male-dominated swarms. However, many species exhibit sex-role reversed courtship behaviour where females gather in swarms to await males that choose mates. These species exhibit many female secondary sexual characters used in courting males, such as enlarged wings, pinnate leg scales, and eversible abdominal pleural sacs. It is not easy to avoid concluding that these gatherings are analogous to human behaviour in dance halls.

Then there are the pre-human bizarre dances of birds-of-paradise.  Young males inherit those dance steps from their fathers, then refine them through practice and watching adults. Less obvious but equally important are the watchful females.  It’s ultimately their choices that decide which dances reach the next generation.

Fig 4  A song and dance performance in lyre birds.

Coordinating movements to music is often considered a uniquely human skill. A study of Australian lyrebirds dispels this notion by showing that male lyrebirds also perform ‘dance’ moves which are predictably matched with specific songs in an individual’s display routines.   This involves the creation of the complex matching of subsets of songs from a individual bird’s extensive vocal repertoire with different but precise combinations of tail, wing and leg movements.  The outcome is to form predictable ‘gestures’, and so appear to engage in intentional choreography (Fig 4). These dances also suggest that accurate synchronisation of the acoustic and locomotory elements of a display should be cognitively and physically challenging to achieve, and thus difficult to fake. If so, females might exercise mate choice by discriminating among males on the basis of integrated performance coordination.  In terms of the coalition hypothesis a dancing lyre bird has been likened to a pop singer who combines song and dance to attract an audience of males and females.  Male Birds of Paradise give similar displays which are viewed by potential mates but also by an audience of young male ‘learners’.

Physiological research suggests that humans have innate neurological specializations to combine music processing with patterns of muscular activity, and that special muscle-building genes determine the kinds of movements that different ethnic groups can achieve.  The outcomes of these biological resources are to demonstrate to others who are interested how you get done what you do.  Richard Schechner defines such activity as ‘performance’ (Fig 5).  Performers of an assembly of humanitarian values are carriers, transmitters, and bearers of traditions, terms which connote a passive medium, conduit, or vessel, without volition, intention, or subjectivity.

Fig 5 Schechner’s categorisation of human performance

Performance has no character, plot, or action, and this distinguishes it from drama.  In fact the concept of performance emerged during the last third of the 20th century and was part of a reaction against the predominance of western traditions in drama or theatre studies.   Schechner explains that this approach can be applied to any event or material object. Performance takes everyday life as its stage and every form of human activity can come under its spotlight. From performance art to political rallies, to the law courts, religious ceremonies and sporting events, to simply dressing up for a night out on the town, the reach of performance studies is potentially limitless.  In his 2003 book Performance Theory, Schechner dedicated a whole chapter to what he identified as the continuities between animal and human performance. Starting with a reference to Darwin’s view that there is a continuity of behaviour from animals to people, and driven by a desire to explore the question, “how are human religions, customs, and arts extensions, elaborations, and transformations of animal cultures?”, Schechner goes on to conclude that, “on several levels human and animal performances converge and/or exist along a continuum” manifested at different levels: structural, processual, technical, cultural, mimetic, and theoretical. However, rather than showing a primary interest in animal performance per se, Schechner calls for a study of the latter within performance theory solely as a strategy for better understanding their most evolved offspring, human performance.

However, a compelling account of the evolution of human musical and dancing abilities is lacking. The sexual selection hypothesis cannot easily account for the widespread performance of music and dance in groups, especially synchronized performances, and the social bonding hypothesis has severe theoretical difficulties. There is, however, a third evolutionary approach.  This starts with the proposition that humans are unique among the primates in their ability to form cooperative alliances between groups in the absence of consanguineal ties. Edward Hagen and Gregory Bryan propose that this unique form of social organization is predicated on music and dance. In particular, they suggest that music and dance may have evolved as a coalition signalling-system that could, among other things, credibly communicate visually the intrinsic quality of a coalition, thus permitting meaningful cooperative relationships between groups. This capability may have evolved from coordinated territorial defence signals that are common in many social species, including chimpanzees.

In support of their theory Hagen and Bryan presented a study based on the idea that group performances are credible signals of collective interests. If most group members invested time and energy singing and dancing for visitors, the visitors might rightly conclude that the hosting group as a whole was strongly motivated to secure an alliance with them, whereas if only a small fraction of a large group bothered to do so, the visitors could rightly conclude the opposite. This argument has implications for the emotionality of music played in groups which the audience automatically classes as being good or bad .  To test this, Hagen and Bryan set up an experiment in which manipulation of music synchrony significantly altered subjects’ perceptions of music quality.  They found that  the subjects’ perceptions of music quality were correlated with their perceptions of the coalition quality of the performers, supporting the coalition  hypothesis. The hypothesis also has implications for the evolution of psychological mechanisms underlying cultural production in other domains such as food preparation, clothing and body decoration, storytelling and ritual, and tools and other artefacts.

In her paper ‘Music and Dance: Timeless Mediums in Uganda’, Katelin Gray paints an idealised picture of the role of dance in an emergent human culture where,  “…. ancient agriculturalists and pastoralists linked hands and danced under the night sky, with soft drums beating syncopated rhythms in the background, and a flute made of bear bone emitting delicate melodies. The next day, most began sowing their millet and sorghum, while a few recorded the happenings of the night before on stone walls for us to find millennia later and consequently speculate about the meaning of art forms in prehistoric times”.

“Dancing and music were a means of education in a preliterate society and a method of unifying the different families that comprised the village. Music was more than entertainment; it reinforced and coordinated the community and connected the population through public activity”.

6  Dance in an ecological curriculum

Culture and society are not the same thing.  While cultures are complexes of learned behaviours and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms.  People are not the only animals that have societies.  Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies.  In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other.  People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations among its members..

While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society.  Cultures are not the product of lone individuals.  They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other.  Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. In this respect, dance is a subset of the subject of culture.

Traditional forms of music and dance are of great historical value to current societies in revealing ethnic relations in a common past. Collectors of English folk songs knew this and composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams have left a legacy of compositions which evoke times when most people laboured in the pre-industrial countryside.

In Africa, modern rulers fear the past;  that an attachment to tribal kings, about whom much of the dance is performed, will weaken the political power of the wider state.  Tribes are not considered a political entity with a legitimate head, but a lesser cultural institution. Yet tribal distinctions have been, and are still a powerful method of forming one’s identity. While political life eradicates this identity, traditional music and dance help to elevate it by communicating and affirming communally held morals and values and keeping active the accounts of a tribe’s history.

Peter Brinson, in his book ‘Dance As Education: Towards A National Dance Culture; sets out to answer the important questions, Why dance in the Curriculum? and In What Particular Way Does Dance Contribute to the Curriculum?  Brinson believes we have a wealth of opportunities for cross curricular collaboration between the professional and educational dance worlds.  In answer to the question ‘So what is next for dance?’ Brinson concludes that dance educators seek assurance that guidance will be given to planners of the school curriculum. Head teachers, however committed to the dance at present in their schools, will neglect it if clear statements are not made as to how and where dance may be included as a broad educational experience, with clear applications to day to day living in a global perspective where consumerism is seen as the antithesis of dance.

To establish a global curriculum, the proposition is that first and foremost, dance is an expression of the concept of ‘cultural ecology’, which has been used in the discipline of anthropology since the 1950s; it means the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments.  In this context, dance makes a distinctive contribution to education at all levels in that it uses the most fundamental mode of human expression- movement to match individuals to their ecological niche.. The body as the instrument of expression is unique in its accessibility. Together with the other arts it provides considerable potential for the expression of personal and universal human qualities. Through its use of non-verbal communication, dance gives students the opportunity to participate in cross-curricular themes in a way which differs from any other area of learning. In a broad and balanced curriculum this important area of human experience should not be neglected.

7  Educational outcomes of dance

Brinson’s list of educational outcomes of dance are comprehensive and impressive.

Through artistic and aesthetic education, dance:

• provides initiation into a distinct form of knowledge and understanding.
• gives access to a unique expression of meaning.
• develops perceptual skills.
• develops the ability to make informed and critical judgments, develops creative thought and action.
• provides opportunities for creating and appreciating artistic forms.
• develops performance skills.
• introduces pupils to dance as a theatre art.

Through cultural education, dance:

• gives access to a rich diversity of cultural forms, offers insights into different cultural traditions, develops understanding of the different cultural dances attached to values
• introduces processes of cultural generation and change.

Through personal and social education, dance

• gives opportunities to explore the relationship between feelings, dance and expression.
• promotes sensitivity in working with others.
• develops self-confidence and pride in individual and group work.
• encourages independence and initiative.
• provides opportunity for achievement, success and self-esteem, for pupils with and without learning difficulties.

Through physical education, health and fitness education dance:

• promotes a responsible attitude to the body and its well-being, develops coordination, strength, stamina and mobility, encourages physical confidence and control, provides a leisure pursuit for fitness in life after school curriculum.

Environmental education is an important addition to to Brinson’s list.

Through environmental education, dance:

• students learn how to use the elements of dance and composition to convey a message about an environmental issue.
• students learn about one environmental issue through research and, in small groups, create a dance piece that advocates for community action to gain environmental betterment.
• students begin to understand and become aware of the various issues that we as a global interacting population are faced with, and through the use of an environmental artefact or source as inspiration, generate movements individually and in small groups with a particular environmental issue in mind.

Fig 6  Black Creek community performance

Regarding conservation as a return to humanitarianism, we already have the tools for dealing with environmental decline—they are innate to humans: awareness, free will, creativity and ingenuity. The issue is whether we are willing to use these abilities to build a better future. To date, we have used our intelligence to try to understand the world and human existence, to prolong our lifespans and improve our lifestyles, to become richer, and to assemble ourselves into groups and societies. We have developed the disciplines of science, philosophy, medicine, economics, politics, engineering and technology, but we have failed utterly to apply these effectively and consistently to deal with environmental issues. As a result, our behaviour as a species is little different from other animals whose destinies are determined by ecological laws.

Nevertheless, the environmental theme of dance was taken up by Laura Reinsborough and Liz Forsberg while studying community arts at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto.  They created the Black Creek Storytelling Parade, a public performance that follows the route of storm water from a permeable surface of the university campus down to the banks of an ancient topographical feature known as Black Creek (Fig 6). They employed costumes, fanfare, amplification, and percussion— performance tactics to relate people to the hidden campus landscape. As organizers of the parade, they sought out a variety of interpretative questions and frameworks.  The following narrative includes Reinsborough’s combination of description and interpretation relating to the performance.  After the initial presentation, they continued as developers and coordinators in response to additional invitations to perform the Parade.

“As we critically reflect upon our practices and build upon past experiences, each performance has taken on new qualities and become increasingly more community-based. Throughout the development of the project, we have also used a number of different methods to attract attention (e.g., sidewalk chalk, costumes, percussion instruments, and audience participation), and we have altered those methods to attract different kinds of attention (e.g., letting go of the costumes after some joking comments from passers-by). Thus, we made decisions about our methods for their potential to both engage and alienate. Critically questioning our methods has been a part of our work each step of the way, out of an interest to hone our practices and as a result of our academic location as graduate students”.

“While York seemingly displays a barren landscape that obscures any history other than the corporate and colonial names of its buildings, we heeded advice from Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University: “Dig a little, and any suburban campus has remnant roots with stories to tell”. And so we dug, using archival research and word of mouth to reveal the area’s unofficial stories: unsettled land claims, hidden community gardens, the historical presence of the passenger pigeon (a foreboding icon of species extinction), ecological restoration initiatives, and land use planning”

Their aim was to craft a multi-perspective view of Black Creek that would engage participants beyond a single, seemingly monolithic narrative. They invited storytellers and other keepers of knowledge to share their stories. The intent was to reach beyond the limits of their primary research, beyond the official stories proliferated by York University, and beyond the most common narratives told of nature and ecology. They hoped to inspire a social connection between parade-goers and place, to uncover the existing stories of the area and graft their own cultural meaning onto the campus landscape.  The local coalition they created is a practical contribution to place-making.

8  Propositions for teaching and researching dance

Dance has its biological roots in pre-human evolution. Theatre practitioner Richard Schechner notes a link between the biological and its universal expression in human behaviour patterns:

“I confess that I believe both in universals and singularities. How can that be? In a nutshell, biology provides humans with templates, building blocks, integers (you pick your term, your metaphor), while culture and individuality determine how these are used, subverted, applied, and “made into” who each person and each social unit is. For me, there are realities at all levels of the human endeavour; biological–evolutionary, cultural–social, individual. These overlap and interplay. To assert a connection between the ethological, the anthropological, and the aesthetic is not to deny local and individual variation and uniqueness”.

It should be a matter of some interest and concern to those who teach and research humanistic studies such as the philosophy of dance that their work is founded on a heri­tage of philosophical speculations about the nature of knowledge and the mind.  This was formulated by prehistoric people who had no reason to suspect that human consciousness and men­tal activity have had a long evolutionary history. Today, most branches of philosophy continue their investigations without regard for the impli­cations of two centuries of palaeo-anthropological dis­coveries.  These research findings imply that the human mind is of a remote antiquity and that it has evolved (and is evolving) within certain bio­logical limits.  The varied abilities that have emerged through natural selection have, necessarily and primarily, been of im­portance to humankind’s survival as a species.

Aesthetics is one of the branches of West­ern philosophy that has generally, even reso­lutely, held itself aloof from scientific en­croachment or scrutiny. This process of Western think­ing about art resists methods of science such as categorization, definition, or precise meas­urement. Its complex workings, whether of construction or appreciation, are regarded, non scientifically as being private, unobservable and usually fleeting, and there­fore do not lend themselves to scientific perusal.  However, viewing dance from the perspective of bio­logical evolution is not the same thing as subjecting it to scientific analysis. More accurately, taking an evolutionary stance is part of a way of looking at art as a human be­haviour, based on the assumption that hu­man beings are a species of animal like other living creatures, which further implies that their behaviour like their anatomy and physi­ology has been shaped by natural selection. Such a viewpoint may suggest new avenues for thinking about some of the problems with which aesthetics has traditionally been concerned: the nature, origin, and value of art, not as an abstraction, but as a universal and intrinsic human be­havioural endowment.  Remember, evolution is the root of dance as a coalition-forming behaviour..

Speak­ing in evolutionary terms, it has only been in the blinking of an eye, that art has been detached from its evolved affiliates, ritual and play, and its various components have coa­lesced to become seen an independent activity. Until less than a hundred years ago the primary tasks of dancers, like painters, were not to “create works of art” but to reveal or embody the divine, illustrate holy writ, enrich shrines and private homes and public buildings.  Like the, fashioning of fine utensils and elaborate orna­ments accompany ceremonial observances, recording historic scenes and personages, and so forth, the makers made these things “special,”  Specifically aes­thetic considerations were no more relevant than other functional requirements.

The ways in which meaning was appre­hended by our ancestors were not divided into separate entities called “art,” ‘science/’ “metaphysics.”  Our attribution of the name “art” to tribal singing or dancing or to cave paintings is arbitrary and misleading. More simply, these are ways of ‘the mind in the cave’ of finding meaning in life, ways that were inextricably bound to social in­stitutions and practices whose fundamental assumptions are no longer accepted unquestioningly. Evolution has set limits to human capabilities and in order to understand these it is necessary to collect and compare examples of universal human behaviours from many societies. Accounts from anthropological studies of a wide vari­ety of human groups show that in spite of a wide diversity of detail, human beings uni­versally display certain general features of behaviour which ethologists have identified in most animal societies as well. For example, both human and animal societies tend to form and maintain some kind of social hier­archy. Both humans and animals (including reptiles, birds, and even insects) use ritual­ized non-auditory communicatory signals that formalise emotional responses, channel aggression and reinforce social bonds to behave collectively.  It is within this developing knowledge framework that dance links ethology, anthropology and aesthetics to provide an antidote to Kruk’s magic spell of world development that has ‘shifted humanitarian values to the background’.  It is an evolved propensity to promote the development of behavioural coalitions which includes much more than theatre, but is expressed along an entire spectrum, ranging from everyday life to rituals and art.

It was inevitable that in our current digital age that there would be a move to integrate digital imagery with live performance.  Over recent years that has become increasingly common  with several artists creating work that enmeshes digital and biological performance entities within a performance context. The works draw on a range of technologies, from interactive and motion tracking systems to registered projected video, motion capture, 3D scenographic landscapes and more, all exploiting the possibilities of emergent technologies. The scope of dance is not narrowing towards digital, rather, it is expanding.”

In 2014, artists at the Deakin Motion.Lab premiered ‘The Crack Up’, a new full-length trans-media dance work Inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 short story of the same name.  Trans-media dance is defined here as a live performance in which both the digital and human presenters perform simultaneously as artistic equals.. The notion behind this work  is that two people, or two or more performance entities, are splitting the attention of the audience, operating as equal collaborators in a holistically produced performance context.  A mobile app was created for the performance which splits the direction of audience focus between a 3D video screened on stage, the dancers on stage, and the integrated mobile devices of members of the audience. The app provides poetic images and lines of text. This transmedia performance can be taken as the starting point for research into  the potential for augmenting live performance with 3D projected scenography and mobile devices.  It is also a starting point for discussion on the potential for dramaturgy, choreographic process, and the directing of audience attention within trans-media dance performances.

9  Climate change: a challenge for community performance

http://ec.europa.eu/clima/citizens/youth/docs/youth_magazine_en.pdf

The dancer, Liz Lerman, finds science to be a rich source of material for her dance company to perform; she sees her dancers as helping disseminate scientific discoveries to the public, and helping the public visualize the scientific concepts. There is part of a current trend for dance companies to choreograph dances about molecular genetics, with themes such as the Genome Project and DNA replication.  Nobel laureate John Polanyi has referred to molecular movement as “the dance of the molecules.” On the other side, many scientific discoveries are often an inspiration for dancers, actors, playwrights, poets and musicians.  Indeed, physics provides the intellectual framework for one of Lerman’s works, on which the whole piece hangs. For one hour, dancers young and old, spin, leap, fall, balance and re-balance through critical moments of atomic and subatomic history referencing Marie Curie and the discovery of radium, the Manhattan Project, the particle collider at CERN and the Hubble telescope (Fig 7).

Fig 7  A fusion of physics and dance

Today, the greatest need for the general public to engage with science is the global  threat to humanitarian values known as ‘climate change’. Without doubt, scientific evidence is telling us that:

• the global climate has been changing over the several decades in a manner that is highly unusual compared to a very long history of climatic stability;
• emissions of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide from humanity’s use of fossil carbon fuels are the dominant cause of these changes;
• these changes are already having significant adverse impacts on human well being and on ecosystems;
• this harm will continue to grow unless the offending emissions are greatly reduced.

For future generations to cope with the accompanying environmental instabilities there has to be a big behavioural change in order  to live within a balanced carbon economy, where our emissions match the rate at which they can be taken out of the atmosphere . This is the most relevant, important and continuous message for educators to transmit, using every available means and media, at all levels of education.  The slogan is ‘Our Planet Our Future: Fighting Climate Change Together’.  This is the title of a booklet produced by the European Commission in 2015.  Miguel Canete in his foreword says:

“Climate change is one of the greatest threats facing mankind today.  It is not a problem we can put off and deal with when we have more time or more money.  We all have a duty to act to stop the climate getting worse,  The actions we take now will determine what the world we live in will look like in 10, 20 or 50 years’ time.  And it’s going to to need huge efforts from all of us individuals, governments, businesses, schools and other organisations, working together for a better climate and better future”.

The message is that the objective of climate action is to impart sustainability and resilience to world development.  In other words, dealing with climate change has become the basis of our common humanity and as such climate action should become a major pillar of education.   ‘Working together’ means networking globally; ‘actions’ means making betterment plans, with realistic targets, in homes, neighbourhoods, schools and workplaces,  The outcome is to leave smaller carbon footprints for future generations to follow.

Documentation of the urgent need for action plans to mitigate or adapt to climate change runs from 1988 to 2014. To present its call for action needs more effective communication. The difficulty in teaching climate change using traditional bookish methods is that we can’t think about it in a linear manner.  Our thoughts about it bounce off other thoughts like a ping-pong ball. They go in all possible directions. Therefore, the best way to keep track of thoughts about a subject like climate change that conforms to a cross-curricular framework is by the application of a whole range of the brain’s cortical skills to make and respond to mind maps.

Mind maps are resources for visual learning and dance is a powerful visual medium that links culture with ecology. The thinking skills of choreography include;  logic, rhythm, lines, colour, lists, daydreaming, numbers, imagination, word, and seeing the whole picture. The more these activities are integrated, the more the brain’s performance becomes co-operative, with each intellectual skill enhancing other intellectual areas.

When navigating the mind map of a dance the audience is not only practicing and exercising their fundamental powers of memory and information processing, but are also using their entire range of cortical skills with all the elements that the brain can process.. This is spiced up with personal elements like imagination, association and location which make learning absorbing and effective.

This then is the challenge for those wishing to present climate change as an educational performance.  The aim is to dispel the following five myths about the underlying science

1. The Earth stopped warming in the last decade.
2. If it is warming, humans aren’t the main cause.
3. A little warming isn’t harmful anyway.
4. If there is any danger, it’s far in the future.
5. Even if mainstream climate science is right and the need for action therefore is real, doing enough to make a difference is unaffordable.

With or without dance, making a mind map is an educational performance, because teaching climate change is primarily a process of cross-subject storytelling,  For example, the Bella Gaia performance is a fine, albeit expensive, example of life-changing dance and music messaging.   Inspired by astronauts who spoke of the educative power of seeing the Earth from space, filmmaker and composer Kenji Williams created the award winning Bella Gaia as a trans media performance that successfully simulates space flight, taking the audience on a spectacular journey around the planet Earth. It showcases a thought-provoking stream of crucial scientific data regarding our imperilled ecosystems while also celebrating the amazing cultural heritage of humanity.

At the other end of the scale, the European Commission’s booklet also aims to produce behavioural change.  In this respect it provides ideas, facts and imagery for communities to choreograph a variety of performances, with or without transmedia components, presenting important international issues about climate action and relating them to local situations.

Above all, a dance performance thoughtfully combined with social media allows people to share what is learned with the world and tap into the knowledge and experience of others to help make even stronger connections with real-world problems and their solution (Fig 8)

Fig 8  A performance for raising awareness of the need for climate action (New York:2014)

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/news-and-events/past-events/public-lectures–seminars/

9  Web references

Models

http://doursat.free.fr/docs/CS790R_S05/CS790R_S05_Flocking_Schooling.pdf

https://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/05/q1/0203-flock.htm

http://www.sekj.org/PDF/anzf19/anz19-081-085.pdf

http://www.nadsdiptera.org/Doid/Empidchar/Empidchar.htm

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982213005721

People dancing

http://www.communitydance.org.uk/DB/animated-library/aesthetic-values-in-community-dance-deal-or-no-dea.html?ed=14053

Definition of performance

http://www.icosilune.com/2009/01/richard-schechner-performance-theory/

http://wn.com/richard_schechner

Academic view

http://www.xavier.edu/xjop/documents/gray.pdf

Art as human behaviour

http://www.ellendissanayake.com/publications/pdf/EllenDissanayake_5618127.pdf

Environmental education through community arts

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ842768.pdf

Music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Uganda

Cultural values

http://www.academia.edu/1937342/Ugandan_Traditional_Cultural_Values

Social dance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dance

http://www.bellagaia.com/about.html

Cross curricular view

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lHyOAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA164&lpg=PA164&dq=dance+cross+curricular+education+about+values&source=bl&ots=cRPjhqO36v&sig=3xO_WMUbLY8eb73XsxyQaPJN0VE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CE4Q6AEwCGoVChMIqJGqgP2jxwIVAzwaCh0TRQPc#v=onepage&q=dance%20cross%20curricular%20education%20about%20values&f=false

Cultural ecology

http://www.publicartonline.org.uk/downloads/news/AHRC%20Ecology%20of%20Culture.pdf

Folklore Jessica Schmonsky

http://www.ecology.com/2012/10/24/ecological-importance-folklore/

Beauty and behaviour intertwined

www.birdsofparadiseproject.org

Biocultural musings

http://bioculturalmusings.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/biology-of-dance.html

Both information and social cohesion determine collective decisions in animal groupshttp://www.pnas.org/content/110/13/5263.full

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system

http://cogprints.org/2472/1/music.pdf

Ecological dominance; social competition

http://jayhanson.us/_Biology/Social_Arms_Race.pdf

A doctoral thesis

http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/5011/1/Cook20125011.pdf

Climate action

1 Action for trees

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/eng-trees-and-climate-change.pdf/$FILE/eng-trees-and-climate-change.pdf

2 Economic action

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/magazine/11Economy-t.html?_r=0

3 Milestones

http://unfccc.int/timeline/

Transmedia dance performance

http://isea2015.org/proceeding/submissions/ISEA2015_submission_53.pdf

Science of chemistry and dance

http://old.iupac.org/publications/cei/vol6/11_Lerman.pdf

Intangible heritage

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/web/heritage_MI.pdf

Learning ecologies

http://www.lifewideebook.co.uk/uploads/1/0/8/4/10842717/chapter_a5.pdf

Conservation, human values and democracy

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4303444/

Ecosystem services and conservation management

“Here and there on the green plush surface of the moss were scattered faint circular marks, each the size of a shilling. So faint were they that it was only from certain angles that they were noticeable at all  I wondered idly what could have made them. They were too irregular, too scattered to be the prints of some beast, and what was it that would walk up an almost vertical bank in such a haphazard manner?  Besides, they were not like imprints. I prodded the edge of one of these circles with a piece of grass. It remained unmoved and  I began to think the mark was caused by some curious way in which the moss grew. I probed again more vigorously, and suddenly my stomach gave a clutch of tremendous excitement. It was as though my grass-stalk had found a hidden spring, for the whole circle lifted up like a trap door. As I stared, I saw to my amazement that it was in fact a trap door, lined with silk, and with a neatly bevelled edge that fitted snugly into the mouth of the silk lined shaft it concealed. The edge of the door was fastened to the lip of the tunnel by a small flap of silk acts as the hinge. I gazed at this magnificent piece of workmanship and wondered what on earth could have made it”.

Gerald Durrell-as a boy partaking of cultural ecosystem services in wonderment..

1 Background

During the past decade there has been a global move towards holistic conservation management, with integrated plans for local ecosystem services (Fig 1)  taken down to the level of the family and its neighbourhood. This is a practical approach to cultural ecology because such plans involve modelling the ecocultural dynamics of the local human ecological niche which encapsulates the dependence of humankind bonding with other creatures.. We now have to legislate to establish and maintain this vital relationship

Fig 1 Classification of ecosystem services

Two significant moves in this direction are the Future Generations (Wales) Act, recently introduced by the Welsh Government, and Section 38 of Kenya’s Environmental Management and Coordination Act (EMCA)  Both initiatives demand that local government, in partnership with its communities, should co-produce plans for the well-being of future generations.  In Wales these plans are called ‘well-being plans’ and in Kenya they are ‘district environment action plans (DEAPs)’. Regarding the format for such plans, a good Kenyan example is the Mount Elgon DEAP.  Wales has yet to specify the required format of its well being plans.

The two systems of legislation have arisen independently as frameworks within which local government is required to make statutory conservation management systems to ensure the needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (the sustainable development principle).

The plans will have to operate seamlessly from strategic to operational levels and  manage the linkages between fragmented ecosystems and the interconnections amongst cultural practices, economic development, environmental stressors, ecosystem attributes and restoration activities for impacts on biodiversity, locally and globally into day living. Performance indicators for well being are required so that everyone can check out progress of their local plan to see how far their global footprint is from the ‘one planet limit’ (Fig 2).

Fig 2 The historic milestones in the hope for sustainability

2 Purpose

The starting point for managing ecosystem services is for people to have some sort of awareness of their local ecological assets and the importance of managing biodiversity for human well being..  This blog explores a knowledge system for assembling conceptual management models so that people can make contact with other living things in a managed ecological context, be it a potted plant, a private garden, trees in the street, parks, a pathway through the countryside, a zoo/wildlife park and large scale terrestrial, marine, and freshwater protected areas.

The early conservation movement included the protective management of fisheries, wildlife, water, soil and sustainable forestry. The contemporary movement has broadened from an emphasis on use of sustainable yields of natural resources and preservation of wilderness areas to include preservation of life in all its diversity. Conservation has come to define a management system that aims to preserve natural resources expressly for their continued sustainable use by humans as an intrinsic good and a contributor to human well being and survival.

Over time, large scale protected areas have moved from being places of physical isolation, where management was frequently hands-off or laissez-faire, to places where active restoration is done to restore biodiversity and other valuable features of the protected area.  Although protected area management aims first at protecting existing ecosystems, a combination of previous degradation and continuing external pressures mean that restoration has become the norm for conservation management.  This is because, on an overcrowded planet, ecosystems are no longer a pristine state in which humankind evolved and continuous management is needed to restore them to a past condition of low human impact.  In recognition of this global situation the term ‘restoration for protected areas’ has been introduced by the IUCN for activities within protected sites and for activities in the wider system of connecting or surrounding lands and waters that influence protected area features. Sometimes a conservation plan necessitates restoration beyond protected area borders (e.g. to address ecosystem fragmentation and maintain well-connected protected area systems).

Fig 3 The human niche as the outcome of social design

Humans have a long history of niche construction—of modifying their environments, large and small by designed behaviour patterns that are both deliberate and inadvertent (Fig 3). Although the consequences of human niche construction in this way are not always anticipated, one of the primary goals of environmental engineering by human societies has been to increase their share of the annual productivity of the ecosystems they occupy by increasing both the abundance and reliability of the plant and animal resources they rely on for food and raw materials. Using fire and simple technology in the modification of vegetation communities, our distant ancestors were shaping environments more to their liking in ways that we can see in the archaeological record back perhaps as far as 40 000 years ago. The recent shift towards holistic management involves the integration of ecosystem services and conceptual models of conservation management should work within the socio-cultural characteristics of the local human ecological niche. As syntheses of the state of understanding of the dynamics of the human niche, conceptual models of ecosystem services can provide a basis for examining the potential risks and consequences of various restoration options and related actions.  Modelled attributes of the restored ecosystem can also be used as benchmarks for evaluating the success of various stages of the management project and determining the need to change restoration actions or policies through an adaptive approach.  Descriptions of the abiotic and biotic attributes of one or more sets of reference ecosystems are important contributors to conceptual models for ecological restoration projects.  Mind maps are essential to visualise these complex models at a glance.

3 Definitions

Ecological restoration: ‘the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed’ (SER, 2004)

Protected area: ‘A clearly defined geographical space, recognized dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated human ecosystem services and cultural values’

4 Restoration

■■ Restoration in and around protected areas contributes to many societal goals and objectives associated with biodiversity conservation and human well-being,  Indeed, holistic restoration management can be thought of as a wellbeing plan.

■■ Reasons for implementing restoration projects vary and may include, for example, recovery of individual species, the strengthening of landscape or seascape-scale ecosystem function or connectivity, improvement of visitor experience opportunities, or the re-establishment or enhancement of various ecosystem services

■■ Restoration can contribute to climate change adaptation by strengthening resilience to change and providing ecosystem services. It can contribute to climate change mitigation by capturing carbon in ecosystems

■■ Rapid climate change and other global changes create additional challenges for restoration and underscore the need for adaptive management

■■ Protected area managers need to work with stakeholders and partners inside and outside protected area boundaries to ensure successful restoration within and between protected areas

5 Operating Principles

Re-establish values

Effective ecological restoration for protected areas is restoration that re-establishes and maintains the values of a protected area

• ‘Do no harm’ when restoration is the best option
• Re-establish ecosystem structure, function and composition
• Maximize the contribution of restoration actions to enhancing resilience even when this may need changed objectives (e.g., to climate change)
• Restore connectivity within and beyond the boundaries of protected areas
• Encourage and re-establish traditional cultural values and practices that contribute to the ecological, social and cultural sustainability of the protected area and its surroundings
• Use research and monitoring, including from traditional ecological knowledge, to maximize restoration success

Maximise beneficial outcomes

Efficient ecological restoration for protected areas is restoration that maximizes beneficial outcomes while minimizing costs in time, resources and effort

• Consider restoration goals and objectives from system-wide to local scales
• Ensure long-term capacity and support for maintenance and monitoring of restoration
• Enhance natural capital and ecosystem services from protected areas while contributing to nature conservation goals
• Contribute to sustainable livelihoods for indigenous peoples and local communities dependent on the protected areas
• Integrate and coordinate with international development policies and programming.

Engage with others

Engaging ecological restoration for protected areas is restoration that collaborates with partners and stakeholders, promotes participation and enhances visitor experience

• Collaborate with indigenous and local communities, neighbouring landowners, corporations, scientists and other partners and stakeholders in planning, implementation, and evaluation
• Learn collaboratively and build capacity in support of continued engagement in ecological restoration initiatives
• Communicate effectively to support the overall ecological restoration process
• Provide rich experiential opportunities, through ecological restoration and as a result of restoration, that encourage a sense of connection with and stewardship of protected areas

6  Planning principles

Identify valued features

• These will usually be habitats and species but can also be ancillary systems, such as the facilities for access and visitor education,

Factor analysis

• Identify all major factors, sometimes called ‘barriers’, causing degradation—undertaking restoration without tackling underlying causes is likely to be fruitless.
• Identify and where possible control external factors such as pollution that may compromise restoration efforts
• Restore, where possible, ecosystem functioning along with physicochemical conditions and hydrology
• Consider natural capital, ecosystem services, disaster risk reduction and climate change mitigation and adaptation
• Identify potential negative impacts of the restoration programme and take action to limit or mitigate them as much as possible
• Assess the possible impacts of climate change and other large-scale changes on the feasibility and durability of restoration and try to build resilience through adaptive planning
• Establish a rationale to manage each factor through researching how it impacts on the feature.

Participation

• Ensure a participatory process involving all relevant stakeholders and partners in planning and implementation, facilitating participation and shared learning, contributing to acquisition of transferable knowledge, improving visitor experiences, and celebrating successes.

Objectives

• Set clear restoration objectives for the state of each feature—it may not be appropriate to aim for a ‘pristine’ or ‘pre-disturbance’ state, particularly under conditions of rapid environmental (e.g., climate) change
• Recognize that some objectives or motivations for restoration may conflict and work collaboratively to prioritize among them

Scheduling

• Ensure that the time frames for the activities required to meet the objectives are clear

Monitoring

• Ensure that monitoring addresses the full range of restoration objectives and the intermediate stages needed to reach them
• Use monitoring results and other feedback to adapt the plan according to the outcomes

7  A Welsh model

The Well-Being of Future Generations Act

http://gov.wales/about/cabinet/cabinetstatements/2014/8995356/?lang=en

Fig 4  A well being hierarchy of human needs

The Act provides for a set of long-term well-being goals for Wales within the context of a hierarchy of human needs. (Fig 4). These goals set for a prosperous; resilient; healthier; more equal Wales; with cohesive communities; and a vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language. Placing them in legislation will provide a clear definition of a sustainable Wales, and help deliver the long term consistency and certainty that is needed to tackle future challenges, for example climate change, tackling poverty, and health inequalities.

The Act will require Welsh Ministers to establish national indicators to measure progress towards the achievement of the well-being goals and report on them annually.

About the Act

The key purposes of the Act are to:

• set a framework within which specified Welsh public authorities will seek to ensure the needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (the sustainable development principle),

• put into place well-being goals which those authorities are to seek to achieve in order to improve wellbeing both now and in the future,

• set out how those authorities are to show they are working towards the well-being goals,

• put Public Services Boards and local well-being plans on a statutory basis and, in doing so, simplify current requirements as regards integrated community planning, and

• establish a Future Generations Commissioner for Wales to be an advocate for future generations who will advise and support Welsh public authorities in carrying out their duties under the Bill.

The Act sets out six well-being goals against which every public body must set and publish well-being objectives that are designed to maximise its contribution to the achievement of the well-being goals. The Well-being goals are:

• A prosperous Wales
• A resilient Wales
• A healthier Wales
• A more equal Wales
• A Wales of cohesive communities
• A Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language

Sustainability is at the forefront of the Bill and it seeks to ensure that the long term effects of current decision making are considered at all times. It will, if passed (it has the backing of all political parties), formalise partnerships across the public sector to ensure a joined up approach to delivery and planning. In applying the sustainable development principle the Bill requires that public bodies take into account:

• The importance of balancing short term needs with the need to safeguard the ability to meet long term needs
• The benefits of taking an integrated approach by considering how: an objective may impact upon each of the well-being goals and the social, economic and environmental aspects and; the impact of the body’s objectives on each other and upon other public bodies’ objectives.
• The importance of involving those with an interest in the objectives, seeking views and taking them into account
• How collaborating with any other person could assist the body to meet its objectives, or assist another body to meet its objectives.
• How deploying resources to prevent problems occurring or getting worse may contribute to meeting the body’s objective, or another body’s objectives

There must be a Public Services Board for each local authority area in Wales. The board will include the Local Authority, Local Health Board, the Welsh Fire and Rescue Authority and Natural Resources Wales as statutory members. In addition the board must invite (‘invited participants’) the Welsh Ministers, the Chief Constable of the police force in that area, the Police and Crime Commissioner, a person required to provide probation services in relation to the Local Authority area and a body representing voluntary organisations in the area.  Other relevant organisations can also be invited to join the board.

The aim of the Public Services Board will be to improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of its area in accordance with the sustainable development principle. Each board is required to publish an assessment of the state of the economic, social and environmental well-being in its area prior to the production of a local well-being plan.  This is similar to current arrangements for Local Service Boards and the existing practice of undertaking needs assessments and producing a Single Integrated Plan but will be a statutory requirement.

The Public Services Board must also review and amend its local wellbeing plan and produce annual progress reports.

8 A Kenyan model

District, Provincial and National Environment Action Plans (NEAPs)

Section 38 of Kenyan Environmental Management and Coordination Act (EMCA) provides for the preparation of District, Provincial and National Environment Action plans every five years. The preparation of the District and Provincial Environment Action Plans commenced with initial training of six technical members from the District  Provincial environment committees. This was through four regional training workshops based on the NEAP Manual. The District Environment Officers and Provincial Directors of Environment who are secretaries to their respective committees informed the District and Provincial Commissioners who chair the Environmental committees. Members of the District and provincial committees were informed and participated in preparation and validation of their respective environment action plans. Other committees including the District and Provincial Development and Executive committees were informed. During barazas or public meetings, members of the public were informed of the ongoing process. The District environment Action Plans are forwarded to the Provincial Directors of Environment to enable input of issues identified into the Provincial Environment Action Plans. The Provincial Environment Action Plans are passed to the National Environment Management Authority to incorporate issues identified at the Provincial level.

9  Managing giraffids: interactions between cultures and ecology

The giraffe  has suddenly come to the fore as an endangered species in a rapidly deteriorating indigenous habitat.According to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, at the beginning of this century there were about 140,000 giraffes roaming  the plains and open forests of Africa. Today that number has plummeted by more than 40 percent.   As with so many other species, the causes of this decline is rapid change which activates unmanaged conflicts between the human demand on its habitat  for different ecosystem services.

Modern culture thrives on change. It creates new goods and services, and teaches us to want them. It adds new technologies, things and ideas at an increasingly rapid rate.  Change in modern culture is propelled by all the same forces that cause change in traditional culture, only in modern culture the changes happen more quickly. Modern culture is a more mutable system that tends to change often.  Another way in which traditional culture and modern culture differ is in their relationship to environment. Traditional cultures lived in close contact with their local environment. This taught that nature must be respected, cooperated with, in certain ritualized ways. One did not make huge changes in the environment, beyond clearing fields for agriculture and villages. Society saw itself as part of nature; its spiritual beliefs and values held humans as the kinsmen of plants and animals.

In contrast, modern culture creates its own environment, exports that cultural environment to colonies in far away places. It builds cities and massive structures. It teaches that nature is meant to be manipulated, to be the source of jobs and wealth for its human masters. It sees itself as being above nature. Its religions commonly cast humans as the pinnacle of nature: at best its paternalistic supervisors, at worst its righteous conquerors.  This results in habitat loss, and habitat fragmentation, through food production,  hunting and poaching, collecting wood for domestic fuel, using rivers and streams as waste sinks, artisan mining for minerals and the growth of urban settlements.  The latter is linked with high population growth.  For example, in 2015, Eye on Earth reported a study carried out in Uganda by the Population Reference Bureau.  The message is that the country’s current population of 27.7 million will expand to 130 million by 2050, a nearly fivefold increase. Uganda’s current growth rate is 3.1 percent, while the world average is 1.2 percent.  The PRB believes a low level of family planning is the main reason for the country’s extraordinary population growth. Only 20 percent of married Ugandan women between the ages of 15 and 49 have access to contraception. Women in Uganda have an average of 6.9 children, compared with a global average of 2.7 and an African average of 5.1.

Unfortunately, the decline in giraffes has occurred with little public attention.  To place this in a larger conservation perspective there are an estimated 450,000 African elephants compared to 80,000 giraffe.  Indeed, the giraffe is more endangered that the panda in terms of the numbers in its indigenous habitat.

There are several large national nature reserves in Kenya with online public conservation plans which include the giraffe. There are also several privately owned conservancies, such as the Kigio Wildlife Conservancy, occupying 3,000 fenced off acres of a former colonial cattle ranch.  These sites, protect smaller pockets of planned biodiversity that allow some species to utilize multiple cross boundary areas. Resilience-UK is using these operational plans as an information source to exemplify an online educational wiki, which compares the logic of different conservation systems being developed for controlling ecosystem services.   In this context, there is scope in Kenya for developing a common conceptual format for conservation plans in order to share ideas, experience and achievements about managing habitats and species, between sites.  Since wildlife and habitats transcend national boundaries there is also scope to promote ideas of transnational planning to a common conceptual format.  The central philosophy is adaptive management (Fig 5) where monitoring of outcomes provides feedback to the objectives, hypotheses and management activities of the plan.

Fig 5 The logic of adaptive management

It was in the 1980s that the idea of developing a common conservation planning/recording system brought together UK government and non-governmental nature protection organisations to create a software database known as the CMS.  This computer package was based on the needs of site managers to schedule and report on the outcomes of their day to day activities  and share best operational practice..  The CMS is now developed and promoted by the Conservation Management System Consortium, a not-for-profit organisation. The system is the gold standard for conservation management in the UK and The Netherlands.  As such, it provides a well-worked and tested planning, recording and reporting logic for making  international comparisons, particular in the context of developing education/training packages to link communities and their local ecosystem services to support the topic of cultural ecology.  A network of Wikis is the focus for this cross-curricular educational initiative.

Fig 6 Excerpt from a conceptual ecosystem services mind map https://atlas.mindmup.com/resilienceuk/kigio_wildlife_conservancy_a_concept_m/index.html

An ecosystem services mind map (Fig 6)  is being developed to illustrate a conceptual management system based on the conservation plan produced by Projects Abroad in partnership with the Giraffe Research and Conservation Trust and the Kigio Wildlife Conservancy.  As a concept management plan the mind map conceptualises a one-to-many database, which is the most appropriate software solution to make, record and report on operational management. The plan is taken down to the level of actions for one of its intrinsic features, the Rothschild’s giraffe, which is an iconic indicator of the the state of the ecosystem services of the African plains.

The family Giraffidae has two extant members: the savannah-dwelling giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) and the forest-living okapi (Okapia johnstoni). Native to Africa, this family is highly adapted for browsing, although the two species inhabit very different habitats, both feed at a level higher than any other sympatric terrestrial herbivore. The giraffe is the tallest living mammal, towering up to 5.9 meters above the ground.  The forequarters of both species are overdeveloped, and the back slopes downward to the rump.

The fossil record of the Giraffidae begins in Africa during the Miocene, extending to the present on this continent. Giraffes also ranged widely in Eurasia from the middle Miocene to the Pleistocene. Some of these giraffes bore highly developed, branching horn-like projections. The modern-day okapi, on the other hand, closely resembles the ancestral form of the early Pliocene giraffids.

Competition for local ecosystem services also affects okapi conservation, which  is very evident in the conflicts surrounding the declaration and management of the Congolese forest Okapi Wildlife Reserve, which is home to a substantial proportion of the remaining world population of okapi.   One year after giving it World Heritage status the okapi was placed  on the list of World Heritage in Danger in 1998, because armed conflict in early 1997, had led to the looting of facilities and of equipment donated by international conservation organisations, the incursions by thousands of miners seeking gold and rare metals and by bushmeat hunters and cultivators. Most of the staff were evacuated. By 2001, exploitation of the Reserve by armed militias, miners and hunters had decimated the animal population around all camps and the park was too dangerous to visit. That year UN agencies  responded to pleas from staff and NGOs for international pressure to stop the destruction and help to restore funds, morale and order. The political situation is still fragile

10 Postscript

“This animal has a body as big as a horse but with an extremely long neck. Its forelegs are very much longer than the hind legs, and its hoofs are divided like those of cattle.

The length of the foreleg from the shoulder down to the hoof measured, in this present beast, 16 palms, and from the breast thence up to the top of the head measured likewise 16 palms: and when the beast raised its head it was a wonder to see the length of the neck, which was very thin and the head somewhat like that of a deer. The hind legs in comparison with the forelegs were short, so that anyone seeing the animal casually and for the first time would imagine it to be seated and not standing, and its haunches slope down like those of a buffalo.

The belly is white but the rest of the body is of yellow golden hue cross marked with broad white bands. The face, with the nose, resembles that of a deer, and in the upper part it projects somewhat acutely. The eyes are very large, being round, and the ears like those of a horse, while near its ears are seen two small round horns, the bases of which are covered with hair: these horns being like those of the deer when they first begin to grow. The animal reaches so high when it extends its neck that it can overtop any wall, even one with six or seven coping stones in the height, and when it wishes to eat it can stretch up to the branches of any high tree, and only of green leaves is its food. To one who never saw the jornufa before this beast is indeed a very wondrous sight to behold”

From Gonzalez de Clavijo’s account of his journey to Samarkand (1402-6).  It reveals the considerable awe felt by a man who has just gazed at a giraffe for the first time.

This blog builds on the document ‘Ecological Restoration for Protected Areas’, produced by the IUCN.  https://portals.iucn.org/library/efiles/documents/PAG-018.pdf

http://kenya.um.dk/en/~/media/Kenya/Documents/6%20National%20Environment%20Action%20Plan%20Framework%2020092013.ashx

Conceptual model of the Mount Elgon DEAP.

1  Chatsworth at Chelsea

The winner of the 2015 coveted Chelsea Flower Show double prize of ‘gold’ and ‘best of show’ was Dan Pearson with his installation entitled, ‘Chatsworth Garden’.  Pearson’s exhibit was inspired by the landscape art of Joseph Paxton the great Victorian engineer and architect of the Crystal Palace.  In particular, Paxton created two small additions to the landscape garden of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth estate, namely, The Rockery’ and ‘The Trout Stream’,

The Trout Stream at Chatsworth is a narrow rill that channels water from the moor above into the garden, looping down to a rocky waterfall, from where it feeds the lower formal ponds. On its way it passes through narrow stone channels and tumbles gently through miniature falls. Sometimes the incline is so shallow, the movement so slow, it almost appears to be flowing backwards, and thus has striking reflective qualities (Figs 1 and 2).

Fig 1  The Trout Stream at Chatsworth

To realise the essence of Chatsworth’s stream and rockery at Chelsea , Pearson imported stone from a local Derbyshire quarry to act as a backdrop and planted in such a way as to emulate the surroundings at the estate, which he visited many times in the lead-up to designing the garden.

Fig 2 The Rockery at Chatstworth

Most of Pearson’s hard landscaping at Chelsea was naturalistic, but there were some utilitarian interventions: an oak boardwalk and sandstone stepping stones lead through the planted space and an oak sculpture – representing the veteran oaks at Chatsworth – stands at the culmination of the stream (Figs 3 and 4).  “I wanted to capture the monumentality and drama of the rockery as a backdrop”, Dan Pearson said.

Fig 3 Chatsworth at Chelsea

Fig 4 Chatsworth at Chelsea: the rockery

Pearson’s interest in the rill as an historical feature of landscape design is evident in his earlier writings about the garden of Rousham in Oxfordshire.  This is one of the classic English landscape gardens and he gives a lengthy description of it in the book Spirit. The garden was the work of one of the key figures of the English landscape movement, William Kent, who was asked to refine the garden in 1737 after the framework had been designed by Charles Bridgeman in the 1720s. Many of the eighteenth century features may still be seen (Fig 5).

Fig 5  The Serpentine Rill at Rousham

The cultural legacy of Rousham takes us further back to its origins in the 17th century art of Claude Lorrain.  Lorrain was a Frenchman who lived in Rome for most of his life yet his landscapes look distinctly English. Rambling, deciduous trees tumble down to a gently bubbling, rock-fringed lake, flanked by a ruined folly.  This similarity, between rural England and rural Greece, as painted by a Frenchman to look like 17th-century Italy,  is no coincidence. It was the Picturesque Movement of the mid-18th century that was essentially a part of the ecological culture of land ownership, which invented the idea of what an English landscape should look like.  It was Lorrain’s paintings that helped inspire the movement which bolstered the social standing of country landowners.

This ‘Lorrain effect’ is precisely what the 18th‑century landscape architect Charles Bridgeman was aiming for at Rousham.  His tour de force is the garden of Stowe.  Among the landscape highlights at Stowe, which are scattered through its great parkland, are examples of Greek architecture, a menagerie, Dido’s Cave and temples to Venus, to Ancient and Modern Virtue, to Friendship and to British Worthies. Around this time at Stourhead in Wiltshire, the banker Henry Hoare was so keen on Lorrain that some historians have suggested that the whole 18th century garden is a transcription of Lorrain’s great canvas, ‘Coast View of Delos with Aeneas’.

2 Landscapes and ecosystems

Landscapes and ecosystems are the two major spatial units supporting 21st century environmental research. Landscape ecology and landscape art are the intellectual markers of cultural ecology and were born from similar desires.  Their common objective is to accurately describe the richness and beauty we all perceive in the outdoor rural environment.  A particular view is analysed in a selective process of discovering shapes, forms, colours and associated knowledge all of which define the scene.   We make mental models to express our understanding of the configuration of ideas; the array of lines,  the patches of colours and textures, the events that have influenced what we see as detail, and the overall evenness or fragmentation of what we see as a whole. Both disciplines love contemplating the contrasts between edges and patches and present them in words, plantings or paintings.  They remind us that science says we are part of nature in everything we do whether it is begetting a child or planting a tree..

Parallels of gardening and painting go much further. Henri Matisse, Gustav Klimt, and Paul Klee experimented tirelessly with nature-inspired configurations of patches of colour, different sized patches, the shape of each patch, the orientation of “floating” patches with the straight edges of the canvas and with other patches inside the artwork’s boundaries. Landscape ecologists similarly ponder patches such as ponds hedgerows and clumps of trees embedded in regularly textured farmlands. The “right” configuration can bring harmony to either model. To conservation biologists, for instance, the size and shape of a patch of trees may mean the difference between protection of a rare species and its local extinction. Informed intuition serves both painters and ecologists well.

Landscapes have been conceptualised in European art since the Greeks first began reproducing images of the places described in mythic literature. In these early works, features of the landscape were not represented in relation to the viewpoint of the ob­server or a precise visual experience, but were in­stead based on meanings found in legendary environmental narra­tives. They expressed ideas more than any actual places and there was no one better than Lorrain who achieved this end..

Artists did not begin depicting landscapes in their own right, separate from the narrative context that gave them literary meaning, until the fourteenth century, when teachers started instructing their students to paint the landscape as it appears in reality, not memory.  Now, landscapes are the starting point for both art and science.  With no place on Earth remaining untouched by human settlement they are cultural artifacts.  They are the visible, spatial functional matrix and living space for all organisms, including humans and their populations and the source of their natural resources. This complexity is multidimensional and multifunctional, dealing with the dynamic relationships between culture, ecology and the cognitive mental and perceptual dimensions of the outdoors transmitted by cultural information.  The latter is used to build notional layers of understanding, which give landscapes a central position in defining an individual’s cultural place in nature, be it national or parochial.

3  Ecotopes: the fundamental scenic units

Landscape was first defined geographically by Alexander Von Humboldt, born 1769, as a visual entity that expresses “all the characteristics of a land”.  It is a spatial entity, having a variable extent and scale, with territorial properties that may be perceived and experienced.  This definition was further developed in the European Landscape Convention to emphasise the dynamic nature of landscape as an area “perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. Therefore, a functional definition of landscape is “a heterogeneous land area composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that is repeated in similar form throughout”. This highlights the interactions between spatial pattern and ecological process, which are both studied as the causes and consequences of spatial heterogeneity of the outdoors across a range of scales.  Thus, we can define spatial patterns as ecological land units, or ecotopes as they have been defined.

Ecotopes are generally regarded as the smallest functional landscape units that can be painted, photographed or measured. They are sometimes addressed as ‘landscape cells’. Ecotopes are best defined as homogeneous ecological units, their spatial expression being predominantly determined by their structural characteristics and arrangement in space. They are the fundamental visual units of art and science.  Scientifically they are characterized by their species composition and the flows of energy, matter and information between organisms and the non-living  elements of the cell.  The organized complexity of landscape is based on this complexity of material processes governing the flow of energy/matter and biophysical information within and between ecotopes. Thus, a landscape is composed of many very different elements and components that interact and are structured within a spatial organization that is invariably subject to  human natural resource management. In other words, ecotopes are the closely interwoven natural and cultural entities comprising the building blocks of the human ecological niche. Change is an inherent property of ecotopes as they develop or regress.

In the following section, these ideas connecting art and ecology as a unified cultural framework are explored using digital imaging to unravel the relationships between ecotopes and landscapes.

4  Islands in the mind

Skomer is a small Welsh offshore island and a national nature reserve. It has a distinctive landscape of parallel rocky ridges, separated by troughs of maritime scrub held in check by an indigenous population of rabbits.   To place Skomer in a wider perspective, it is at the micro-landscape level of rabbit grazing and the nesting burrows of seabirds that the problem of pattern and scale actually models the central problem in ecology, unifying population biology, ecosystems science and marrying basic and applied ecology.  In this tightknit scheme of things, the issue of ecological pattern is inseparable from the problem of the generation and maintenance of biodiversity.  Not only is the heterogeneity of the environment often essential to the coexistence of species, but the very description of the spatial and temporal distributions of species is really a description of patterns of diversity. Thus, an understanding of botanical pattern in the landscape, its causes and its consequences, is central to understanding principles of evolution, such as speciation, as well as ecological processes governing succession, community development, and the spread and persistence of individual species.  These processes are governed by past and present cultures through the value they place on natural resources.

On Skomer, it is the feeding and social behaviour of rabbits that produces a resilient, high topographical diversity in the low biodiversity in the microcosm of maritime scrub of the island’s central fields and cliff tops.  Rabbits thus hold the key to the existence of a range of mechanisms for generating pattern in landscapes further afield on greater scales. The resultant visual diversity is celebrated in a digital gallery of snapshots taken at various points around the island on 15th May, 2015.  The gallery highlights a new aspect of the art of micro-landscapes, which expresses the fortuitous aesthetics arising through the dynamics of botanical microcosms.

http://tamron.myphotoexhibits.com/exhibits/13197-edges-and-patches

The basic principle of vegetation dynamics on Skomer is that rabbit grazing severely restricts the growth of species that are palatable as seedlings or mature plants.  Their burrowing and scraping produces a seed bed for colonisation by unpalatable species, which grow as clumped monocultures shaped by their constant nibbling.  These visually dominant clumps eventually die and are colonised all over again. The time scale of this cycle is measured in decades but we know little about the factors governing lifespans of the botanical players.  At the moment the sequence of species cannot be predicted but over the past forty years it has involved the rise and decline of sorrels and docks, scentless mayweed, Yorkshire Fog, woodsage, ground ivy, sea campion, heather, red campion and bluebells. All these species exist interspersed in mainland coastal scrub, which in the absence of rabbits would surely dominate the landscape of Skomer.  For example, this assembly of gorse/ bramble/ blackthorn/ bracken is currently the visually dominant feature of Marloes Deer Park, the nearest point on the mainland.  There, with a very low rabbit population, scrub is managed by burning and grazed by beef cattle.  It is also found at other places along the coastal slopes of West Wales, where it is sometimes grazed by sheep.  The position of trees in this maritime habitat can be imagined from the ancient woodland of Pinderi Cliffs Nature Reserve, which clings to the precipitous slopes above the sea north of Llanrhystud, about fifty miles from Skomer.  The principal biological interest of this site is a steeply west-facing sessile oak woodland, which includes an interesting assemblage of other species such as blackthorn, hawthorn, hazel, small-leaved lime, spindle, rowan, and wych elm.

Regarding the current tree-free landscape of Skomer, the following images are snapshots of ecotopes  illustrating the various stages of ‘rabbit-driven’ processes that were evidend on Skomer, 13th May, 2015 (Figs 6-10).

Fig 6 Degraded maritime heath; north facing coastal slope.

Fig 7  Above Bull Hole; clumps of dead thrift colonised by sea campion with a pool of bluebells.

Fig 8  Pigstone Bay; Clumps of nibbled thrift

Fig 9 Central grassland: Field 1; patch of ground ivy with rabbit lawns.

What has all this to do with Dan Pearson and his Chelsea Gold medal?

In terms of gardens being personal expressions of cultural ecology, they are ecological islands composed of ecotopes managed for their visual attractiveness.  Gardens also consist of islands within islands.

Fig 10  Field 1: Large rabbit warren with woodsage and moss.

In most gardens, a ubiquitous island is the lawn.   t

In most gardens, a ubiquitous island is the lawn. The family lawn may be regarded as the most labour intensive expression of urban culture aimed at creating satisfying biological surroundings.  Although the vision of a household lawn may be a monoculture of short velvety grass, the reality is that most domestic lawns consist of collections of ecotopes defined by the local dominance of ‘weeds’. They are in fact part of an ecological set of grassy habitats, which on Skomer are produced by rabbit grazing whereas in the garden these herbivores are replaced by the lawn mower.

Satellite photographs in the United States have shown that lawns (residential and commercial sites, golf courses, etc.) occupy 45.6 million acres, or 23% of urbanized land.  At ground level the major ecological effect of a lawn mower is to encourage the spread of plants, such as grasses, which reproduce by growing roots from specialised prostrate stems (stolons).  These grow out from the centre, hugging the ground, because stems that grow in this way survive the machine’s rotating blades.  In this respect, grasses are in competition with broad-leaved, low growing plants which reproduce and spread in the same way.  These are the weeds of lawns, which may be so vigorous relative to the grasses that over time they become the dominant life forms.  It is at this point that the gardener resorts to selective weedkillers to meet the objective of a lawn that is a hundred percent grass.  An alternative response is to encourage the weedy plants, reducing the chemical inputs, to create a combined stoloniferous habitat where the ecotopes consist of a high proportion of clover, buttercups, daisies or hawkweeds in a grass matrix.  In fact these ecotopes have their own aesthetics. like the windows into vegetation cycling on Skomer.  They add colour and may be maintained by a management programme that consists of mowing and uprooting plants that grow in the ’wrong place’ (Fig 11).

Fig 11 Ecotopes of creeping buttercup (upper cluster) and mouse-ear hawkweed (lower cluster) in an urban lawn.

Therefore, by making a stoloniferous mixed lawn the gardener is also experimenting with a managed ecosystem which can have aesthetic outcomes.  Also, it is aligned with Dan Pearson’s adoption of the Chatsworth semi-wild ornamental ecotopes for his show garden.  A difference in principle is that a lawn island managed for its accidental ecotopes is more sustainable with low inputs of energy and materials although in this respect it is not a free running ecosystem as is the unmanaged Skomer landscape.

5 References

Journal of Landscape Ecology (2010), Vol: 3 ECOSYSTEM AND LANDSCAPES – A CRITICAL  COMPARATIVE APPRAISAL  Zev Naveh

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/ecosystems-david-herbert.html

http://northcentralart.com/art-painting-ecosystem/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/meadows-53912

http://www.deborahsilk.com/art/curric/other/eco/eco_collage.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167880997000169

http://grass-scan.wikispaces.com/Grass+SCAN

Art and mental modelling

Lion Panel, Schuvet, Cave Painting

It is widely accepted in the cognitive sciences and literature that the human ecological niche is a self-constructed mental whole.  That is to say, people develop and use their own internal representations, called ‘mental models’, to interact with the world.  Making such personal mental models of cultural ecology underlies the process of enculturation. People must know about their environment so they can adopt appropriate behaviours to exist within it. Mental models are conceived of as a cognitive structure that form the basis of reasoning and decision making, particularly with respect to understanding the limitations to human survival. They are constructed by individuals based on their personal life experiences, perceptions, and understandings of the world. They provide the mechanism through which new information is filtered, stored and applied.  From this point of view reality is provisional and dependent on what has been accepted into a person’s database through education and experience.  The outcome of these adaptive behaviours is a distinct culture.

Current holistic mental models of the human ecological niche are rooted in the concept of ‘deep ecology’.  This is a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework defining the origins of species and their habitats to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation. Fritjof Capra says that when the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole. It then becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual. Indeed the idea of the individual being linked seamlessly to the cosmos is expressed in the Latin root of the word religion, religare (to bind strongly), as well as the Sanskrit yoga, which means union.

To understand that Earth includes humanity as part of an interdependent spiritual whole is to see that there is no separation between the brain, the mind and the world.  That which we commonly refer to as “self” is but a microcosmic aspect at the cellular edge of the vast complexity of our macrocosmic reality embedded in dark matter.  Self awareness is the biological mechanism by which we equilibrate within the human ecological niche to survive.  Here, in all our thoughts and actions, we are an integral part of nature and at one with its biophysical expressions in all that we do.

As a crucial outcome of human evolution we can glimpse the beginnings of ecological modelling in cave and rock art, where certain kinds of symbols regularly appear across time and space, although the peoples producing these recurring symbols had not been in contact with one another. These primeval symbols are not, in other words, the result of cultural diffusion. They are are a mixture of representative and abstract elements: Lewis-Williams calls them ‘entopic forms’

Entopic forms are records of the first mental models expressing the dependence of humans upon the rest of nature.  But somehow along the course of time, the human mind in the cave became separated from this unified universal whole.  There is now a cosmopolitan, scientific model of the human ecological niche where globalised consumerism is the reality of humanity dedicated to taking more from nature than its ecosystems can provide through regeneration and materials recycling.

But what is the role of art in ecological modelling ?   According to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin,  “Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated“.  What could Rodin mean?

At this point we can turn for a provisional answer to one of Rodin’s contemporaries. Jean Arp, also called Hans Arp, was a French sculptor, painter, collagist, printmaker and poet. The son of a German father and French Alsatian mother, he developed a cosmopolitan outlook from an early age and as a mature artist maintained close contact with the avant-garde throughout Europe. He was a pioneer of non-representative abstract art and one of the founders of Dada in Zurich, but he also participated actively in all important artistic movements of the time, particularly surrealism and constructivism.

Surrealism is an artistic, philosophical, intellectual and political movement that aimed to break down the boundaries of rationalization to access the imaginative subconscious. It is a descendent of Dadaism, which disregarded tradition and the use of conscious form in favour of the ridiculous. First gaining popularity in the 1920s and founded by Andre Breton, the approach relies on Freudian psychological concepts.

Proponents of surrealism believed that the subconscious was the best inspiration for art. They thought that the ideas and images within the subconscious mind were more “true” or “real” than the concepts or pictures the rational mind could create from observing nature. Under this philosophy, even the ridiculous had extreme value and could provide better insights into a culture or a person’s desires, likes or fears.

A major reason why many people took issue with the movement was because it abandoned conventional ideas about what made sense, what was ugly and what was art. In fact, much of what surrealism advocates was designed to break rules in overt ways. The art and writing of the time often holds images or ideas that, under traditional modes of thought, are disturbing, shocking or disruptive.

Constructivism is also a philosophy of mental modelling founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we live in. Each of us generates our own rules and mental models, which we use to make sense of our experiences. Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our models to accommodate new experiences. At the extremes constructivism defines truth as a provisional understanding.

Making biomorphs

Indian Ink, Hans Arp, 1944

In his art, Arp was more of a constructivist.  Using black ink, watercolours and gouache he developed a distinctive graphical repertoire of abstract shapes for his sculptural reliefs.  The same motifs, repeated from work to work in unique combinations, were intended as a kind of ‘object language’ of his neural activity.  The forms he called biomorphs emerged spontaneously from his subconscious in response to taking up a paintbrush and art was the outcome of the brain’s nature. These biomorphs may have something in common with Lewis-Williams’ primeval entopic forms.  While Arp prefigured junk art in his use of waste material, it was through his investigation of biomorphism and of chance and accident in artistic creativity that proved especially influential in later 20th-century art.  Renunciation of artistic control and reliance on chance when creating his compositions reinforced the anarchic subversiveness inherent in Dada  In this connection, he pioneered the use of chance in composing his images.  For example, he haphazardly dropped roughly shaped squares onto a sheet of paper then glued them down and waited for his mind to make sense of the outcome.

With reference to Rodin, Arp’s stated aim was to avoid the traditional way that sculptors always started with natural forms and abstracted their desired shapes to exaggerate their character.  Arp began with shapes emerging from his subconscious to make compositions with no reference to representing natural forms; his naming of the outcome only came when he contemplated his finished oeuvre.

“Dada is without sense, like nature. Dada is for nature against art. Dada is direct like nature. Dada is for infinite sense and for defined means”.  This was the prelude to Arp’s verbal attack against two of the most celebrated works in the history of sculpture, the Venus of the Louvre and the Laocoon of the Vatican.   Arp expresses what is probably his most specific contribution to Dada, as well as one of his personal constants: the denunciation of the anthropocentrism of man and his art. “Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this conception of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome”.

Dadaists asked themselves if in changing art, it would not also be possible to change somewhat the behavior of man himself: “I wanted,” wrote Arp, “to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things, nor should everything be compared to him, but, on the contrary, all things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man. This is made clear in my objects from 1917”.

By objects, Arp was referring to the biomorphs that had first surfaced in the graphic research he had initiated in 1917: “I drew with a brush and India ink broken branches, roots, grass, and stones which the lake had thrown up on the shore. Finally, I simplified these forms and united their essence in moving ovals, symbols of metamorphosis and of development of bodies”.

This period from 1917-20 was to mark a high point in Arp’s graphic work and to affirm the importance of black and white in his work.  Commenting on this in 1955, he said: “I use very little red. I use blue, yellow, a little green, but especially, as you say, black, white and gray. There is a certain need in me for communication with human beings. Black and white is writing”. Thus, what should be seen in the ink drawings are calligraphies without sense, which nevertheless do not exclude communication. These signs, which hail us, are simple drawings; for example, three blots included over a hollowed-out blot, or black lines and forms highlighted with white.

Arp would not trouble himself if the randomness of the blots – and not the will of the person drawing them – would suggest to the imagination a key, dumbbells, a two-footed bottle, or anything that the viewer would be pleased to discern. Arp would not deprive himself, either, of inventing fantastic titles suggested by these forms.  They were created automatically by movements of the hand and not by decisions of the intellect. To a critic he asked  ‘What do you want?’  “It grows like the toenails on the feet. I have to cut them and they still grow.” This automatism, also manifests itself in the poems that Arp wrote simultaneously and that he would assemble in Die Wolkenpumpe (1920), or those he would compose with Tzara and Serner. The three composed in turn their roles on paper, without preconceived ideas, everything falling by chance from their pens, happily mixing languages.

Creativity as mental self-organisation

According to Arp, drawing, sculpture and poetry should originate in themselves through a process of automatic self-organisation; for him, this was a fundamental principle: “I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it. I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands”. He was in favour of the dream: “Genesis, birth and eclosion often take place in a daydreaming state, and it is only later that the true sense of these considerations becomes apparent”. From the first abstract creations a viewer faced with an inexplicable painted canvas would cry out in exasperation, “Why! an infant child could produce this”. From the point of view of Arp’s spontaneously produced biomorphs the viewer is right.

The process of creation was always the same for Arp. Form comes first, then meaning. That is why he never knew a priori what the title of a work in progress was to be: “Each one of these bodies certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name”. If a work was entitled ‘Branches and Spectres Dancing’, or ‘Drawer Head’, or ‘Banner- Wheel’, it was not because the artist intentionally deformed existing objects, but rather that the forms born naturally from brain to hand suggest such an association of ideas or the objects they resemble. If no association came to him, he would call it simply ‘Drawing’, ‘India ink’, ‘Collage’, or ‘Composition’.

Space for the mind

We each live in a tiny little corner of reality where we perpetually insist on carving out a space for our ego.  In this mental portion of our ecological niche we can experience the interconnected, mutually dependent facets of our neural processes as they seek to find balance and harmony with the environment. Just as the natural harmony of the planet is dependent on all of its parts working together in a felicitous and balanced manner, a mind in union with its environment functions socially when it acts in harmony with its self and the body that contains it.

In the last chapter of his biography of Hans Arp, Serge Fauchereau refers to a book, ‘Jours effeuilles’, which was published as a foreword to an exhibition Arp was doing with his friend Richter in 1966, the year of his death. Arp states: “To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing”.

Fauchereau commented “In a time as dominated by confusion as our own, and which privileges the pathetic in art and life, the tragic or the sarcastic and the grimacing, a case in which calm joy – a joy produced while regarding one’s own oeuvre – is not to be taken lightly. Artists like Arp, after all, do not come along that frequently”.

It is entirely up to the viewer to discern the content and meaning of what is painted.  The message or emotion is in the eye of the beholder, not the eye of the creator. The artist’s creativity is in drawing out an emotion or an interpretation from the viewer. If this interpretation differs from what was intended by the artist (if indeed anything he intended anything), this in no way invalidates the interpretation placed on the work by any individual viewer.

Arp begat non-representational abstraction, which has become a global way of thinking and seeing.  It runs alongside representational art and together both kinds of art are tools that express cultural identity locally and globally.  Non-representational, abstract art is an expression of cosmopolitanism because artists shift the emphasis of artmaking away from individual objects or happenings representing ethnic cultural identity towards a form of expression that is within the capability of the whole of humanity. In this sense, art unifies humanity, as Rodin believed, through contemplating the pleasure of the mind.  It can also carry messages between peoples through the responses of the maker and viewer to the images.

Non-representational abstraction can be regarded as composed of three main processes; (i) the brain’s effort to analyze the pictorial content and style; (ii) the flood of associations evoked by it; and (iii) the emotional response it generates. Being of no practical use, art in general enables the viewer to exercise a certain detachment from “reality”.  Arp was the first to define non-representational abstract art as part of a special maker/viewer cognition system where the maker’s interpretation of what she has made comes after the work is finished.  The visual stimulus in the brain of the viewer is not object-related.  Therefore the automatic object recognition systems in the brain are not activated by abstract art.  The viewer has to form new “object-free” associations from more rudimental visual features such as lines, colors and simple shapes. This conclusion is supported by the lack of specific regions in the brain for processing abstract art exclusively. Also, eye tracking experiments, demonstrate that in abstract art, the brain is “free” to scan the whole surface of the painting rather than picking out well recognized salient features, as is the case when processing representational art.

Abstract art may therefore encourage the brain to respond in a less restrictive and stereotypical manner, exploring new associations, activating alternative paths for emotions, and forming new possibly creative links.  It also enables us to access early visual processes dealing with simple features like dots, lines and simple objects that are otherwise harder to access when a whole “gestalt” image is analyzed, as is the case with representational art.  Surely, this is what Rodin meant when he used the term ‘animation of nature’. If abstract art is the key to the animation of nature it may also be the key to promoting the Dadaists educational objective that was to change ‘the behavior of man himself’.

Feeling is a Fragile Container, Qiu Zhenzhong,  2005

 

References

https://www.maps.org/news-letters/v19n1/v19n1-pg61.pdf

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol16/iss1/art46/

Arp, Serge Fauchereau, Ediciones Poligrafa, SA, 1988

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3937809/

http://www.pearllam.com/exhibition/beyond-black-and-white-chinese-contemporary-abstract-ink/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3937809/

http://genealogyreligion.net/entoptics-or-doodles-children-of-the-cave

In his Easter message for 2015, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, seeking ways to satisfy people’s yearning for a more idealistic society, envisaged a better and greater social reality where we can afford to be magnanimous, putting ourselves second, and placing other people’s needs on a par with our own. His standpoint is that people,

“….know in their bones that there must be something better, something more worthwhile than the self-centredness which is attracted by the promise of endless pleasure, but which somehow never seems to materialise.”

He says that it can’t be right for consumerism (which we used to call greed) to measure the worth of human beings by what they own, what they eat and how up to date with fashion they are. Regarding the search of young people for something better, the Archbishop sees a danger that yearning for something more idealistic can be misdirected. This he exemplified by referring to how some teenagers have been seduced by the promise of the false utopia of the Islamic State or even martyrdom to that cause, which would have us roll back a thousand years of human progress.

Prince Charles confessed his perplexity at this development in these words:

“The radicalisation of people in Britain is a great worry, and the extent to which this is happening is alarming, particularly in a country like ours where we hold values dear. You would think that the people who have come here, or are born here, and who go to school here, would abide by those values and outlooks. I can see some of this radicalisation is a search for adventure and excitement at a particular age.”

David Cameron, as Prime Minister, was one of those who tried and failed to fulfil a grander vision with his notion of the ‘Big Society’. Similarly, Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, attempted to define British values as a focus for creating an all inclusive national identity as a platform for empowering citizens to control their own lives , but little came of it.

In 2007, Brown introduced this unifying idea of citizen empowerment by developing the theme of Britain’s ‘golden thread of liberty’. His starting point was that national identity has become far more more of a debating point with two thirds now identifying Britishness as important, and recent surveys show that British people feel more patriotic about their country than almost any other European country. One reason for this, Brown believes is that Britain has a unique history – and what has emerged from the long tidal flows of British history – from the 2,000 years of successive waves of invasion, immigration, assimilation and trading partnerships, from the uniquely rich, open and outward looking culture. It is this which has produced a distinctive set of British values which influence British institutions.

This prompted Brown to identify the golden thread which runs through British history;

“…. that runs from that long-ago day in Runnymede in 1215 when arbitrary power was fully challenged with the Magna Carta, on to the first bill of rights in 1689 where Britain became the first country where parliament asserted power over the king, to the democratic reform acts – throughout the individual standing firm against tyranny and then – an even more generous, expansive view of liberty – the idea of all government accountable to the people, evolving into the exciting idea of empowering citizens to control their own lives”.

Woven also into that golden thread of liberty are countless strands of common, continuing endeavour in our villages, towns and cities – the efforts and popular achievements of ordinary men and women, with one sentiment in common – a strong sense of duty; the Britain of local pride, civic duty, civic society and the public realm. The Britain of thousands of charities, voluntary associations, craft societies but also of churches and faith groups. Britain’s history tells us that worthwhile values are not vague aspirations, but hard won and enduring moral and ethical principles which shape national policies and personal behaviour.

For Archbishop Sentamu the origin of the United Kingdom’s moral direction is grounded in the Bible. It has its roots in the Old Testament and came to fruition in Christianity, where it is exemplified in the following words of Jesus:

“Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

Cameron also referred to Biblical values as important features of a big society when he says: “There are those millions who keep on strengthening our society – being good neighbours, running clubs and voluntary associations, playing their part in countless small ways to help build what I call the big society”.

“Many of these people are Christians who live out to the letter that verse in Acts, that ‘it is more blessed to give than to receive’. These people put their faith into action and we can all be grateful for what they do.”

Cameron was referring to the Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, in which the Apostle Paul quotes Jesus as he addresses the Ephesian elders. Paul says in the King James Version in Acts 20:35:

On the other hand, Edgar Kahn, the author of “No more throw away people”, takes the secular stance, that we have the financial economy and the core economy. The latter is the talent and skills that we all uniquely possess and can excel at. If society can value these core skills, and enable their use, then we can empower people whose worth is often measured only in terms of financial capacity. Kahn applies the notion of time banking to activate localism through collaboration and co-production as central to values of sustainable development.

In line with Kahn’s notion of the ‘core economy’, David Halpern defines ‘hidden wealth’ as the value of our care-based exchanges, which are grounded in social norms of cooperation and trust. Compared to the relatively nebulous notion of the Big Society, which is an outcome of activating communities for voluntary action, Kahn’s ‘core economy’ and Halpern’s ‘hidden wealth’ are empirically grounded resources, and strong drivers of economic growth and national wellbeing that would appeal to believers and non-believers alike. They both fall within the definition of natural economy, which refers to a type of economy where money is not used in the transfer of resources among people. It is a system of allocating resources through direct bartering, entitlement by law, or sharing out according to traditional custom. As such it is a basic pillar of the human ecological niche and the essence of localism. In this context, localism describes a range of political philosophies which prioritize action generated in the local community.

Generally, localism supports local production and consumption of goods, local control of government, and promotion of local history, local culture and local identity. Localism can be contrasted with regionalism and centralised government, with its opposite being found in the unitary state. Sentamu, Cameron, Brown, Kahn and Halpern all believe we are made for a greater reality where the aim is to create a climate that empowers local people and communities, building an inclusive society that would take power away from politicians and give it to people, and all of them are seeking a practical agenda to meet this objective. These ideas stress the importance of connecting with the people around us and demonstrate how investing time in building these relationships will enrich our lives. They illustrate how being active and discovering the importance of physical activity that we enjoy, clearly enhances health and well-being and they go on to encourage curiosity through taking notice of the extraordinary things in our day-to-day lives, urging us to be more aware of the world around us and what we are feeling, and learning to reflect on this. Crucially they emphasize the importance of learning and taking on new challenges, to improve self-confidence.

Finally they stress the importance of giving and seeing ourselves in relationship to the wider community; being a part of civic society that has a global reach. In other words, cultural change only becomes meaningful when we alter our relationship not just to the state, but to each other and ourselves. Whatever else we think of their ideas, their credibility is based on inclusivity and metropolitanism. They hinge on the viability of the demands placed on ‘people’ to participate and cooperate for a common purpose. These demands will be particularly acute, as will the kinds of assumed competencies that are implicit in these demands.

Regarding the implementation of the ideas surrounding the concept of Big Society, the Royal Society of Art’s Social Brain project, ‘The Hidden Curriculum of the Big Society’, argues that instead of framing the Big Society as an implausible technical (policy-driven) solution to socio-economic challenges, it can only work as an adaptive (personal and cultural) challenge to utilise and build our hidden wealth. Curriculum literally means to ‘run the course’, as in curriculum vitae, the course of an individual’s life. The ‘curriculum’ of the Big Society is viewed as a long term process of cultural change, consisting of the myriad activities and behaviours that people are explicitly being asked to participate in and subscribe to. The hidden curriculum of this process of cultural change comprises the attitudes, values and competencies that are required for this process.

The main purpose of RSA report is ‘to highlight the nature of this hidden curriculum, and indicate how it might inform policy and practice, particularly in relation to releasing hidden social wealth and increasing social productivity’. Understood in this way, the curriculum of the Big Society, including mass participation and cooperation, seems to require us to gain certain key competencies that are involved in social productivity and cooperation, including responsibility, autonomy and solidarity. The report argues that acquiring these competencies is not straightforward and entails significant developmental challenges, amounting to a hidden curriculum for a growth in mental complexity on a national scale. Therefore, to make the Big Society message bolder and clearer, we need to be more insightful about the emotional and psychological demands and rewards of participation.

For the Big Society to work, we need to support adult development. Government programmes to prevent the radicalisation of young Muslims will be ineffective if all they can offer as an alternative is the status quo. In the eyes of most young people, the status quo has been tried and found wanting. Something far more worthwhile and exciting is needed. The big idea common to the ‘idealistic society’, ‘the big society’, ‘the core economy’, ‘the hidden economy, and ‘the natural economy’ is the need to make more of our ‘hidden wealth’- the human relationships that drive and sustain the forms of participation needed to make society more productive and at ease with itself. But this needs in turn a fundamental change in people’s attitudes. Available evidence suggests the level of mental agility required to develop the competencies required to make societies hidden wealth available is not currently widespread in the adult population. So for these ideas to take root, we need to invest more time and energy making sure that the forms of participation and engagement called for are supported by formal and informal adult education. Social productivity requires that people are both supported, challenged and led by local activists. Realising our hidden wealth rests on the re-engagement of people as “active citizens”, enabled to take informed decisions about their lives, communities and workplaces but also to be more participative in designing and in providing services that are demand driven from grass roots.

However, many people are both disengaged and lack the confidence, skills, knowledge or understanding to do so. This is particularly true for people with little formal education and those most at risk of social exclusion. But even among educated and informed citizens, who perceive advantages in participating more in grass roots initiatives to protect their, and their communities interests, there are few who are prepared to devote the time and energy on a sustained basis to participate in community driven initiatives. This is even more so, if there is a lack of available funding. And, of course, many will be expected to act on a pro bono basis. It is also the case that there have been too few examples presented of what a big society looks like in practice.

There is an obvious role for local authorities. For example, local authority service boards are central to the workings of the Welsh Government’s ‘Future Generations Bill, which requires all the boards establish local wellbeing plans to meet the challenges and opportunities to reconceptualizing grassroots activism. The objective is to establish a role for community-based organizations in advancing local well-being, in particular through education and social inclusion strategies. But the very bodies – local authorities – that might kick start the initiative, apart from feeling the financial squeeze , remain , for the most part, unsure of what the big society thinking means for them and its practical implications for their commissioning and procurement of local services. There is another education gap to be plugged!

http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/grassroots_08022012.pdf http://www.artsforhealth.org/resources/Big_Society_Arts_Health_Wellbeing.pdf

A will to till one’s own of soil

Is worth a kingly crown,

With bread to feed the belly need,

And wine to wash it down.

So with my neighbour I rejoice

That we are fit and free,

Content to praise with lusty voice

Bread, Wine and Liberty.

(Robert William Service)

(Clee Fields; Google Map (2015):

RF= Ridge and furrow markings in school playing field; HF=Horses Fields).

 1 Grass roots and neighbourhoods

The earliest origins of the use of “grass roots” as a political metaphor are obscure. In the United States, an early use was thought to have been coined by Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge of Indiana, who said of the Progressive Party in 1912.   “This party has come from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of people’s hard necessities”. He was referring to the party’s demand that power must reside in communities where citizens may decide on law by popular vote.  This philosophy rested on the idea that the division of land and its settlement created groups of neighbours who had a common interest in maintaining the well being of their shared environment.  This idea was recently pursued by the British Conservative Party in its search for policies to transfer centralised power to communities in the context of promoting local plans for sustainable development.  The organisation of grass roots neighbourhood groups for local action were defined as follows:

• a new group or an existing not for dividend group within an institutional setting (e.g. scouts, residents association; social enterprise or charity);
• comprised of people living in a defined geographical area;
• have a named leader who is willing to supply their contact details and address for enquiries – required to agree to abide by a neighbourhood ethical code of conduct (to be developed through consultation). This code of conduct will protect neighbourhood groups against extremist causes;
• be required to be publicised online and through other channels, so that new potential members can enquire about joining/to be rated and/or receive feedback

The aim is give new powers and rights to groups of neighbours so that:

• Neighbourhoods will be able to bid to take over the running of community amenities, such as parks and libraries that are under threat.
• Neighbourhoods will be given a right of first refusal to buy local state-owned community assets that are for sale or facing closure. This will cover assets owned by central government and quangos, not just town halls.
• Neighbourhoods will also have a right of first refusal to take over and run vital commercially-owned community assets when they shut down – for example, those post offices, pubs and shops whose continued survival is of genuine importance to the local community.
• We will give neighbourhoods detailed street-by-street crime data, so that they can hold the police to account at local beat meetings.
• Neighbourhoods will be able to start their own school, giving them greater control over their children’s education.
• Neighbourhoods will be given the power to engage in genuine local planning through collaborative democracy – designing a local plan from the “bottom up”.
• The Sustainable Communities Act will be used to ensure that neighbourhoods have access to line-by-line information about what is being spent by each central government agency in their area, and the power to influence how that money is spent.
• Allow neighbourhoods to create Local Housing Trusts to enable villages and towns to develop the homes that local people want, with strong community backing.
• Greater access to funding for neighbourhood groups, for example the neighbourhood element of local tariffs raised from development.
• Civil servants will be defined as civic servants and promoted on their record of engagement with neighbourhood groups.

The story of the division of land to form neighbourhoods is vibrant with human problems of life, of labour and of socio-political organisation.  In Britain and in Western Europe as a whole, every parish bears the marks of the comings and goings of people who, over the centuries,  have added to and taken from the top few centimetres of soil upon which humanity depends to satisfy its many needs and wants.   Soil is the ultimate cultural resource.  Amid all the changes which have swept over rural life, traces of past modes of living remain intact, etched into the ground beneath our feet, described in writings and preserved in maps.  They are a haunting memory which challenges the environmental maladjustments of urban life and draws the town dweller back to the soil from which all wealth and conflict comes.  Every person who has focussed on a patch of it, through deed or mind, has a master key to the storehouse of local cultural ecology and a reason to engage in  the politics of land ownership and the history of how these patches, first scratched by primitive tools, became fields in the modern mind. It is in the latter imaginative sense that most of us begin our working day in a place that once supported a farmer groping towards an understanding of his place in nature. Tillage and herding compelled him to observe non-human beings more closely.  Mating and lambing, sowing and reaping, making hay, all dovetailed into questions of selfhood posed by the passing of seasons.  This is the cosmopolitanism of good neighbours because neighbourhood is the property of imagination that binds people together in a common survival imperative at meeting places, each of which is  a common cultural focus independent of creed and nation.

Many environmental problems can be traced back to local communities and that is why groups of neighbours have an important role to play in gathering community support to implement environmental programmes.  An action plan for an old field with a hedgerow can provide a meeting place to begin a citizen’s cultural ecology network, particularly as old fields are critical wildlife habitats essential for the survival of wildlife but which can also be a place to meditate on our place in nature.

2  Symbols of remembrance

Tim Dee writes in his book ‘Four fields’ about some real fields, continents apart, growing a few hundred acres of grass that stand for our cultural appropriation of ecosystems which predate human evolution.  He presents fields as found objects that make us look and think about the ways in which we have corrupted nature, yet still need to walk as good neighbours alongside wilder beings, even if we have to meet nature in an untidy patch of grass sighing in the wind.

“Without fields of my own, these chapters are my field-searches”.  The field to which I return most often is currently rough grazing land at Burwell in the Cambridgeshire fens, one mile from where I live. This field was once a fen and the intention of its current owners is that it will be fen again, one day. The other three are foreign plots that I have known (in part) across some years: far afield, but not.

The first of these is in Zambia on an old colonial farm. This particular field once grew tobacco but is at present overgrown with grasses and scrub. I have already written a little about these Zambian fields. Since those first words the farmer has died (he is buried near his old crops) and I have married Claire, the woman who showed me the field, the farm and the farmer.

The second foreign field is a battlefield, and the remnant shortgrass prairie and adjacent croplands, in Montana in the USA where Sioux and Cheyenne warriors killed George Custer and his party in June 1876, in a battle which as much as anything was a fight over grass.

The last field is in the abandoned village of Vesniane in the Exclusion Zone near the exploded nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Until April 1986 it was a meadow grazed by cows. When I went there, the last thing I saw was an empty aluminium milk churn lying on its side, in the open doorway of a ruined byre at the field edge.

Each of these four fields has been turned over in one way or another for as long as they have been fields – it’s in their nature. But now each is at a more angled point in its life. Fields cut from cleared scrub are abandoned back to thorns and thickets. Wild grasslands have become battlefields and then the holding place for the dead of those battles. Pasture is poisoned. A plot will be unplumbed. Territory, ownership, the exploitation of land, its meaning and value, the grass itself – all has been and is being argued over. There are tangled human voices in each field but there is also the sound of the grass”.

The first serious adult contact I made with fields was through the history of Suffolk’s coastal villages, the heartland of my mother’s family that was lost to the sea.  The poet, Blake Morrison, now sees there a rapidly eroding cliff top field where ‘wheat is living on the edge‘ and there is  “….  empty air where churches stood”.   This poetic vision connects washed away fields in the parishes of Covehithe and Dunwich, with their present-day inhabitants and visitors, within a perspective of the deep history of cosmology and current climate change.

This theme of memory and  place is taken up by Richard Irvine and Mina Gorji in their article ‘John Clare in the Anthropocene’.  Here they explore what it might mean to interweave social and natural history as a remembrance of cultural ecology within deep time, taking as their inspiration the work of another English poet John Clare (1793-1864). They begin with the notion that we are now living in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch dominated by global climate change of our own making. We can say that the Anthropocene began with the intensification of agriculture in the 17th century.

This process was picked up by Clare in his poem ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’, composed in the early 1820s.  Here he lets a relatively small  local grassy limestone heath in eastern England, known as Swordy Well, relate the impact of the agricultural revolution on the micro-morphology of its diminutive soils and ecosystems. The creatures affected also include humans,   When Swordy Well speaks as an assaulted semi-wild thing it takes on the lament of the human community of neighbours who once had the cultural  freedom to harvest its bounty before it expressed a new cultural ecology when tidied into fields:

“I couldn’t keep a dust of grit Nor scarce a grain of sand

But bags and carts claimed every bit

And now they’ve got the land

I used to bring the summer life

To many a butterflye

But in oppressions iron strife

Dead tussocks bow and sigh

I’ve scarce a nook to call my own

For things that creep or flye

The beetle hiding neath a stone

Does well to hurry bye”.

Swordy Well, was a piece of common land associated with ancient rights of the villagers living around it to graze their animals.  One of the first moves towards industrial agriculture was for the owners of such common land to use Parliamentary process to divide up commons into fields with hedges, ditches and fences.  Paths were blocked off and the fields were measured, given names, then sold or rented privately.  Local residents lost their ancient right to freely graze their livestock. Clare’s poem speaks of the rural poverty caused by field-making for private gain and describes the great loss to its human neighbours: ‘There was a time my bit of ground Made freemen of the slave’; The poem also makes clear that the loss of common land and the more intensive usage of the countryside that followed was to the detriment of the ‘common’ as a diverse ecosystem with longstanding cultural overtones. Its ecosystems were managed haphazardly, but surely,  by locally agreed custom.  Beyond this, the global privatisation of common resources is treated as a fundamental loss to planet Earth itself:

‘ My only tree the’ve left a stump And nought remains my own’.

Irvine and Gorji view Clare’s poem as a total account of dispossession.  It is striking in that it shows a human speaking from within a place, and in doing so gives the place a voice to speak on behalf of humans. In this process, the natural and the social consequences of privatisation designed ‘to make two blades of grass grow where there was only one before’, come to be intimately connected. Tim Dee also takes John Clare’s vision as his window into the cultural ecology of ‘fields and grass’:

“Just as fields aren’t famous, grass isn’t heroic of itself. It works anonymously. But I am trying to hear that as well. In John Clare’s great poem ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ a put-upon, enclosed field talks back. It’s worth listening”.

3  Old Clee Fields: a case study for cultural conservation

The British Government’s geothermal aquifer project, which began in 1980, consisted of drilling experimental boreholes at four sites in England: Cleethorpes, Southampton, Marchwood, and Larne in Northern Ireland. The original plan for the Cleethorpes boreholes, where drilling started in 1983, envisaged that they would feed a district-heating scheme, supplying hot water to houses and schools.  Water from a depth of 2000 metres proved to have too low a pressure for such a scheme, and water from shallower depths was not warm enough. However, the local authority held talks with horticulturalists and fish farmers who were interested in the business opportunities but the conclusion was that without government support, it was not economically feasible to tap the hot aquifer.

Cleethorpes’ geothermal resource came into the news again in 2014 when a local business man proposed to build a small community of 25 houses with greenhouses, which would be heated by a new borehole to be drilled in the village of Old Clee, about 3 miles from the Cleethorpes exploratory site. This new project was to be developed in a cul de sac on five acres of land known as ‘Horse’s Fields that can only be reached through Church Lane.  The plans for the increased urbanisation of Old Clee triggered an immediate response from the residents who launched a campaign to oppose the development based on the traffic issues in Church Lane and the loss of a local green resource.  Regarding the latter, one of the two Horse’s Fields is the remains of a very extensive pasture which was part of Greetham’s dairy farm until it was was developed for a school and houses after the Second World War.  In particular, it was a textbook example of ridge and furrow cultivation dating from the time when Old Clee was organised as a medieval open-field system, which operated until the mid-19th century. Under the Enclosure award of 1846 the open fields in Clee village and Cleethorpes were subdivided and shared between various landowners. Greetham’s Farm was appropriated in the 1930s for expanding the housing stock of Grimsby, then the largest fishing port in the world.

Grimsby’s population growth had started with the onset of industrial fishing resulting from the discovery of a cod/haddock bonanza on the North Sea Dogger Bank.  This had brought my grandparents from the countryside to partake of Grimsby’s fabled riches available to farm labourers.

Greetham’s Fields is where my own musings on fields I do not own began as a child chasing butterflies through the grassy flower-rich ridge and furrow pasture, then overlooked by Old Clee Church.  My time scale as a second generation Grimbarian was greatly expanded when I discovered a thin band of seashells about a foot below the soil, when digging into the field’s deep ditch sides.  Old Clee by virtue of the Saxon Tower of its church was really old, but not as old as the tidal estuary that in past times had reached within a few hundred yards of clay ridge where the church stands.  Now, that beach is three to four miles away.  Going further back in time there is the large glacial erratic ‘Wishing Stone’ dropped off by melting ice in Church Lane, a pointer to a prehistoric time-out- of-mind when the site of my butterfly fields were scoured sterile by glacial action.

Therefore the five acres of Horse’s Fields awaiting a planning decision are symbolic to me as the remains of a grassed universe where I roamed freely as a young body during the Second World.  Every blade of grass I cherished, along with the ditches and hedgerows that were then brimming with wildlife.   Brian Patten’s poem ‘A Blade of Grass’ expresses the idea that when we are young we tend to believe in the concepts of love, truth, and beauty. Even a blade of grass will be accepted in lieu of a poem when a lover offers it to his young beloved. But as we grow older we become cynical and even a ‘blade of grass /becomes more difficult to accept’, for the calculating mind will dismiss its value as merely ‘grass’, nothing more and nothing less.  Unfortunately, local planning committees are composed of calculating minds attempting to make a choice between nature conservation and developments that win votes but in the long run are not sustainable.

You ask for a poem.

And so I write you a tragedy about

How a blade of grass

Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older

A blade of grass Becomes more difficult to accept.

(‘A Blade of Grass’ – Love Poems. Brian Patten;  p. 23)

If, like Tim Dee, I had to choose a field that symbolises a personal and a global loss of  contact with nature, because I am, like all humanity, a part of nature in everything I do, the first choice would be the Old Clee Horse’s Fields.  They are the pathetic remains of what seemed to me a vast expanse of ‘Greethams Fields’ as I knew them as the playground of a small boy herding butterflies.  To me they encapsulate the devastating outcomes of the relentless socio-economic pressure of urbanisation, which we all love and hate.  It is hateful because it destroys grass.

4 The cultural value of grass

Small, semi-wild grassed habitats in human communities have a cultural value greater than that of their biodiversity. From this point of view, Old Clee is not short of grass, being adjacent to a large grass-based open air recreation complex cut regularly by power mowers.  The ecological call of grass in the temperate zone is ‘eat me’ or ‘cut me’ else ‘I will revert to scrub and eventually become woodland’. To arrest this ecological process called succession recreational grassland is cut frequently to maintain a standardised low diversity baldness.  In this respect, Horse’s Fields are grass because they were originally  grazed by cattle as part of Greetham’s dairy farm and then by pet horses.

If the planning application for the housing estate fail, the objective of the residents could be to raise funds to purchase the fields and manage them in perpetuity as a community ‘cultural reserve’, not by grazing livestock but by taking an annual crop of hay.  Haymaking is not only good for biodiversity but it also celebrates the culture of grassland farming that has played an important role in European social history.  For five millennia haymaking has been a crucial part of human existence and an important catalyst in the cultural transformation of humans from hunters to herders. Unlike other agrarian inventions, which were part of the origin and dispersal of agriculture, haymaking was developed  by Neolithic peoples without requiring the trial and error domestication of specific plants. Nutrient-rich cereal grasses were selected for arable production systems; fodder grass grew from the wild wherever livestock grazed. Cutting, sun-drying and storing native fodder for family herds helped save herders and their herds from seasonal deprivation, slaughter or migration. The surplus preserved as hay allowed animals and their human dependents to survive cyclical duress, or seasons and years of insufficient rainfall or sunshine. The hayfield became a picturesque arena of communal, seasonal work and provided visual texture and depth to the patchwork of summer fields.  Haycocks, stacks and bales of various size and shape, have challenged generations of artists, diverse in style and philosophy, with their subtle sculpture, colour and reflectivity. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds.

A hayfield is a response of an ecosystem to human intervention.  To maintain its conservation/heritage value for the contemplation of urban dwellers requires the skilful use of the haymaker’s scythe.

The even mead that erst brought sweetly forth

The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover

Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank

Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems

But hateful docks, rough thistles, keksies, burs,

Losing both beauty and utility.

(Shakespeare, Henry V)

For communities contemplating adopting haymaking to connect directly with nature, communally and individually,  there are many community projects available to emulate.  For example, here is what George Peterken says about his parish grasslands project.

“Last week I went to Shirenewton to talk to the local history society about meadows and traditional haymaking. It was arranged a year ago, but it turned out to be well timed, for Shirenewton village has just acquired land for a village meadow. The village has two centres, separated by small fields, and it is for these that the community raised a nearly-six-figure sum. I did not see the field itself, but I understand that its a pleasantly flowery meadow with lots of colour but no great rarities, and that it is studded with 25 oaks – a meadow-parkland, in fact. The idea is that this will remain a public open space; that it will be treated as an ordinary meadow with grazing after the hay has been taken; and that it will be used for teaching by the local school. In the not-too-distant future, I hope to be invited to a village haymaking gathering, one of the lost traditions of rural Britain. An example for our own community?”

We can reinforce this message by turning again towards John Clare’s spirituality that comes from his deep sensing of nature:: ’

Tis haytime and the red-complexioned sun

Was scarcely up ere blackbirds had begun

Along the meadow hedges here and there

To sing loud songs to the sweet-smelling air

Where breath of flowers and grass and happy cow

Fling o’er one’s senses streams of fragrance now

Spirituality of grass is rooted in culture.

To the American poet Walt Whitman grass symbolised all humans, collectively and individually.  The man in Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’ “…observing a spear of summer grass.”  causes him to ponder the human condition and the collective thoughts and actions of human beings. This blade of grass is amongst an innumerable host of leaves of grass like itself. It is a representation of a mass of individuals dependent upon their common root, as well as each being distinct and separate as a single blade from the surrounding multitude.  So we humans are all part of a global host but we are also distinct, unique individuals. When we ponder a blade of grass we can think about ourselves, exemplified by the blade. and our purpose on Earth as individuals and a species.

“Song of Myself” can be interpreted as a call to experience the variety of life by ‘deep listening’ to grass.  The message is that through the senses one can find long-term fulfillment and freedom from the mundane tasks of day-to-day living, which continue as background noise.

The section of the Whitman’s poem about grass opens when a child carrying bunches of grass  asks the poet “What is the grass?” and Whitman is forced to explore his own use of symbolism to encapsulate nature. Thus, the bunches of grass in the child’s hands become a symbol of  regeneration in nature. But they also signify a common material that links disparate people together.  Grass is the ultimate symbol of democracy, it grows everywhere. Grass is also a reminder of mortality  because it feeds on the remains of the dead. He concludes that the  natural roots of democracy sprout from mortality, whether due to natural causes or to the bloodshed of internecine warfare. Old ideas die with the individuals who held them and democracy comes from revolution. We are at one with the bunches of grass because we are of the same biochemistry; we have the same pulse driving identical atoms of a dancing cosmos. We become other as other becomes us in an endless dance of engagement and revelry with the common stuff of life and stars.  The very soil that nourishes the “blade of grass”  transpires water, generating oxygen, thus endlessly representing the “journeywork of the stars.”  In this sense, Whitman alludes to the fact that we come from the dust of the universe and, “My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, …”   We are at one with nature in that the soil begets a multitude of grass; the soil begot human beings through a creative act regardless of one’s belief system.

Grass is therefore a central symbol of this poem and stands for the sacredness of common things. Because we are thinking animals we are able envisage the nature and significance of grass unfolding the important themes of death and immortality, for grass is symbolic of the ongoing cycle of life present in nature.  It is the key to the secrets of humanity’s relationship with the cosmos because we all have a chemical connection with the elements of nature and the universe. We have brotherhood with the most commonplace objects, such as leaves, ants, and stones, within an expanding cosmos. Whitman’s senses convince him that there is significance in everything, no matter how small.

Sections 31-33 contain a catalogue of the infinite wonders in small things. He believes, for example, that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” and “the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.”   All things are part of the eternal wonder of life and therefore even “the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps.” He, himself, incorporates an unending range of things, people and animals. Now he understands the power of his vision which ranges everywhere: “I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,/I am afoot with my vision.” Especially in sections 34-36, he identifies himself with every person, dead or living, and relates his involvement with the various phases of American history. Realising his relationship to all this makes him feel, as he states in section 38, “replenish’d with supreme power, one of an average unending procession.”

His meditation on grass is an explanation of life and existence, “the puzzle of puzzles . . . that we call Being.”  Here, grass is a symbol of the sacred latent in the ordinary, common life of humankind and it is also a symbol of the continuity inherent in the life-death cycle. No one really dies. Even “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death,” that “all goes onward and outward . . . /And to die is different from what any one supposed.”

In Section 7 the poet signifies his universal nature, which finds it “just as lucky to die” as to be born. The universal self finds both “the earth good and the stars good.” The poet is part of everyone around him. By contemplating grass he sees all and condemns nothing. Sections 8-16 lists all that the poet sees – people of both sexes, all ages, and all conditions, in many different walks of life, in the city and in the country, by the mountain and by the sea. Even animals are included. He not only loves them all, he is part of them all: And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

Whitman is representative of all humanity because, he says the voices of diverse people speak through him – voices of men, animals, and even insects. To him, all life is a miracle of beauty.  Section 17 again refers to the universality of the poet – his thoughts are “the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.” Sections 18 and 19 salute all members of humanity.  Contemplating the meaning of grass in terms of mystical experience, the poet understands that all physical phenomena are as deathless as the grass.

(Old Clee residents gathering at Horse’s Fields)

 

Tim Dee (2013): ‘Four Fields’. Random House.

http://www.academia.edu/3629203/John_Clare_in_the_Anthropocene

http://www.suffolkkemps.info https://sites.google.com/site/hyperboxclub/whose-india

http://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/Plans-tap-geothermal-hot-spots-revealed/story-22049531-detail/story.html

http://www.parishgrasslandsproject.org.uk/blog.htm

http://www.hayinart.com/

http://grass-scan.wikispaces.com/Grass+SCAN

http://www.culturalecology.info/followingfish/Index.html

http://www.daypoems.net/poems/1900.htm

“The northeast entrance to Stonehenge is positioned at one end of a pair of natural ridges.  It is not unusual for Neolithic monuments to incorporate such aspects of the natural world into their design, but what is exceptional is that this particular natural feature, by sheer coincidence, is aligned on the solstice axis”.   Mike Parker Pearson (2012), who stumbled on the reason why Stonehenge is where it is.

1 Visuality

Foucault proposes that the spatialization of knowledge in Western Europe in the 17th century was one of the factors leading to the constitution of knowledge as science. He suggests the Western natural sciences such as ecology and archeology, are based more on the visual than other sensory organs. Natural history emerged as an individual science and precursor to modern conservation biology, which deals with the protection of landscapes, habitats and species, based on a spatialisation of objects which strike the eye. Concurrently, other elements of knowledge of the objects fall away as the objects are spatialised. This, Foucault argues, is linked to the development of the printing press. The natural world became divided into particular classifications, considered as universal categories, according to quantifiable, visual characteristics, and presented as illustrations in books. Books themselves can here be considered as spatial entities reproducing this spatio-visual aspect of knowledge. Texts become spatial techniques, not merely metaphors, as they become natural entities in their own right. They carried the authority attached to such objects in Western knowledge production over and above orally or bodily transferred forms of knowledge.

In contrast, oral tradition and oral lore is also cultural material and tradition transmitted by word of mouth from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants. In this way, it is possible for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other knowledge across generations without a writing system. The telling of stories was the main route to answer questions about humankind’s place in nature and the wider cosmos. Cultural monuments were built as the visual renditions of these tales as were natural features in the local landscape, such as rivers and mountains, all of which bound society to the earth.

In his book, ‘The permissive universe’, published in 1986, Kirtley Mather began a discussion of the recent separation of human thought from the earth as a relatively new phenomenon. His message for modern humans is that we should “keep our feet on the ground,” and maintain our kinship with the planet. This was the theme of an address given in 1996 by Eldridge M. Moores, President of the American Geological Society, who pointed out that cultural geology plays a prominent story-telling role in many indigenous cultures. For example, there is a strong relation between the native American Diné (Navajo) and Cree traditions and their local topography. Legends of a Mother Earth Goddess are abundant in Europe and Asia. Greek mythology includes a battle between Hercules and Antaeus, the son of Gaia, the earth goddess. As long as Antaeus could maintain contact with the earth, he was unbeatable. Only when Hercules held him above his head was that protective contact broken. Only by separating him from his earthly roots was Hercules able to vanquish his opponent.

About the time that Moores was preparing his address, James Loveluck was elaborating a theory, named after Gaia, which posits that the Earth is a self-regulating entity involving the bioisphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, into which we are tightly coupled as part of an evolving biophysical planetary system. Moores was speaking only four years after the first environmental summit had been held in Rio de Janiero, where sustainability and Earth’s carrying capacity were critical issues. Moores, referred to the fact that the American per capita resource use and waste generation were much greater than for any other region. He examined the prospect of bringing only four countries, Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia, up to one-quarter of the U.S. per capita level of consumption. Together, these aggregate about 40% of Earth’s 5.5 billion people and would double or triple the human planetary load. Earth’s productivity could not deliver the additional resources and science could not provide a technical solution. In other words, society somehow needs to work out a way for these and other countries to prosper without environmental ruination and to find a way for ourselves to prosper with less demand on Earth’s resources. Moores believed that geoscientists can help in this quest and that cultural geology should become the central science of the 21st century! Three decades later the talking still goes on!

What is required is an educational story-telling route from visuality to change our behaviour as modern consumers of nature. A story is a powerful strategy for teaching and learning. Stories can help develop our understanding of the places where we live. They can also help us create our own narratives supporting the development of shared stories; our cultural myths and legends. Stories are made, told and retold and myths, legends and folktales have been the cornerstones of teaching us to be earthbound and earthcaring in every culture. They are an important means to understand ourselves and to interpret experiences in the context of the human ecological niche. This is why the stories of indigenous cultures are closely related visually to the land. Indeed, traditional cultures that have evolved in more ecologically sustainable ways have also developed music, art, dance and storytelling as a way of expressing a sense of spirituality that integrates the self with other life forms that share a common habitat’. Stories produce a strong sense of social cohesion, which helps the community develop its understandings of place, in contrast to the focus on the individual, typical of modern Western culture. However, people interpret the same setting very differently, seeing nature;

* as source of scientific knowledge;

* as creation; * as a human resource;

* or in peril.

The guardians of cultural heritage use one or more of these interpretations when displaying what they are about, despite the fact that these perspectives may be in tension; for example, seeing nature as a source of scientific knowledge versus seeing nature as creation. Imagination plays an important role in this process and is particlarly well illustrated in the modern world of archaeological research, where there is an urgency to explain the inexplicable with learning models that are easy to understand.

Debates about the transmission and contextual models of learning have a long history and are far from new. In the transmission model, learners are viewed as passive recipients of pre-interpreted messages and learning is framed as a cognitive experience; the primary concern is whether or not the learner received a particular message. This transmission view of learning suggests that conservationists should work thoughtfully to define and fully transmit coherent educational messages or enduring understandings.

In contrast, in the contextual model, learners are viewed as active meaning-makers, or interpreters; learning is framed as a complex context-dependent social process, where the primary concern is whether or not learners are forming connections through their previous and subsequent experiences. This view of learning suggests that visitors to cultural monuments generate their own highly personalised meanings from the same experience, and that conservationists should implement strategies of storytelling that invite visitor interaction, response, and interpretations.

 

2 Conflicts in visuality

About 5,000 years ago on Salisbury Plain, Neolithic Britons constructed a 110-metre-diameter circular ditch and earthen bank with an inner circle of wooden posts. About 500 years later, they started work on the 30-metre-diameter stone monument that partially remains today as a major visual experience for tens of thousands of visitors from across the globe. The monument is oriented to frame the rising sun during the summer solstice and the setting sun during the winter solstice. It was erected in several phases that together lasted for perhaps 700 years. Modern dating methods have narrowed down the probable date of the first phase of construction to between 3000 and 2920 BC. The second phase, consisting of the erection of wooden posts was conducted later, and Phase III, the creation of permanent stone circles, much later still.

Stonehenge was abandoned about 3,400 years ago and the remains of the monument include two primary stone types: ‘bluestone’ and ‘sandstone’. Bluestones were the first stones to be set up within the henge earthwork. They were part of the original layout, which appears to have been a pair of concentric semicircles with an average diameter of 25 metres marked out in the centre of the monument with an opening towards the southwest. This setting has been determined by the excavation of two sets of stones pits known as the ‘Q’ and ‘R’ holes. This setting was however only short lived with the stones then being removed and the holes backfilled with chalk rubble. Possibly contemporary with this bluestone setting is the erection of the Altar Stone to the southwest of the semicircle. It is now recumbent but was shaped to function as a standing stone. This particular stone came from the native Bosherston sandstone of South Pembrokeshire. Apart from the Altar Stone, at least two other sandstone monoliths (of unknown origin) were also built into the bluestone circle.

The bluestones originated in the volcanic rocks indigenous to the Preceli Hills of North Pembrokeshire. With an average weight of about four tonnes, the bluestones, which take on a vaguely grey-blue colour when wet, are mostly diabase, a rock category which is chemically similar to basalt but intruded into other rocks at shallow depth rather than erupting. There were many changes in the bluestone settings prior to the arrangement that we see today, and there are indications that they may originally have been set in a double circle. Of these, 16 are still standing; the others are either leaning, lying on the ground or traceable only through buried stumps. It is thought that some of the bluestones were originally part of a circle situated one mile southeast of Stonehenge on the banks of the River Avon at West Amesbury. This circle is at the end of the ‘Avenue’, considered to be a ritual pathway that connected Stonehenge with the River Avon. It appears to be a miniature version of Stonehenge but all that now remains of the circle are holes containing chips of Preseli Spotted Dolerite, identical to the bluestones used at Stonehenge.

Current thinking is that the creators of Stonehenge originally built two bluestone circles – one with 56 stones at Stonehenge and another with 27 stones at West Amesbury. The stones of the smaller circle were later incorporated into the larger circle. Sarsen sandstone, is a hard, 60-million-year-old silicified sandstone similar to that of the Marlborough Downs, about 30 kilometres to the north of Stonehenge. About 50 sarsen stones remain, but originally there may have been many more.The sarsens were arranged in two circles around the bluestones, one within the other. The outer circle’s vertical sarsens are connected by horizontal rock beams that give the monument its unique character. Within this outer circle is a horseshoe of even larger sarsens with lintels called trilithons. The mass of the largest sarsen is estimated at 40 tonnes – the equivalent of a fully loaded cement truck. This gives a measure of the design and engineering skills that the Neolithic tribesmen had to develop in order to collect, dress and place their stones. Pebbles and flakes of many other rock types, both foreign and local, have also been found in excavations at Stonehenge and in other Neolithic and Bronze Age sites across Salisbury Plain: These include greenstone, limestone, schist, quartzite, gneiss and other unidentified sandstones. In all, at least 20 rock types have been identified at Stonehenge. Furthermore, archaeologists have uncovered diabase fragments from a number of archaeological sites in the area that are far older than the earliest stone settings at Stonehenge.

The generally agreed hard facts about Stonehenge are that it is known who built it, when they built it and what it was built from and we have a good idea how they built it. Two important unresolved questions concern its ultimate purpose and how building stones foreign to Wiltshire were assembled on Salisbury Plain. These questions have raised conflict between archaeologists and between archaeologists and geologists. Because of its alignment with the summer and winter equinoxes everyone agrees that the cultural purpose of Stonehenge was to celebrate the passing of the seasons. Regarding its ultimate purpose we resort to imaginative story-telling. Prof. Mike Parker Pearson’s story is that the original Stonehenge was a large funerary temple created between 3000 and 2500 BC as a graveyard for a local community of elite families. “This was a place for the dead”. Prof Tim Darvill tells a story about the place being an ancient ‘Lourdes’. The sick and wounded would come here for cures from the monument’s great bluestones, which had been dragged from Wales to Wiltshire because of their perceived magical healing properties. “This was a place for the living”. Darvill’s reference to the origins of bluestones raises another conflict of interpretation depending on whether it is believed the stones alien to Wiltshire’s geology were transported by men or by ice. The major persistent protagonist for glacial transport is the glaciologist Brian John. A selection of the Internet evidence-base of fact and conjecture is presented below.

 

3 Learning from Stonehenge

Human beings have to add sense to their existence in order to be able to manage their conditions of existence. To paraphrase Stuart Hall’s words: Culture comprises the meanings and values which arise among distinctive social groups and classes. These meanings and values depend on their given historical conditions and the relationships through which they “handle” and respond to the conditions of existence.

They also depend on the lived traditions and practices through which those “understandings” are expressed and in which they are embodied. What we can to learn from cultural heritage is continuously developing. All the time learning is being extended from the traditional concept of understanding the physical form of a monument to the sociological understanding of the society that built it and the lessons it has for contemporary issues. In this context, every age gets the story it wants to hear and the understanding of the nature of heritage is ever dynamic. There seems now to be an overall agreement that the past does not exist. What do exist, however, is a great number of relics of the past each of which is a product of a particular culture and its environment. We perceive these relics and interpret them, and by this process we imagine the artifacts as a cultural metaphor. The question has been raised: Whose cultural heritage? That is often a matter of interpretation.

With respect to Stonehenge the site has become a massive symbol of the tensions and contradictions that surround the way in which the past is used, understood and presented. Visitors arrive from all over the world locked into the silos of a multiplicity of political statehoods. In contrast, Stonehenge represents the workings of an ancient cosmopolitanism. It tells us that states, as central political organizations are an extremely recent invention in the evolutionary history of humans. Homo sapiens, evolved in societies with far less complex economic and political systems. Starting with Homo ergaster, the first of our ancestors to look more like ourselves, about 1.8 million years ago, early human societies were foraging societies dependent entirely on hunted and gathered food. Current evidence suggests that social obligations beyond simple friendship were defined exclusively in terms of kinship: the superiors were men, elders, and parents and the inferiors were women, youngsters, and offspring including in-laws. Cultures of kinship can and do acquire ideas and skills from those nearby but neighbouring societies often differ far more at a cultural level than expected because they resist such influences. Cultural evolution is not the free fair exchange of ideas it could be. Over thousands of years, these kin-based forms of political organization of bands and clans, gradually gave way to more centralized forms of government in which tribal warfare no doubt played a key role. The outcome was in the form of increasingly complex chiefdoms. These latter were the British regional tribal groupings encountered by the Roman generals who conquered them. The first archaic states developed from chiefdoms in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Importantly, the political processes from clans to chiefdoms were paralleled by changes in economic conditions, especially early inventions and promotions of agriculture. By implication, the earlier a society shifted to agricultural production, the earlier a state could emerge. Archaeological evidence suggests that a change to this kind of local political trajectory occurred from approximately 3000 BC.

The discovery of the burial of the Amesbury Archer in 2002, a mile or so from Stonehenge, represents a turning point in the dynamic culture change. The man was born around 2300BC, the time the last bluestone circle was raised. The presence of five Beaker pots in his grave is unique at this time. Beaker ware is the cultural marker of the Bronze Age. Also, his grave contained the largest single collection of archery equipment so far found from a Beaker grave and the earliest datable copper and gold objects found in Britain. Most remarkably, oxygen isotope analysis indicates that this man originally came from somewhere in the Alpine region of Europe. In summary, the transition from a hunter-gatherer economy to agricultural production in the new stone age was essential for the formation of chiefdoms and subsequently the creation of states, as agriculture enabled and advanced the development of a central political organization. This change from hunting-gathering to agricultural production produced a population explosion. By 5,000 BC, the world’s population was 10 million; by 1,000 BC, it was between 50 and 100 million; and by the birth of Christ, it was 200 million. In this context, Stonehenge represents a Neolithic world as a jigsaw of neighbourhoods. There are no overtones of the territorially sovereign states, which emerged later from a complex interaction between colonizing polities, events, actors, and spaces in all parts of the globe. About, 5,000 years ago, humanity had a cosmopolitan unity in a pre-metal global culture without the ideal of territorial exclusivity as the sole basis for state sovereignty. The stone gatherers of Salisbury Plain were villagers subject to the economic and cultural currents of prehistory as well as the tension between aspects of insularity and elements drawn from afar, which suggests a certain internationalism or cosmopolitanism.

Mark Pagel exploring the human propensity for cooperation and openess asked what is the nature of culture as a survival strategy that it would have the opposing feature of forming us into so many small societies, which seem to act in some respects like an extension of our bodies. We are devoted to others sometimes to the point of self-sacrifice, we cooperate with others to meet common goals, and yet we use others to advance our interests. At a psychological level, we display forms of social behaviour conducive to living in small groups, such as rewarding conformity, punishing those who deviate from norms, being wary of outsiders. Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. Cosmopolitanism may entail some sort of world government or it may simply refer to more inclusive moral, economic, and/or political relationships between individuals of different geographical groups.

A person who adheres to the idea of cosmopolitanism in any of its forms is called a cosmopolite. Agenda 21 envisages a bottom-up world of cosmopolites promoting family involvement in community betterment with global networking of ideas and achievements. How can we learn from this story to promote some or all of the conservation strategies of the Rio cosmopolitan agenda? Actually, such a framework of ‘village networking’ was proposed two years after the Rio Summit by a group of young people sponsored by the United Nations. In Wales, this was the stimulus for the creation of a new knowledge framework entitled cultural ecology. Cultural ecology now exists as a collection of on-line resources for enriching national curricula to organise community assets that foster environmental quality and social well-being. Thus, the curriculum may contribute to resilience of the neighborhood by becoming nested in existing adaptive environmental co-management and the feedback loops of civic ecology. Thereby, the educational programmes themselves also may contribute to living sustainably in these local systems, which may be networked far and wide through social media. Thus, the Stonehenge villagers and their social environs are symbolic of how situated learning through telling stories, as described in the environmental and science education literatures, may contribute to social learning and address complex neighbourhood management issues in socio-ecological systems.

http://www.culturalecology.info/baywatch/baywatch1/rescue_m/rescue_menu/index.html

 

4 Facts and conjecture: an Internet evidence base

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-6ymAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT42&lpg=PT42&dq=neolithic+cosmopolitanism&source=bl&ots=ZQJwHpwe0I&sig=1SIyq9ldOct1w8QqQr_Fnnlw8qQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2Wi6VLzpD83harzZgZgH&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=neolithic%20cosmopolitanism&f=false

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art38/

http://pure.au.dk/portal/files/44166015/Ultimate_Causes_of_State_Formation_accepted.pdf

http://www.pearsonhighered.com/samplechapter/0205661041.pdf

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zRCnS_EnXwgC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=stonehenge+conflict+of+interpretation&source=bl&ots=AARMrN52C9&sig=KFcxDg5bjdjM4fAiB65EruIgS_g&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pae3VMyZFI_faNTPgBA&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=stonehenge%20conflict%20of%20interpretation&f=false

http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/englandstonehenge.htm#chronology

http://www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone/stonehenge.htm

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/did-aubrey-holes-hold-56-bluestones.html

http://www.louistalboys.com/stonehenge/article2.htm

http://www.brianjohn.info/bluestones59.html

http://robinheath.info/

http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba47/ba47lets.html

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/pdf-files/uploaded-to-ebulletin-2011/Bluestones%20press%20release.pdf

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=l9mjU90hoBUC&pg=PT303&lpg=PT303&dq=glaciation+of+salisbury+plain&source=bl&ots=O_DFpIif09&sig=prCPFVFyqoIndmZSIvBnqXzAVb8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Aye1VMvkDc3faNSPgLgG&ved=0CCcQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=glaciation%20of%20salisbury%20plain&f=false

https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/the-tragic-english-erratic/

http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/401098/details/CARN+MEINI%3BCARN+MENYN/

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2013_11_01_archive.html

1 Definition

‘Deep living’ asks us to focus on ourselves and develop an ecological understanding of the past and present cultural dynamics of our neighbourhood and community for living sustainably with resilience. It is a social response to, and an expansion of, a philosophical and practical approach to the ecosystem services which support the long-term survival of family, neighbours, community and state. Deep living portrays itself as “deep” because it asks deeper questions about the place of human life on Earth: who we are and how we evolved within a blind universe. As a social movement, deep living develops at the marketplace interface between materialist and humanist values of goods and services. There, it seeks to redress the shallow and piecemeal approach of the economics of mass production to assess the monetary value of ecosystem services.

Modern markets are driven by an economic system that values natural resources in proportion to their capacity for creating wealth and so consumes them faster than they can be replenished. Going further back in time, the major modernist philosophies of science, from Bacon and Descartes to 20th-century empiricism and its role in the Western education system, have served the growth of what Frederick E Bender calls a ‘culture of extinction’. Global warming, air and water pollution, ozone-layer depletion, species extinction-these are all the results of living beyond Earth’s productivity.

Bender’s culture of extinction has arisen because the dominant belief of humankind is that the faster you get one desirable thing the more securely do you obtain another. Forty years ago, this was the conclusion of E. F. Schumacher in his book ‘Small is Beautiful’. Schumacher said that in the marketplace, for practical reasons, innumerable qualitative distinctions, which are of vital cultural importance, are suppressed. Everything is equated with everything else. To equate things in a market economy means to give them a price and thus to make them exchangeable. To the extent that economic thinking is based on the market, it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price. Not surprisingly, therefore, in our global culture where year on year economic growth is the political aim, even simple non-economic values like beauty, health, or cleanliness can survive only if they prove to be ‘economic’.

To press non-economic values into an economic framework, economists use the method of cost/ benefit analysis. As an attempt to take account of costs and benefits, which might otherwise be disregarded altogether cost/benefit analysis is generally thought to be an enlightened and progressive process. To Schumacher, it is a procedure by which the higher is reduced to the level of the lower and the priceless is given a price. All it can do is lead to self-deception or the deception of others. To undertake to measure the immeasurable is absurd and constitutes but an elaborate method of moving from preconceived notions to foregone conclusions. All one has to do to obtain the desired results is to imput suitable values to the immeasurable costs and benefits. This simply re-enforces the pretence that everything has a price, or in other words, money is the highest of values. In this context, to live deeply is to share a profound respect for Earth’s interrelated biophysical systems regardless of their economic value and cultivate a sense of urgency about the need to make profound cultural changes to restore and sustain the long-term survival of our global ecological niche, which is priceless.

Schumacher’s ‘economics as if people mattered’ has recently resurfaced as the ‘radical political economy’, also known as ‘ecological economics’. To move humanity democratically from the old economics to a radical political economy will involve the very difficult behavioural change from ‘voting to have more’ to ‘voting to have less’. The limited success of green party politics is evidence that people are far from ready to take this step.

2 Management of human consumption

By investigating the human/nature dynamics of past cases of the collapse of civilisations, the most salient interrelated factors which explain the failure of prosperous cultures, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today, are:

‘population’, ‘climate’, ‘water’, ‘agriculture’, and ‘energy’.

Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion. In fact, the two key solutions to avoid the fate of earlier civilisations are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure a fairer distribution of resources, to dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth. These factors and solutions were integrated into a global strategy for human survival at the first Earth summit in 1992. This global strategic framework for managing human impacts was published as the Agenda 21.

Agenda 21 is a voluntary action plan that offers suggestions for sustainable ways local, regional and national governments can combat poverty and pollution and conserve natural resources in the 21st century. It is not legally binding in any way.

As a managerial blueprint for building a new world culture, Agenda 21 was compiled according to humanistic values, which are usually discussed in terms of five basic elements of human psychology:

Human beings, supersede the sum of their parts. They cannot be reduced to components.

Human beings have their existence in a uniquely human context, as well as in a cosmic ecology. 

Human beings are aware and aware of being aware – i.e., they are conscious. Human consciousness always includes an awareness of ones’ needs in the context of other people’s needs.

Human beings have some choice about what they do next and with that, comes responsibility.

Human beings are intentional, aiming at goals, aware that they cause future events, and seek meaning, value and creativity in life.

These humanistic elements of Agenda 21 all come together in the dynamics of cultural ecology, which encompasses family within the ‘community action cycle’, which links governance with care for neighbours and neighbourhoods for human betterment. In contrast with materialistic values, humanistic values at the home/neighbourhood level are what we sometimes call simply human values. They have to do with human development, human fulfilment and human enrichment. This includes wealth, health, enrichment of culture, the social order, and the natural environment; it includes everything with which we identify or with which we have an internal relationship. People have always been concerned with meeting their materialistic needs and with acquiring the means for doing so, but in the modern period wealth and power have become ends in themselves or means to still more wealth and power. In fact, we can say that under capitalism life has come to be defined in terms of the quest for wealth and power. Agenda 21 was envisaged to operate in a democratically organised humanistic culture where the human enterprise would be defined in terms of human growth, cultural advancement, and social betterment. The latter elements of humanistic development are expressed practically through Agenda 21 as:

* Equity; the idea of fairness for every person man or women; we each have the right to an education and health care.
* Sustainability; the view that we all have the right to earn a living that can sustain our lives and have access to a more even distribution of goods.
* Productivity; the full participation of people in the process of income generation. This also means that the government needs more efficient social programmes for its people.
* Empowerment; the freedom of the people to influence development and decisions that affect their lives.
* Cooperation; the participation and belonging to communities and groups as a means of mutual enrichment and a source of social meaning.
* Security; the opportunities freely and safely with confidence that they will not disappear suddenly in the future

3 Ecological footprints

The cultural pivot of deep living is ‘the ecological footprint’ which is a measure of human demand on Earth’s ecosystems. Although the term ecological footprint is widely used and well known, it goes beyond the metaphor. It represents an accounting system for local biocapacity that tracks how much biocapacity there is, and how much biocapacity people use. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the amount of Earth’s natural capital that is available, such as land, and the planet’s ecological capacity to keep pace with human demands. The indicator is an estimate of the amount of space on Earth that an individual uses in order to survive using existing technology. This space includes the biologically productive land and water area that produces the resources consumed by that individual such as food, water, energy, clothing, and building materials. It also includes the amount of land and water required to assimilate the wastes generated by that person. In other words, the ecological footprint measures a person’s demand on Earth’s ecosystem services. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to assimilate associated waste.

The average world citizen has an ecological footprint of about 2.7 global hectares (gha) while there are only 2.1 gha of bioproductive land and water per capita on earth. This means that humanity has already overshot global biocapacity by at least 30% and now lives unsustainabily by depleting stocks of “natural capital”

Using this method of assessment, it is possible to estimate how much of the Earth (or how many planet Earths) it would take to support humanity if everybody followed a given lifestyle. For 2007, humanity’s total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.5 planet Earths; that is, humanity uses ecological services 1.5 times as quickly as Earth can renew them. Every year, this number is recalculated to incorporate the three-year lag due to the time it takes for the UN to collect and publish statistics and relevant research. Since the Rio Summit it shows no signs of decreasing.

4 Thinking ‘Deeply’

Regarding materialism, in 1976, Daniel Bell predicted a vastly different society developing– one that will rely on the “economics of information” rather than the “economics of goods.” Bell argued that the new society would not displace the older one but rather overlie some of the previous layers just as the industrial society did not completely eradicate the ancient agrarian sectors of our society. The post-industrial society’s dimensions would include the spread of a knowledge class, the change from goods to services and the full participation of women. All of these would be dependent on urban renewal through the expansion of services in the economic sector and an increasing economic dependence on science as the means of innovating and organizing technological change. Bell prophetically stated in ‘The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society’ that we should expect “…new premises and new powers, new constraints and new questions–with the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history.”

Evidence of the mismatch between areas benefiting from urban revitalisation through culture and related forms of social consumption, and those most in need points to both a lack of cultural planning and a crisis in local governance. This reflects the regimes and power-play existing in the competitive urbanisation process, and in particular, the role of intermediaries that mediate and broker the global with the local impacts. These are rooted in the local communities because this is where the power relationships and integrations of globalisation are seen and felt. Local communities are seen as the essential receivers and transmitters of the forces of globalisation and should therefore be the focus of voter involvement with community action plans.

However, all these models assume that the annual economic growth will continue indefinitely and they do not consider the reduction in the average global family prosperity that would result from widespread wealth redistribution. For example, in the 1970s it was calculated that to redistribute wealth globally so that most people had the same per capita income would result in everyone living like European peasants of the 18th century. All models for adjusting cultures for sustainability also ignore the growing scramble for the earth’s natural resources. This has intensified greatly in the past decade. Countries such as India, Japan and especially China have seen a huge increase in demand for both minerals and agricultural commodities to serve mass consumerism. The third world countries producing these resources, which support the economic betterment of the buyers, are reaping economic benefits, benefits that are not equitable and also result in unplanned devastating environmental consequences.

Nevertheless, post-industrial economic regeneration based on the mantra of ‘new cultures for old’ within the current paradigm of continued economic growth, remains the universal goal of economic regeneration. One such community is the model of an academic proposal for boosting the prosperity of the former coal mining and steel-making community of Tredegar in the South Wales Valleys. The heavy industry work force of Tredegar blazed the trail of the industrial revolution but the valley is now one the European Community’s outstanding areas of unemployment.

5 Acting deeply

Community capacity building (CCB) is one of the ‘twin pillars’ of community development for ‘deep living’. The other pillar is community engagement. Most of the beneficial changes in communities come about through the process of engagement, whereby communities are able to respond to opportunities, or deal with problems, by bringing them to the attention of those with the ability to respond and carrying out agreed plans of action. But such engagement cannot take place unless the community has the capacity and the recognition required to engage in such discussions. Also, the most excluded groups and communities are most often the ones with the least capacity to do so. Communities with capacity are confident, organised, cohesive and influential, and their members are likely to enjoy a better quality of life. This means they can deal more effectively with public bodies to come up with solutions to problems or opportunities. They can do more to set up and run projects or initiatives and encourage people to support each other.

A good working definition of CCB is:

“Activities, resources and support that strengthen the skills, abilities and confidence of people and community groups to take effective action and leading roles in the development of communities” (Strengthening Communities, S Skinner, CDF publications, 2006)

Building community capacity is one of the three national priorities for community learning and development in Scotland and the Scottish Community Development Centre supports this in a number of ways. In Wales, the report on Tredegar as a deep place model of regeneration highlights ‘relevant education’ as one of the major limiting factors in producing a sustainable community. The report says:

“There are major educational attainment gaps between the people of Tredegar and the more affluent areas of Wales. The local education service has been judged as failing and has been placed in special measures. Tredegar is, of course, not alone and across the UK children from the lowest income families are half as likely to get five good GCSEs and study subsequently at university.

A key consideration relates to the type of skills taught and the methods by which they are advanced. Also there is a significant discrepancy between course provision and local employment opportunities. In order to successfully close the poverty gap in education, there needs to be interventions as part of a holistic strategy involving schools, families and communities”.

The authors of the Tredegar report suggest that to anchor the community in ‘deep place’ a Cooperative Educational Trust should be established to include schools attended by residents of Tredegar.

This Tredegar report is concerned with place, and how a deep focus on place can be a powerful mechanism for managing integrated public policy interventions. It sees this focus as the most appropriate and effective means to address two significant, interconnected social policy problems:

* how to overcome the inequitable distribution of wealth, and the unacceptable agglomeration of poverty in post-industrial areas;
* and, how to effectively adjust both personal and civil lives and practices toward a more ecologically sustainable economic model.

A general guiding belief is that sustainable schools are not just well-managed, caring schools. They are also great places to learn, where pupils develop self-esteem and reach high standards of achievement. In this context, evidence shows that using the local environment as an ‘integrating context’ for learning boosts literacy and numeracy standards, while at the same time developing critical thinking skills and reducing behaviour problems. This is attributed to the increased enthusiasm for learning produced by teaching that is grounded in real local issues, people and places. Also, children (and adults too) need contact with elements of natural world, which can be accessed locally, for their own personal and emotional development.

6 Schools and Communities Action Network (SCAN)

Agenda 21 is about getting involved to improve your local patch. If children are to be taken out of school, there is a strong argument that it would be a far better use of limited resources to provide a framework for them to interrogate their local community’s plans for its open spaces. In this way they could come to grips with the day-to-day problems, issues and challenges of environmental management in the heart of their community. This experience would probably equip them to help plan and manage their own patch, at school, or in their own backyards. It is also a practical route to active citizenship.

Motivation to use the local community served by the school as an outdoor classroom for studying and promoting deep living is enhanced in two principal ways.

* issues that matter to young people, from the state of the local park to global warming and its local implications, are used as a context for learning across the curriculum so that time in school is relevant to their lives, not abstract or disconnected from their futures.
* the school estate and its local area are used as a learning resource, so that pupils engage with real issues in real places among real people as a natural part of their learning. The school becomes a testing ground where pupils think through the problems and opportunities right on their doorstep, while studying the connections to larger, sometimes global challenges.

For example, the health of the local community could become a focus for learning across many subjects, with opportunities to examine the school/home food, drink and travel practices, and make comparisons with other places. Similarly, wildlife in or around the school – or places that the school is visiting – provides a window onto the needs of other beings. This can be exciting in its own right, but also draws pupils towards the question of conservation management.

The way such a school’s community action network (SCAN) could operate is exemplified by the 4-Cs model: child (primary/secondary level), curriculum, campus, community.

Curriculum – teaching provision and learning:
The National Curriculum sets out in broad terms what is to be taught in schools, not how it is to be taught, allowing schools to be creative in the way they plan and facilitate learning. Through its focus on issues that matter to young people, and through its links to practical activities in the school’s buildings, grounds and local area, sustainable development can stimulate curriculum and teaching innovation. Learning about real issues in real settings – inside and outside the classroom – can boost motivation across all ability levels, while developing skills such as communication, problem-solving, teamwork and organisation. We believe this approach can help to retain pupils within the education system and improve pupil behaviour, self-esteem and achievement.

Campus – values and ways of working:
Schools that manage their operations sustainably provide a powerful example for their staff and pupils to follow. By encouraging everyone to participate, the whole school can become a medium for acquiring positive, sustainable habits. The benefits to the school can be considerable. Better catering can improve pupils’ health, concentration and learning outcomes. Greener travel arrangements contribute to the safety, fitness and alertness of pupils. Efficient management of school buildings can result in lower energy and water bills. Employment practices like staff development and local recruitment can contribute to regeneration. A strategy of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ can result in less purchasing, less cost and less waste.

Community – wider influence and partnerships:
Schools are well placed to exert a broader influence in their communities. Through their contact with parents and carers, suppliers and local organisations, an extensive well-being agenda can be advanced among local people. Pupils are required in school for less than 15% of the year. What they experience outside school has a significant impact on their self-esteem, achievement and behaviour. By promoting safer, stronger, healthier and greener (i.e. sustainable) communities, schools are therefore also helping themselves. Schools have much to give in terms of their facilities and hosting of local services, and in their influence on local affairs. And the goals of a sustainable community are attractive to many parents, providing a focus for their involvement with the school.

The 4-Cs model works! The evidence is contained in the history of the schools and communities action network developed in Wales as a practical response to the Rio Summit in the 1990s. The network was created within the local teacher’s advisory service. It involved schools using simple classroom methods for pupils of all ages to probe the quality of life in their communities. The aim was to alert young people to the character of their surroundings through ‘place awareness walks’, and establish a features database that lists the good and bad things in their neighbourhood. Plans were produced in school and taken into the community and presented to local politicians for action.

https://sites.google.com/site/nowscan/

The message from Welsh teachers is that there are really many different approaches and methods, to link schools with the communities they serve through the curriculum to enhance and develop people’s deeper understanding of what is special about where they live. They should all be encouraged. Many are traditional ways to study local wildlife that go back to the age of the pioneer nature watchers, such as Gilbert White, Charles Darwin and Charles Kingsley. Others, might take up the need for a broader environmental appraisal that covers issues such as transport, crime, litter, jobs, and energy use. The Schools and Communities Action Network is the tool to mobilise people and stimulate flows of information, methods, ideas and data; person-to-person, family-to-family. The free networking of ideas and achievements has never been easier through Google Sites, Facebook and YouTube as the communication media to network a local social action cycle.

https://plus.google.com/b/100761305716041408177/100761305716041408177/about/p/pub

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Schools-and-Communities-Action-Network/759676674094232?sk=info

1 Definition

The North American Ndee are the Western Apache people of the mountainous semi-arid Transition Zone of west-central Arizona. They are notable in linking important allegorical stories to the places where they are said to have occurred, and regularly recount these stories for teaching and counselling. For example, descriptive place names such as ‘Coarse-Textured Rocks Lie Above in a Compact Cluster’ and ‘Line of White Rocks Extends Up and Out’, have long since become shorthand for the lessons they exemplify, and are central to Ndee cultural literacy. The late Dudley Patterson, an Ndee Elder, explains his people’s approach to place-based education as follows. “Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dries up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep thinking about it” (Basso, 1996, p. 127).

Place-based education seeks to overcome the divide between narrow academic subjects and reality that is blocked out by classroom walls. It achieves this through grounding learning in lived experiences of how local culture tackles real-world problems in the environment and influences decision-making by communities. Education based on place has its roots in John Dewey’s idea of progressive education. According to Dewey, the traditional subject-based, bench-marked linear learning pathways of books undermine the integration of students’ experience outside the classroom and makes it difficult to apply what they learn to their daily life. We have to turn to computers to produce Dewey’s flexible educational frameworks of conceptual mind-maps and place-based pedagogies to bridge this gap (Table 1).

Table 1 Information arrays for learning

The world of books

· Separate subject-based benchmarked pathways;

The world of computers

· Integrated conceptual mind maps

· Comparative place-based pedagogies

An ideal progresssive pedagogy contextualises knowledge in students’ lives. History is taught through researching the stories of places and people, perhaps interviewing elders in the community. Learning about language and arts involves documenting people and events in their places. Concepts in social studies emerge from discovering how local governments operate and how government decisions impact on local communities and families. Science projects monitor local environmental conditions; etc.

In a place-based model, the goal is to collect and compare information geographically. The aim is to create opportunities for learners to think independently (inquiry), collect, analyse, synthesise, and critique information (data), address community opportunities and concerns (values), and create knowledge and innovative ideas (actions). Another major goal that Place-Based Education addresses is communication skills by reporting research findings through publications (written and electronic) and making presentations to peers and the community. If environmental and social data students collect in their communities is standardised and organised in a suitable array, it can be uploaded across the nation into a cultural network on the web. This global networking can be coordinated through school libraries and their information services. The next step is to do research on social and environmental concerns within a large geographic area and make community comparisons.

There is also an important practical outcome from place-based studies. Meanings of places (i.e., sense of place) define and infuse content and pedagogy when students regularly work in the local outdoor environment or in the community. The emphasis on hands-on, real-world learning experiences increases academic achievement by helping students develop stronger ties to their homeland. It enhances students’ appreciation for the natural world, and creates a heightened commitment to serve as active, contributing citizens. Community resilience and environmental quality are improved through the active engagement of local citizens, community organisations, and environmental resources in the life of the school. Teaching that deliberately enriches a local sense of place can potentially stimulate the interest of all students in the cultual attributes of where they live, and the social ways of interpreting them. Where the physiography or cultural geography known by aboriginal inhabitants has been obliterated by urbanization or other changes, visualization technologies can be used to recreate them.

Place-based (also called place-centred or place-conscious) teaching has long been practiced in the United States at elementary and secondary school levels in diverse regions. But an important question is ‘Can teaching based on sense of place suit natives and newcomers equally well?’ It is known that tourists and other visitors can develop strong attachments to places far from their homes. In this connection, Williams and Stewart (1998) remarked that “it is not the possessors of meanings that are local, but the meanings themselves.”

Therefore, whoever defines a place through a process of self-education about its meanings, whoever speaks to and for its people, and whoever imagines its destiny with the practical hope of determining its future can be said to be part of that place. This raises the important question of how local is ‘local’? The answer is that the size of ‘place’ as a learning resource should be defined so it can expand the students’ world as their mental horizon expands. A child’s interest in the world naturally increases in accordance with their cognitive and emotional development. At first there is a natural interest in what is close at hand, 5th grade students have the ability to think at the state or bioregional level, high school students expand their interests to national and global levels. At each level students are grounding their study of large-scale issues, which are geographically based on a solid and personal understanding of how things work in their immediate locality. This means that place must be small enough to handle neighbourhood issues and large enough to set their nationhood in a global context.

2 Wales: a geographical model for a place-based pedagogy

The first border between Wales and England was largely zonal and loosely aligned with the eastern watersheds of the rivers Dee, Wye and Severn. The eastern earthwork known as Offa’s Dyke was built as an early distinct political line running north to south but was subsequently overrun. Ironically, it was The Act of Union with England in 1536, which resulted in a linear political border stretching from the mouth of the Dee to the mouth of the Wye.

Although Wales closely shares its political and social history with the rest of Great Britain, and the vast majority of the population speaks English, the country has retained a distinct cultural identity and is officially bilingual.

The beginning of the 20th century saw a revival in Welsh national feeling. With 20,000 Welsh-born people living on either side of the Mersey in 1901, Liverpool had an array of Welsh chapels and cultural institutions, hosted the Welsh National Eisteddfod in 1884, 1900 and 1929, and gave rise to several leading figures in Welsh life in the 20th century. By the inter-war years, heavy industry in south Wales was increasingly linked to Bristol’s Avonside and the English Midlands, and that in north Wales to Merseyside. The Liverpool Daily Post became, effectively, the daily newspaper for north Wales. Plaid Cymru, ‘The Party of Wales’, was formed in 1925, seeking greater autonomy or independence from the rest of the UK. The decline of Liverpool after the Second World War, and changing patterns of Welsh migration, caused the Welsh presence to diminish; in the 1960s the flooding of the Tryweryn Valley to provide the city with water soured Anglo Welsh relations with many people in Wales.

‘England and Wales’ became common for describing the area to which English law applied, and in 1955 Cardiff was proclaimed the capital city of Wales. Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Welsh Language Society) was formed in 1962, in response to a perceived decline in the language. Now, the more urbanised south, containing cities such as Cardiff, Newport and Swansea, which was historically home to the coal and steel industries, contrasts with the mostly rural north, where agriculture and slate quarrying were the main industries. Although the M4 corridor now brings wealth into south Wales, particularly Cardiff, there is no pronounced economic divide between north and south as in England; there is, for example, a high level of economic and social poverty and joblessness in the post-industrial south Wales Valleys a few miles from Cardiff.

Referenda held in Wales and Scotland in 1997 backed moves to establish a form of self-government in both countries. In Wales, the consequent process of devolution began with the Government of Wales Act 1998, which created the National Assembly for Wales. Powers of the Secretary of State for Wales, a kind of English Viceroy, were transferred to the devolved government on 1 July 1999. At the same time the Assembly was granted responsibility to decide how the Westminster government’s budget for devolved areas is spent and administered for the benefit of the Welsh people. The 1998 Act was amended by the Government of Wales Act 2006, which enhanced the Assembly’s powers, giving it legislative powers akin to the Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly. The current debate is about when and how local tax-raising powers will be organised in Wales.

Despite this broad unity of Wales as a small but distinctive nation, a number of Welsh historians have queried the notion of a single, cohesive Welsh identity. The country is largely characterised by an upland topography and this has traditionally limited the integration between north and south Wales, with the two halves virtually functioning as separate economic and social units in the pre-industrial era. Even today, the main road and rail links run east-west and by rail or car it can take five hours or more to reach Bangor from Cardiff.

As early as 1921 Sir Alfred Zimmern argued that there was “not one Wales, but three”: archetypal ‘Welsh Wales’, industrial or ‘American Wales’, and upper-class ‘English Wales’. Each represented different parts of the country and different traditions. In 1985 political analyst Dennis Balsom proposed a similar ‘Three Wales model’. Balsom’s regions were the Welsh-speaking heartland of the north and west, Y Fro Gymraeg; a consciously Welsh – but not Welsh-speaking – ‘Welsh Wales’ in the South Wales Valleys; and a more ambivalent ‘British Wales’ making up the remainder, largely in the east and along the south coast. This division reflects, broadly, the areas where Plaid Cymru, Labour, and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively tend to enjoy most political support.

Since the time, a hundred years go,when it supplied most of the world’s energy as coal,Wales has been a significant player on the global stage. It has three UNESCO World Heritage Sites and one UNESCO Biodiversity Reserve. There is cutting-edge international research flowing from its many universities. By making sustainable development the principle of its policy and legislation the Welsh government has positioned Wales in a relatively small group of nations taking a serious practical approach to Agenda 21. This reinforces the idea that civic nationhood appears to have been established as a primary factor in Wales’ post-1997 existence.

The population of Wales in mid-2008 was estimated at about three million living in an area of about 8,000 sq. ml. It is therefore large enough to express most of the ills of an over-populated planet that is running short of resources. It is small enough to trace government policies to tackle these ills down to neighbourhood levels. As a provisional step to model a place-based educational framework the Green Map System of Wales is being developed as a set of educational arrays (Figs 1 & 2) for comparing resilience planning which combines culture, landscape and ecology.

http://www.greenmap.org/greenhouse/about

Places, which are representative of cultural ecology in action, are cross-referenced to web information files in html, wiki, pdf, conceptual mind maps and interactive power point presentations.

Fig 1 The Green Map System: Wales Cultural Ecology Map 1

Fig 2 Wales: Cultural Ecology Map 2: Severnside Levels

To summarise, the aim of ‘Cultural Ecology’ maps is to alert the map-reader to problems which humanity is facing at a tempo of change which is entirely novel. These environmental problems and the human response are encoded in past landscapes where they are revealed as prior solutions to, and outcomes of, environmental challenges that are strikingly similar to their modern counterparts. That is to say for millennia humans have had to cope with deforestation, soil erosion, floods, desertication, loss of biodiversity and climatic change. These same factors are often invoked as causal triggers responsible for the formation and decline of archaic societies around the globe.

In many regions of the world, changes in political power, demography, and social organization have been wave-like. Likewise, climate and other environmental phenomena cycle and vary over time. Correlations between climatic and cultural changes are invoked in some regions as causal agents for change. It is impossible to assess and evaluate these relationships without a long temporal perspective that takes into account the organizational, economic, and environmental parameters prior to, during, and after climatic and cultural events in a given region.

All in all, the positive accomplishments of human ingenuity in the past 150 years overshadow all the previous achievements of mankind since the beginning of the Neolithic revolution 15,000 years ago. It is necessary to concentrate on so small a fragment of time because the last two hundred years has been a phase of ecological mutation worthy of comparison with the transition from food gathering and hunting to tillage and pasture. It is also necessary to attach this time interval to a small geographical area that illustrates this increased tempo of change and the resilience of its people for adaptive management of social change. A cultural ecology map can therefore provide an educational resource to explore the nature of interactions between these social and ecological systems.

Also, new insights into the social-ecological resilience of cultures come from mapping the concepts of ‘driving forces’, ‘thresholds’, ‘adaptive cycles’ and ‘adaptive management, on the ground and in the mind. This is a process of social learning. The practical goal of cultural ecology mapping is to promote resiliency plans for achieving long-term environmental occupacy of a locale by learning about how the complexity of the landscape is the result of the resilience of past generations who changed their behaviour to maintain flows of ecosystem services.

The underlying purpose is to take up the challenge, first articulated by Tim O’Riordan, and examine the drift towards a more inclusionary and deliberative politics. The task is to assess how far attempts to incorporate such approaches have worked in coservation management, and to examine its prospects in an emerging world where enduring management of ecosystem services may well have to be provisional and participatory. O’Riordan takes the view that in today’s complex and specialised politics, full-blooded participatory democracy cannot replace some form of accountable representative democracy. This will enevitably lead to reslience plans being compromises to achieve a new balance between ecosystem services and economic well-being. Relationships between culture, landscape and ecosystem services will inevitably change to reflect this balance.

Further information on these themes and access to the cultural ecology maps of Wales may be found at the following three sites.

http://www.changingtimes.wikispaces.com

http://www.opengreenmap.org/greenmap/wales-cultural-ecology-map-1

http://www.opengreenmap.org/greenmap/wales-cultural-ecology-map-2

3  References

Basso, K.H., 1996, Wisdom Sits in Places, Albuquerque,
University of New Mexico Press, 171 p.

https://sites.google.com/site/ownershipthroughheritage/

http://www.promiseofplace.org/assets/files/research/SemkenPlacebasedGeoscienceforAmeriIndian.pdf

http://web.utk.edu/~markfly/documents/Place-Based%20K-12%20Education%20Proposal%205_10_10.pdf

Williams, D.R., and Stewart, S.I., 1998, Sense of place: an elusive concept that is finding a home in ecosystem management, Journal of Forestry, v. 96, p. 18-23.

http://cielearn.org/wp-content/themes/ciel/docs/Edelglass,%20Philosophy%20and%20Place-Based%20Pedagogies.pdf

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/politics-policy-people/sociology/contemporary-wales/content-section-2.1.2

https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/museumstudies/museumsociety/documents/volumes/mason.pdf

http://www.promiseofplace.org/assets/files/research/Rosenthal2008PBEAnnotatedBibliography.pdf

http://www.ntu.edu.vn/portals/96/tu%20lieu%20tham%20khao/phuong%20phap%20giang%20day/place-based%20learning.pdf