Cultural Ecology

The tree is a powerful symbol. Trees appear in many creation stories, such as the World Ash or the Garden of Eden. Religions, especially the Druids, have revered trees. Buddha was enlightened sitting under a Bodhi tree. Christmas is celebrated by decorating Christmas trees. There are sacred trees throughout the world. “Family tree” has a symbolic connection to the theme of immortality. Myths and symbols are the carriers of meaning. In them, a situation is presented metaphorically in a language of image, emotion, and symbol. Because human beings share a collective unconscious (C. G. Jung’s psychological explanation) or the Homo sapiens morphic field (Rupert Sheldrake’s biological explanation), a symbol comes from and resonates with the deeper layers of the human psyche.

Jean Shinoda Bolenhttp://www.dailyom.com/library/000/002/000002551.html

Human behaviour. from gathering food to mountain climbing, is now a major influence on all Earth’s ecosystems.  There is no longer any wildness defined as ‘beings without people’.  The term naturalness is used to define conditions in parts of our planet’s surface that for the time being happen to be relatively free of major human ecological interventions.  Naturalness is largely the outcome of those processes of wildness that remain in the absence of human utilitarian activities.  Nature sites are selected to represent naturalness.  It is in these places that nature becomes the incarnation of human thought about our place in nature and nature’s resilience.  In this connection, through the ages and in all corners of the globe, people have looked to trees to make sense of their lives, honouring their transcendental qualities in a variety of ways. How has our cultural attachment to, and interconnectedness with, trees manifested itself in the world today?

 1 Evolution with trees

Many people take an understandably human-centered view of primate evolution, focusing on the bipedal, large-brained hominids that populated the jungles of Africa a few million years ago. But the fact is that primates as a whole, including not only humans and hominids, but monkeys, apes, lemurs, baboons and tarsiers, have a deep evolutionary history that stretches as far back as the age of dinosaurs.

The first true primates evolved about 55 million years ago, at the beginning of the Eocene Epoch. Their fossils have been found in North America, Europe, and Asia. They were still somewhat squirrel-like in size and appearance, but had grasping hands and feet that were increasingly more efficient in manipulating objects and climbing trees. The position of their eyes indicates that they were developing more effective stereoscopic vision as well.

Smilodectes (lemur-like family Adapidae from the Eocene Epoch)

Among the new primate species were many that somewhat resemble modern prosimians such as lemurs, lorises, and possibly tarsiers. The Eocene was the epoch of maximum prosimian adaptive radiation. There were at least 60 genera of them that were mostly in two families, one similar to lemurs and lorises and the other like galagos and tarsiers. This is nearly four times greater prosimian diversity than today. Eocene prosimians also were much more widely distributed around the world than now. They lived in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The great diversity of Eocene prosimians was probably a consequence of the fact that they did not have competition from monkeys and apes since these latter more advanced primates had not yet evolved.

Major evolutionary changes were beginning in some of the Eocene prosimians that foreshadow species yet to come. Their brains and eyes were becoming larger, while their snouts were getting smaller. At the base of a skull, there is a hole through which the spinal cord passes. This opening is the foramen magnum. The position of the foramen magnum is a strong indicator of the angle of the spinal column to the head and subsequently whether the body is habitually horizontal (like a horse) or vertical (like a monkey). During the Eocene, the foramen magnum in some primate species was beginning to move from the back of the skull towards the center. This suggests that they were beginning to hold their bodies erect while hopping and sitting, like modern lemurs, galagos, and tarsiers

Sometime around six or seven million years ago, the first members of our human family, the Hominidae, evolved in Africa. Their anatomy suggests they spent much of their time in trees, as did their close primate relatives, the ancestors of today’s chimpanzees and gorillas. But unlike other primates, these early hominids walked readily on two feet when on the ground, a trait often used to define the human family.

Over the last decade, there have been a number of important fossil discoveries in Africa of what may be very early transitional ape/hominins, or proto-hominins. These creatures lived just after the divergence from our common hominid ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, during the late Miocene and early Pliocene Epochs. The fossils have been tentatively classified as members of three distinct groups dating from 7-6 million to 5.8-4.4 million years ago. It is uncertain as to whether any of these three types of primates were in fact true hominins and if they were our ancestors.

Humans are descended from australopithecines.  The earliest australopithecines very likely did not evolve until the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch in East Africa. The primate fossil record for this crucial transitional period leading to australopithecines is still scanty and somewhat confusing. However, by about 4.2 million years ago, unquestionable australopithecines were present. By 3 million years ago, they were common in both East and South Africa. Some have been found dating to this period in North Central Africa also. As the australopithecines evolved, they exploited more types of environments. Their early proto-hominin ancestors had been predominantly tropical forest animals. However, African forests were progressively giving way to sparse woodlands and dry grasslands, or savannas. The australopithecines took advantage of these new conditions. In the more open environments, bipedalism would very likely have been an advantage.

By 2.5 million years ago, there were at least two evolutionary lines of hominins descended from the early australopithecines. One line appears to have been adapted primarily to the food resources in lake margin grassland environments and had an omnivorous diet that increasingly included meat. Among them were our early human ancestors who started to make stone tools by this time. The other line seems to have lived more in mixed grassland and woodland environments, like the earlier australopithecines, and was primarily vegetarian. This second, more conservative line of early hominins died out by 1 million years ago or shortly before then. It is likely that all of the early hominins, including humans, supplemented their diets with protein and and fat-rich termites and ants just as some chimpanzees do today.

Between the time of the first hominids and the period when our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa more than 150,000 years ago, our planet was home to a wide range of early humans. To piece together their story, we rely on a wealth of evidence, including fossils, artifacts and DNA analysis. The web of clues is difficult to unravel, and experts often disagree about which species lived when and where. But it is clear that the human family has a rich evolutionary history; a past dwelling with trees that has shaped who we are today.

Geneticists have come up with a variety of ways of calculating how similar chimpanzees and humans are. The 1.2% chimp-human distinction, for example, involves a measurement of the base building blocks of genes that chimpanzees and humans share. A comparison of the entire genome, however, indicates that segments of DNA have also been deleted, duplicated over and over, or inserted from one part of the genome into another. When these differences are counted, there is an additional 4 to 5% distinction between the human and chimpanzee genomes.

No matter how the calculation is done, the big point still holds: humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are more closely related to one another than either is to gorillas or any other primate. From the perspective of this powerful test of biological kinship, humans are not only related to the great apes – we are one! The DNA evidence tells us that the human evolutionary tree is embedded within the great apes.

The strong similarities between humans and the African great apes led Charles Darwin in 1871 to predict that Africa was the likely place where the human lineage branched off from other animals – that is, the place where the common ancestor of chimpanzees, humans, and gorillas once lived. The DNA evidence shows an amazing confirmation of this daring prediction. The African great apes, including humans, have a closer kinship bond with one another than the African apes have with orangutans or other primates.  Hardly ever has a scientific prediction so bold, so ‘out there’ for its time, been upheld as the one made in 1871 – that human evolution began in Africa.

However, the traditional idea that our ancestors descended from the trees and gradually-and exclusively-began walking upright might be a gross over simplification. Fossil evidence from early hominins suggests that adaptations for tree climbing, such as long arms and fingers, coexisted with adaptations for upright walking, such as an arched foot and humanlike hips. Eventually, these upper-body climbing adaptations vanished and we became the adept striders that we are today. But how good are we at climbing trees now.

 2  Culture with trees

Indigenous groups often climb trees to gather food without relying on chimp-like branch-climbing or supportive equipment. And though they’re not as good at climbing as chimpanzees, falls are only marginally higher (6.6 percent compared to 4 percent).  To answer this question researchers studied two Ugandan groups-the Twa, who are hunter-gatherers, and the nearby Bakiga, who are farmers-and two Philippine groups-the Agta, who are hunter-gatherers, and the Manobo, who are farmers. Both groups of hunter-gatherers consume locally collected honey as an important part of their diets. Both groups climb trees to gather the honey, and many individuals start climbing at a young age. To ascend the trees, the climbers wrap their arms around the tree trunk at head-level, then, placing one foot in front of the other, the climbers advance upward to the honey source; in a sense, they “walk” up trees

Since the Neolithic period humans have struggled to open up forests for their cultures and livestock, little by little gaining living space for themselves. This was a long and battle, won with the help of fire, the plough and the unceasing teeth and hoof of farm animals. The remaining patches of woodland in Europe have not only a great heritage value, but also a symbolic one. The forest is a representation of wilderness in which we were launched as human, embedded in untamed nature with its unpredictable forces and its mystery.

European forests are not purely a mythical space, but also a physical reality, a large part of our cultural territory where the natural aspects of land dominate the man-made ones, where the wood production to meet our needs is compatible with the preservation of a great part of the biological diversity with which we evolved.

Even if most of our present tree scattered environment is largely managed and not comparable with the old natural forests that once covered Europe, it is still the habitat we share with of many other beings. Forest species contribute to about one-third of the biological diversity of Europe, as forest ecosystems represent the highest level of ecological structures, being complex and diverse in ecological function and form. As environments that early australopithicenes would have known. they have a great heritage value, as areas for human recreation, as landscapes, as providers of ecological services (clean water, prevention of erosion, carbon traps to combat climate change, etc.) and as privileged stages of spiritual contentment.

Until relatively recent times, forests have also been exploited for timber and other products – mushrooms, firewood, gathering of berries and nuts, game – for a very long time. The wide variety of wood from the different tree species has been used in many forms, for buildings, furniture, tools, arms, fencing. A superb wooden heritage has been created over the centuries in Europe, exploiting the beauty, suppleness or strength of wood.

Wooden heritage reckons its years in centuries. Few materials can lay the same claim to versatility as wood. This historically sustainable material, while at the same time flexible in all its applications, has adapted itself since prehistoric times to a variety of monumental, creative and functional expressions throughout our Europe. The technical and cultural differences in its use have benefited from the capacity of wood to be transformed combined with its resistance to the erosion of time.  Surviving for centuries in spite of irreversible decay, wooden heritage was made one of the key areas of reflection during the “Europe, a common heritage” campaign.

Although not denying the functional aspect of wood as a material, it conveys some of the poetry implicit in its selection and in its symbolic meaning to those who shape it, decorate it, build with it or simply enjoy the fruits of the work of the virtuoso makers: from forest specialists to skilled artisans of musical instruments.  We are dealing with a heritage of trees that corresponds to the craftsmanship of construction, the sociability of various forms of culture and respect for the landscape.

The wooden heritage constitutes an asset whose artistic and cultural values exceed the age of creators and curators. European wooden heritage is a living heritage supporting one of the most threatened forms of cultural expression and preservation of cultural heritage.

 3 Trees and human conduct

 Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau published his book, ‘Walden; or, Life in the Woods’ in 1854.  It details his sojourn in a cabin close to Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau lived at Walden for two years, two months, and two days, but Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau did not intend to live as a hermit, for he received visitors and returned their visits. Instead, he hoped to isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simplicity and self-reliance were Thoreau’s other goals, and the whole project was inspired by Transcendentalist philosophy. As Thoreau made clear in the book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, not far from his family home.

Walden emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in transcending the “desperate” existence that, he argues, is the lot of most humans. The book is not a traditional autobiorgraphy but combines autobiography with a social critique of contemporary Western culture’s consumerist and materialist attitudes and its distance from and destruction of nature. That the book is not simply a criticism of society, but also an attempt to engage creatively with the better aspects of contemporary culture, is suggested both by Thoreau’s proximity to Concord society and by his admiration for classical literature. There are signs of ambiguity, or an attempt to see an alternative side of something common — the sound of a passing locomotive, for example, is compared to natural sounds.

The book is informed by American Transcendentalism, a philosophy developed mostly by Thoreau’s friend and spiritual mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson owned the land on which Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond, and Thoreau often used to walk over to Emerson’s house for a meal and a conversation.

Thoreau regarded his sojourn at Walden as a noble experiment with a threefold purpose.

First, he was escaping the dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution by returning to a simpler, agrarian lifestyle.  However, he never intended the experiment to be permanent, and explicitly advised that he did not expect all his readers to follow his example, and never wrote against technology or industry as such. Second, he was simplifying his life and reducing his expenditures, increasing the amount of leisure time in which he could work on his writings (most of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was written at Walden). Much of the book is devoted to stirring up awareness of how one’s life is lived, materially and otherwise, and how one might choose to live it more deliberately — possibly differently. Third, he was putting into practice the Transcendentalist belief that one can best transcend normality and experience the Ideal, or the Divine, through nature.

It is an example of the integrative meme of spiral dynamics.  Spiral Dynamics argues that human nature is not fixed: humans are able, when forced by life conditions, to adapt to their environment by constructing new, more complex, conceptual models of the world that allow them to handle the new problems. Each new model transcends and includes all previous models. According to Beck and Cowan, these conceptual models are organized around so-called vmemes (pronounced “v memes”): systems of core values or collective intelligences, applicable to both individuals and entire cultures.

The final chapter is more passionate and urgent than its predecessors. In it, Thoreau criticizes Americans’ constant rush to succeed, to acquire superfluous wealth that does nothing to augment their happiness. He urges us to change our lives for the better, not by acquiring more wealth and material possessions, but instead to “sell your clothes and keep your thoughts,” and to “say what you have to say, not what you ought.” He criticizes conformity: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” By doing these things, men may find happiness and self-fulfillment.

“I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

Queen of the forest canopy

Nalini Nadkarni has been called “the queen of forest canopy research,” a field that relates directly to three of the most pressing environmental issues of our time: the maintenance of biodiversity, the stability of world climate, and the sustainability of forests.

For three decades, she has climbed trees on four continents, using mountain-climbing techniques, construction cranes, walkways, and hot air balloons to explore the world of animals and plants that live in the treetops. In 1994 she realized that there was no central database for storing and analyzing the research she was gathering, so she invented one. This state-of-the-art repository, called the Big Canopy Database, is credited with speeding cross-disciplinary collaboration just as a common database revolutionized the mapping of the human genome.

Nadkarni, the Director of the Center for Science and Math Education at The University of Utah, is known for using nontraditional pathways to raise awareness of nature’s importance, working with artists, dancers, musicians, and even loggers. Her work has been featured in Glamour, National Geographic, on TV, and in a giant-screen film, as well as in traditional science publications.

In a recent talk, Life Science in Prison, Nadkarni shares her findings from a partnership with the Washington State Department of Prisons which demonstrates that nature and conservation can have a tangibly positive impact on the planet, society and the inmates, themselves. There are currently 2.3 million incarcerated men and women in the U.S? And that 60% of all released inmates end up returning to prison? Nadkarni theorized that nature could help move the static and stuck prison system. So she provided science lectures. And the men, amazingly, chose coming to the lectures instead of watching television and lifting weights.  She partnered with conservancy organizations to replant prairies and grow endangered frogs for later release into protected wetlands.

She worked with some of the most dangerous criminals to add calming images of nature to solitary confinement facilities

Nalini boils it all down to this: “When we come to understand nature, we are touching the most deep and most important parts of ourself.”

We can take this as an example of humankind having reached the level of the holistic meme.  We experience the wholeness of existence through mind and spirit Everything connects to everything else in ecological alignments. Energy and information permeate the Earth’s total environment. Self is both distinct and a blended part of a larger, compassionate whole. Holistic, intuitive thinking and cooperative actions are to be expected.

– See more at:

http://www.thepromisedland.org/episode/5-nalini-nadkarni#sthash.KokNA2CP.dpuf

http://www.ted.com/talks/nalini_nadkarni_life_science_in_prison

Diagram of a nectar point network

1 Valuing urban wildlife

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

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

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

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

2 Objective

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

3 Nectar Point Network

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

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

4 Habitat gardens

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

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

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

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

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

5 Support

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

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

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

6 Web References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://iloveinsects.wordpress.com/

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

http://archive.org/details/concerningthehab033579mbp

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

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

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

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

Humanists and absolutists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The glue of mystery

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

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

He formulates the fine-tuning of the Universe in terms of the following six dimensionless constants:
•
N = ratio of the strength of gravity to that of electromagnetism;

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

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

•
Lambda (λ) = cosmological constant;

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

•
D = number of spatial dimensions in spacetime.

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

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

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

Concentrating on little things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Inviting the wind to carry

Salt waves of the sea,

The pine tree of Shiogoshi

Trickles all night long

Shiny drops of moonlight’.

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

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

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

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

Fig 1 Mystery as an arbitrator between humanism and absolutism

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

‘The Measure of Things’

David E Cooper

Clarendon Press, 2002

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

Wholesome knowledge

Wholesome knowledge is a category of wisdom that improves or preserves humans as individuals or groups. In the context of historical anthropology wholesome knowledge supports the fundamentals of living with one another within the ecological production of the planetary economy in ways that are relation-based rather than consumption-based. We look at these lost aboriginal cultures and marvel at their ways of living that seem so wholesome compared to our own.  Nevertheless, in our modern world, wholesome knowledge is the acquired wisdom that enables us to position quality of life and greater life fulfilment as primary goals, with aims that lead to processes for utilising the environment to improve or reconstruct a personal identity and lifestyle. The personal gathering of wholesome knowledge therefore helps people adapt themselves to difficult and challenging life circumstances as they grow older.  Research into identity development of older people suggests that this period of life is suited for applying creativity and wisdom to discover new ways of viewing Earth as a provider for future generations.  This can be seen as a cultural legacy to pass on a message to their children’s children that they should only take from the planet what ecological processes of growth and renewal can restore.

Bioscopes: examples of wholesome knowledge

All organisms interact at a cellular interface with the physical and biological world that surrounds them, from the interaction of food with cells lining the human gut to wandering through tropical forests and sailing the open ocean. Bioscopes are examples of systems biology, which is an approach to understanding ourselves of the larger picture, be it at the level of the organism, tissue, or cell, by putting its pieces together. It stands in stark contrast to decades of reductionist biology, which involves taking nature apart.

Systems biology is the study of the interactions of biological components in a spatial entitiy .  The components may be molecules, cells, organisms or populations.  The spatial entities may be habitats, organisms or organs. At the core of systems biology is holistic thinking.  This is the desire to understand natural systems as a functional whole, rather than a sum of parts. Thus, it is not sufficient to simply recognize the different facets of complexity.  Instead, the aim is to discover and examine the generally hidden threads that hold everything together and elucidate how these functional links can lead to the emergence of new phenomena and understandings.

Ecological examples that provoke systems thinking about our relationships to other living things in the human ecological niche are important to support lifelong learning.  In this context, bioscopes are a category of powerful teaching materials we owe to John Henslow.  Henslow, as professor of botany at Cambridge, was the mentor of Charles Darwin but from 1844 he also taught the children in the Suffollk village of Hitcham where he was the Rector. Bioscopes are living worlds within worlds and the particular educational example of systems biology that Henslow introduced to village schoolchildren was plant-pollinator interactions so that they should obtain a basic understanding of sex.  The phenomenon could be readily observed in the local hedgerows, and in the classroom it was taken down to the level of naming the sexual parts of flowers.  Because of the role birds and bees play in plant reproduction, to tell children about “the birds and the bees” has since become a euphemism for sex education in the English language.  Darwin addressed the wider importance of pollination interactions in the process of natural selection when he wrote in 1859, ” . . . I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure”.

In this wider context, every assembly of plants and their pollinators is a prime example of mutualisms in which both species benefit as a result of an interaction. Because pollination is a mutualism, many characteristics of the flower and the pollinator have evolved in concert including morphology and seasonality. Plant-pollinator bioscopes highlight many fundamental ecological concepts (e.g., foraging theory, competition), evolutionary concepts (e.g., diversification of lineages, adaptations), and applied biological concepts (e.g., agriculture, climate change). They are relevant to current issues surrounding the decline of honey bees and humming birds.

Bioscopes can change the mental balance between an individual and nature forever, particularly when they illustrate connections between our culture of mass production and the ecosystem services vital to our survival.   The educational message is that we not only need to be with nature but we have to recognise we are part of nature in everything we do from turning on a tap to taking a making a garden.  This deeper understanding is a feature of bioscopes as instances of nature that open windows on our use of the environment and our attitudes towards the maintenance of its habitats and species.  In truth, everyone has their own collection of bioscopes, large and small, in the mind’s eye.  Each has been chosen ‘not for what it is’ but for ‘what else it is’.  The ‘what else’ shifts one’s thinking towards humanity’s bigger picture.  So the small picture of flower and bee yields a complexity of understanding our place in the vast human ecological niche that now encompasses the entire planet.  Simplicity of form is a condensation or distillation to engage people more profoundly.  This is the educational outcome of a good bioscope.  The aim is not to create the appearance of nature but to stimulate thoughts about how we are integral with non-human species and the material world which furnish our ecological niche.  This point was made by Marc Trieb** when he chose the Patio de los Naranjos, or the Court of the Oranges, which forms the entrance to Cordoba’s Great Mosque and Cathedral, to illustrate complexity condensed within the simple (fig 1).

Fig 1 Courtyard of the Oranges

The simple alignment of the grid of trees mirrors the alignment of the hundreds of stone columns inside the mosque, creating an ingenious spatial relationship between the two. Lines of stones in the pebble mosaic pavement also accentuate the grid pattern making up the whole complex of narrow water channels.  Trieb believes that the irrigation system is the most elegant ever conceived in the way it uses water as a way to connect interior and exterior arcitechtural spaces. He reasons that such places are so enduringly beautiful because they speak literally of the root of their inspiration. Irrigation allowed families to settle and raise food, which led to civilization. That gift in turn inspired architectural form and reflected the connection between water as the source of life and the ability of Homo sapiens to build and live in an urban environment.

Potent bioscopes also reinvigorate the connection between beauty and the environment.  Kate Cullity** defines this beauty as the all-encompassing somatic and visceral kind, with the power to awaken a re-imagining of new ways to relate to and care for nature of which we are a moving part.  All bioscopes illustrate ecological processes of regeneration, competition, death and decay and nutrient recycling plumbed into a managerial background.  Finally, the deeper and wider messages from bioscopes is that they undermine the foundations of many of our confectionary values, which are grounded in the economy of commodities and unlimited economic growth.  All these behaviours link us as consumers with ecosystems near and far.  In this context, bioscopes show us that humankind is at one with all non-human species in that we partake of the same pool of Earth’s finite resources.  It is the planet’s productivity that will ultimately put a stop tp population growth.

Lifelong learning***

Culture is the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or a social group. It includes not only arts and letters, but also modes of life, fundamental human rights, value systems, traditions and beliefs.  The relatively recent global demographic shift in the age distribution of humanity, which has resulted in an increase proportion of the elderly, is one of the most significant changes now influencing cultures across the globe. Human longevity has now become a central factor in the demography of industrial society.  It is one of the most rapid and massive changes on the part of any species. Extended life span is not an optional add-on utilising the power of the pharmaceutical industry.  The over-60s now have to be taken seriously as an important socio political segment of society and this has great implications for human cultural ecology. Like the younger segments of society the elderly have significant inputs into transport, infrastructure, financial services, social care, climate change and energy-use, life sciences and constitutional reform.  This impact is underway in all countries taking the pathway of consumerism.

Ageing, is a sequence of staged processes, which is first manifest from twelve years of age.  This is the age when statistically humans in the Western world are least likely to die.   As an all-pervasive phenomenon, ageing may now be truly defined more broadly as ‘the combination of biological, psychological and social processes that affect people as they grow older’ (Fig 2).

Fig 2 Perspectives on ageing *

As with other phenomena such as ‘sexuality’, ‘race’ and ‘disability’, which appear at first sight to be biological categories, the material changes in the ageing body are shaped by social conditions, such as diet, working conditions, and also made meaningful by social and cultural practices.  This ecological perspective of ageing indicates that the concept of ‘life course’ provides an analytical framework for understanding the interplay between human lives and changing social structures.  The individual life course from birth to death is seen as a social process, which results in interactions of individuals in societies and groups that are segmented by age.  In particular, patterns of health and well being are affected by a dynamic interplay among biological, behavioural, and environmental expressions of the human genome, which now unfolds throughout an extended life course of individuals, families, and communities.  This life course is expressed in profound age-stratified cultural expressions.  It defines the analysis of ageing in a biomedical perspective and a socio-cultural perspective.  Together, both perspectives form an analytical ecological framework.of human lifespan.   The first perspective charts ageing as a decline in fitness caused by the accumulation of cellular errors leading to failures in organ systems.  The second perspective deals with age-related social and cultural practices leading to both inequalities and inclusivity.

From the socio-cultural perspective, education through school, home and society has a measurable impact on wellbeing, through all the stages of life.  Globalisation with its technological and social changes are key factors that most people will experience during their extended lifetime, resulting in the need for more educational updating than any previous generation. If people are to lead satisfying and productive lives, they will need to learn throughout this extended lifespan in order to maintain a constant engagement with society to maintain and extend their autonomy and identity capital. This reinforces the social glue that older people add to society in addition to any financial contributions they make. Other contributions to their communities and neighbourhoods are made by being active members of the places where they live.   Recent research has shown that older people already have a greater propensity to volunteer, to be involved with community-based organisations, to participate in democratic institutions and to vote.  Also, elders see life from a very different viewpoint than their children, and so choose different priorities.  The virtues we associate with age, namely prudence, caution, deliberation, security, are the very opposite of those materialistic forces that built the modern world. But as the demographic pattern of high industrial society shifts toward the senior years, what have been called ‘legacy values’ are bound to gain greater political weight. It has always been the role of elders to raise the great questions of meaning and purpose that loom large as death approaches. As we grow older we naturally become more inward and contemplative, wondering what all the effort and the anxiety, the hard pursuit of success and of material resources has really achieved.  In particular, facing an extended yet finite life encourages introspection on the meaning of life. The conservatism of elders stems from their concern for security, a state of dependency that influences them toward a different allocation of the nation’s wealth than younger citizens might prefer.  There is a shift towards thinking about a legacy of humanistic values that transcend the individual life course and will condition the world of their children’s children.  This is not only the concern of the old.  It’s important to remember that attitudes and policies imparted by the middle-aged today are most likely the attitudes and policies by which those same middle-aged adults will be judged when they move into the aged population group themselves.  It seems to be the fate of an industrial population to age and to alter its values in the direction of its elders.

In contrast with materialistic values, humanistic values, or what we sometimes call simply human values, have to do with human development, human fulfilment and human enrichment. This includes health, 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 consumer society wealth and power have become ends in themselves or means to still more wealth and power. Material values are dominant and the human enterprise conceived as the quest for wealth and power, is different from what it would be in a humanistic culture with the human enterprise defined in terms of human growth, cultural advancement, and social betterment.  Indeed,  the Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam developed a theory called gerotranscendence: the idea that as people age, they transcend the limited views of life they held in earlier times. Tornstam believes that throughout the aging process, the elderly become less self-centered and feel more peaceful and connected to the natural world. Humanistic wisdom comes to the elderly, Tornstam’s theory states, and as the elderly tolerate ambiguities and seeming contradictions, they let go of conflict, and develop softer views of right and wrong.

The gerotranscendence theory does not claim that everyone will achieve wisdom in aging. Some elderly people might still grow bitter and isolated, feel ignored and left out, or become alientated and judgmental.  Also, just as in other phases of life, individuals must struggle to overcome their own failings and turn them into strengths.  Life long education comes in here to aid a natural tendency of the elderly to assemble their experiences as a lifetime whole, gathering the necessary information and understanding from a wide range of sources.  This is where bioscopes come in because they reveal that all living things are part of a global human ecological niche in which we of necessity partake, but should also give.  We are but one species in a multitudinous mass of living organisms built on the same dynamic carbon framework.  This biochemical oneness with all other creatures is expressed in every breath we draw in.  It is also expressed in our mortality when an individual’s life course ends in death.  Evidence that elders take readily to educational bioscopes comes from the membership lists of nature conservation organisations and surveys of visitors to nature sites.  The issue is how to embed learning through bioscopes into the entire life course of everyone so that we manage nature for a greater purpose and pass this message on to future generations.  The starting point is that ageing makes our mental picture-making become more holistic to increase the focus on the development of hidden or neglected skills, which lead to a delight in life with potential for cultural change.

*Perspectives of Ageing

https://sites.google.com/site/ageinglifecourse/home

Futurescapes ISBN 978-0-500-51577-8

*** Ageing in Society ISBN 978-1-4129-0020-1

http://www.jblearning.com/samples/0763726559/SampleChapter02.pdf

http://www.uncp.edu/home/marson/348_ecological.html

http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3147&Itemid=247

http://roxbury.net/images/pdfs/clcwebch1.pdf

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/uploaded_files/research/life_course_influences_on_health_and_well-being_in_later_life-_a_review.pdf

** http://jeffreygardens.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/patio-de-los-naranjos-cordoba-spain.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rRcYvyfDgFUC&lpg=PA85&ots=DULkDcE9Vl&dq=wholesome%20knowledge%20assmann&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=wholesome%20knowledge%20assmann&f=false

http://grass-scan.wikispaces.com/file/view/grass_scan.pdf/83088161/grass_scan.pdf

1 Tapping into land
Now that mining companies have begun digging up Mongolia to feed minerals to the newly emerging industrial economies of the Far East, Earth is losing its last self-sufficient pastoral expression of cultural ecology. Only one per cent of Mongolia is cultivable. For thousands of years Mongolians have relied on their free ranging cattle, horses, yaks, goats and camels. Even now, most herding households are self-sufficient in meat and milk products and earn an income from selling live animals, milk, meat, skins and hides, wool and cashmere. But increasingly Mongolians are squatting on the outskirts of their capital Ulan Bator waiting for urban jobs to be generated from the billionaire revenues expected from the Canadian mine at Oyu Tolgoi. The mine is working one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper deposits. When fully operational it will account for about one-third of Mongolia’s economic activity. But, even now as their government argues with the mining company about just shares from the enterprise, more and more people are abandoning their nomadic ways in favour of city life. The familiar problems of urbanisation have already surfaced at Ulan Bator, where shanty towns now make up half the entire city.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of miles away, in the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire, eight families have started a British suburban neo-Neolithic life on 75 acres of marginal farm land in houses built of straw. Planning permission says they have to earn three quarters of their living from the land and take care of their own needs for energy water and sewage.
It is ironic that both these social groups are orientating their lives towards betterment; the Easterners want the fruits of mass production in the city; the Westerners aim to meet their needs by adopting a land-based lifestyle. The former are hoping to slot into a global culture of consumerism. The latter have cut their ties with an urban infrastructure by growing their own food making their own electricity and milking their own cow. They are doing this whilst producing some creative craftwork on the side.
What links these two societies under change are the cultural adaptations they will have to make to connect their society with the ecological particularity of the living world. The industrialised Mongolians will maybe make this connection superficially when they buy their supermarket milk and see symbols of their former connection with the land printed on plastic cartons. The Pembrokeshire diggers will coax their milk from a living, breathing, animal, which is a highly visible herbivore in their relatively small garden food chain. Both societies are nevertheless having to face up to the same questions that were first raised a century ago in Europe at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This was a time that also marked the beginning of secularism and the loss of a spiritual lodestone relating culture to environment in a ‘big history’. In this context, culture denotes the totality of the social environment into which a human being is born and in which he/she lives. Culture in this sense includes the community’s institutional arrangements (social, political, and economic) but also its forms of art and knowledge, the assumptions and values embedded in its practices and organization, its images of heroism and villainy, it various systems of ideas, its forms of work and recreation, its origins and destiny and so forth.
In particular, the migrating families at opposite sides of the world, who are actually activated by new cultural values, will sooner of later have to come to grips with the idea that “land” as a whole is an object of moral concern. This proposition, was first articulated by Aldo Leopold in his book ‘Sand County Almanac (1848)’

2 Ethics of land use
Leopold’s summarised his standpoint as follows:
“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state”.
Since writing this, Leopold has stimulated writers to argue for certain moral obligations toward ecological wholes, such as species, communities, and ecosystems, not just their individual constituents. From this perspective it appears that the Mongolians are moving away from this feeling of cultural wholeness with Nature, whilst the Pembrokeshire families are facing up to the vexed question of how urbanised human beings should relate to habitats, ecosystems and species in their pursuit of happiness with betterment. On past experience we can pretty well guarantee that before long some of the urbanised Mongolians will be yearning for betterment that is not connected with increased monetary riches. Could the universal goal of betterment be a world where parents place the emotional, intellectual and moral needs of their children above materialism? This was the belief of John Ruskin, writing about dehumanising Victorian urbanism twelve years after Leopold. His goal of cultural ecology was to produce children as truly ‘bright eyed and happy hearted human creatures’, who could be introduced with the words “these are my jewels”.
Ruskin also encapsulated the purpose of political economy in the following paragraph.
“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others”.
Ruskin sought a practical application of his philosophy by tapping into a two-way stream of ideas: those ideas presented with the purpose of exposing contemporary social evil and distress, and those presented in order to show a way out of the social muddle into happiness and greater security. His practical solution in the 1870s was to establish The Guild of St George, a project which he summarised as follows:
‘We will try to make some small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam-engines upon it, and no railroads ; we will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick ; none idle, but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law, and appointed persons : no equality upon it; but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not at forty miles an hour in the risk of our lives ; when we want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry it either on the backs of beasts, or on our own, or in carts, or boats ; we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields, and few bricks. We will have some music and poetry; the children shall learn to dance to it and sing it; perhaps some of the old people, in time, may also’.
Juxtaposing Leopold and Ruskin defines the land ethic as being ecologically centred because it focuses on the moral relationships within the natural world, particularly between humans, the land and each other. These relationships were formulated in the context of modernism by Lynn Holtzman as an ecologically-integrated Golden Rule. The goal is to foster and maintain relational harmony and health between humans and between humans and the land, thus achieving Leopold’s ultimate goal of ‘land health’, “a state of harmony between men and land”. J. Baird Callicott has gone further into ecological detail. He believes that moral value is determined by an individual’s contribution to maintaining the whole, that is, the whole possesses the greater moral value. The land ethic, Callicott argues:
“…. not only provides moral consideration for the biotic community per se, but ethical consideration of its individual members is pre-empted by concern for the preservation of the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community”.

3 Ecological beauty and morality
Because humans are an integral part of the biotic community, individuals and societies are included in the beauty of life as it has evolved on Earth. As an example of ‘functional Beauty’, the beauty found in the human environment falls into a broad category, which includes architecture, everyday artefacts, events, and activities, and the arts. Ruskin’s conception of painting as language permits him to replace an older theory of art imitating nature, traditionally central to views of art, with the theory that painting utilizes systems of visual relationships that express the essentially inimitable tones, tints, and forms of nature. Ruskin had an acute sense of visual beauty, which he discovered and renewed lifelong in landscapes and townscapes. While he was appalled by many aspects of urban life he loved the old towns and cities of Europe. He could only account for the sense of intense pleasure he experienced in such places, which he recognised was analogous to the contemplation of natural beauty in the living world, by integrating this experience in his ideas about beauty in Nature. So, for Ruskin, art in town and country, the human ecological niche, can remind humanity of what it has lost and, to a degree, restore it in the imagination.
“Even this most basic function of art bears great gifts to man, if he will only accept them; for by recording the truths of sky, mountain, and sea, painting can bring an awareness of nature into the dark confines of an industrial age”.
Ruskin, who believes that much human strength and health of spirit comes from nature, tells his Victorian readers:
“You have cut yourselves off voluntarily, presumptuously, insolently, from the whole teaching of your Maker in His universe” (16.289)”.
For Ruskin, art is defined in the medieval sense of making things and is an effort to furnish the human ecological niche. In particular, art carries social messages as part of an evolved system of social cohesion and a reminder that in everything we do we are part of Nature. In Ruskin’s day the driver of this big history of mankind was God. Now science has pointed us towards natural selection. Nevertheless, writing in ‘The Stones of Venice’, drawing from his response of reading Wordsworth, Ruskin is still able to make us understand the distinctive and different aims of art and science. Wordsworth had said,
“The appropriate business of poetry, (which, nevertheless, if genuine, is as permanent as pure science,) her appropriate employment, her privilege and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions.”.
4 Nature: aspect and essence

Fig 1 Aspect and essence: a cultural response to ecology

Ruskin contrasted Wordsworth’s kind of ‘poetic truth’ with the province of science (Fig 1), which was to produce an understanding of ‘impressions’, which are the ‘surface truths’ of the material world:
“Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul. Her work is to portray the appearances of things, and to deepen the natural impressions which they produce upon living creatures. The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions. Both, observe, are equally concerned with truth; the one with truth of aspect, the other with truth of essence. Art does not represent things falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind. Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man: and it requires of everything . . . only this, – what that thing is to the human eyes and human heart, what it has to say to men, and what it can become to them. (11.47-48)”.
“Expansive, beautiful, and blue!” This was John Ruskin’s first impression of the natural beauty of England’s Lake District in the 1830 poem “Iteriad: or, Three Weeks Among the Lakes”. It was from this observation that he began a long association with the region. In his book ‘Ruskin and the English Lakes (1901)’, Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley explored Ruskin’s connection with the English lakes, from his first visit in 1874 to his burial in the Lake District village of Coniston twenty five years later. A friend of Ruskin, Rawnsley was inspired by his teachings on the preservation of open spaces and conservation of historic properties to co-found Britain’s National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. The criteria for seeking out and protecting such places can be traced to Ruskin’s love of the materiality of nature expressed in terms of the higher spiritual truths it might offer

Art, which deals in the truths of experience, adds to the wealth of human knowledge by permitting us to see and feel with the faculties of another greater than ourselves. For this reason, truly imaginative paintings have an “infinite advantage” (5.186) over our actual presence at the scene they depict since they provide a “penetrative sight” and “kindly guidance” (5.187) that, like an imaginative lens, increases our powers of beholding nature and man.
This view of painting as a moral window on nature has come down to modern times. For instance it prompted John F Kennedy to write of the need to bring ecological awareness into political economy:
“To protect nature is to follow a moral path, but ultimately we do it not for the sake of trees and animals, but because our environment is the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to provide our children the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as those our parents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting the air, water, wildlife, and natural treasures that connect us to our national character. Therein lie the values that define our community and make us proud to be Americans”.
When writing this way Kennedy, like many Americans of his generation was a believer in Ruskin’s aesthetic theory, which had been adopted by American educationalists who read his works in the 1870s. They promoted his views with the moral message as being especially suited to becoming part of general education. Passages from Ruskin on “Distribution, “from ‘The Political Economy of Art’, recommended the beautification of schools and the use of pictures in the education of boys, because:
“the eye is a nobler organ than the ear; and … through the eye we must, in reality, obtain, or put into form, nearly all the useful information we are to have in this world.”
These writings were frequently quoted by American advocates of picture study. ‘Sesame and Lilies’, a pair of lectures on male and female education delivered in 1864, was especially popular in the United States. American editions were published as early as 1865 and continued to be reissued frequently through the first half of the twentieth century up to 1944. This was coupled with the availability of reproductions of famous paintings. In a period that romanticized the artistic genius, exposure to masterpieces was valued because they somehow provided contact with the larger spirit of creativity. In an era of social reform, picture study was expected to supplement moral and religious instruction, for example, bringing elite virtues to poor immigrant children.

5 Visual big history
Ruskin believed that to develop a personal conception of nature from studying a picture the viewer must adopt the most childlike suspension of disbelief: the canvas should always seem a real place to be entered, the universe should always be a system “out there”, with the picture being part of a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere This is the ‘perpetual newness of infinity’ that comes from picture study. The viewer is encouraged to take an element and make a life of it. As an artefact of human social evolution a picture is therefore part of big history. Bill Gates referring to the impact on his educational experience of thinking big history described it in the following way.
‘I wish everyone could take this course. Big history literally tells the story of the universe, from the very beginning to the complex societies we have today; it shows how everything is connected to everything else [and] weaves together insights and evidence from so many disciplines into a single, understandable story – insights from astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, history, economics, and more.”
Ruskin in ‘Modern Painters’ places himself in a big history of cultural ecology within a timeline that began with God. He describes the forces involved by relating his visual experience of a dark, still July evening in the Alps, lying beside a fountain midway between Chamouni and Les Tines.

Suddenly, there came in the direction of Dome du Gouter a crash — of prolonged thunder; and when I looked up, I saw the cloud cloven, as it were by the avalanche itself, whose white stream came bounding down the eastern slope of the mountain, like slow lightning. The vapour parted before its fall, pierced by the whirlwind of its motion; the gap widened, the dark shade melted away on either side; and, like a risen spirit casting off its garments of corruption, and flushed with eternity of life, the Aiguilles of the south broke through the black foam of the storm clouds. One by one, pyramid above pyramid, the mighty range of its companions shot off their shrouds, and took to themselves their glory — all fire — no shade — no dimness. Spire of ice — dome of snow — wedge of rock — all fire in the light of the sunset, sank into the hollows of the crags — and pierced through the prisms of the glaciers, and dwelt within them — as it does in clouds. The ponderous storm writhed and moaned beneath them, the forests wailed and waved in the evening wind, the steep river flashed and leaped along the valley; but the mighty pyramids stood calmly — in the very heart of the high heaven — a celestial city with walls of amethyst and gates of gold– filled with the light and clothed with the Peace of God. And then I learned — what till then I had not known — the real meaning of the word Beautiful. With all that I had ever seen before — there had come mingled the associations of humanity — the exertion of human power- — the action of human mind. The image of self had not been effaced in that of God . . . it was then that I understood that all which is the type of God’s attributes . . . can turn the human soul from gazing upon itself . . . and fix the spirit . . . on the types of that which is to be its food for eternity; — this and this only is in the pure and right sense of the word BEAUTIFUL .

Sixteen years before the publication of the Origin of Species, when Darwin was debating when he should publish his ideas on natural selection, Ruskin had set out to prove that ‘the truth of nature is a part of the truth of God’ (3.141), with the corollary that ‘the truths of nature are one eternal change – one infinite variety’ (3.145) – evidence that she is ‘constantly doing something beautiful for us’ (3A5FY. The broad religious argument had been elaborated with a variety of emphases over the centuries. Ruskin had been exposed intensively as a child to this theological thinking and could not adopt Darwinism. It is therefore interesting to compare his description of God’s gift to man of Earth’s artistic beauty, which glues humanity to eternal life, with Darwin’s famous conclusion to The Origin of Species. Using the example of a ‘tangled bank’, Darwin envisages the ‘Creator’s’ role as leaving Nature to its own devises where at any time the outcome is the result of a process of competition between a variety of living things.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
These early attempts to find a holistic framework for promoting artistic endeavour as the moral link between culture and ecology actually began with Wordsworth. In his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798), he described a three stage development model of landscape responsiveness derived from his own life experience. The first stage was the child’s delight in nature as a big playground with trees to climb and fields to race around in. The second stage, in his early 20s, was the experience of nature’s colours, forms and sounds as a source of intense sensuous and aesthetic pleasure, with a sharpened sense of nature as a refuge from cities. The third stage was the loss of that sensuous delight in the natural world, which became replaced with a recognition of nature’s power to stimulate more complex moral and spiritual comfort and insight. For Aldo Leopold, reaching the third stage allowed him to recognise that a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of habitats and species to being a plain member and citizen of a global ecosystem, showing respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the ecology of all living beings. This is the best kind of transformative curriculum for the children of urbanised Mongolians and the re-ruralised Pembrokeshire diggers.

http://www.academia.edu/446498/AesthEthics_The_Art_of_Ecological_Responsibility

“Every phase of life in the countryside contributes to the existence of cities. What the shepherd, the woodman, and the miner know, becomes transformed and ‘etherealized’ through the city into durable elements in the human heritage: the textiles and butter of one, the moats and dams and wooden pipes and lathes of another, the metals and jewels of the third, are finally converted into instruments of urban living: underpinning the city’s economic existence, contributing art and wisdom to its daily routine. Within the city the essence of each type of soil and labor and economic goal is concentrated, thus arise greater possibilities for interchange and for new combinations not given in the isolation of their original habitats.”
(Lewis Mumford: The Culture of Cities, 1938)

Creation on Earth is in crisis. Why then do we in the West continue in activities that are manifestly harmful to our lives, other peoples and other beings of the natural world? A large part of the answer is that we do not want to loose the comforts that we few million enjoy, which are bought at the cost to the billions who we know cannot rise to our life styles. At the centre of our behaviour, as a species, is the fundamental principle of ecological territoriality that is common to all life forms. With respect to human primates, this principle puts land at the heart of survival, first as hunter-gatherers meeting family needs, now as consumers of the products from the lesser economies of far distant places to satisfy our social wants.

As a distinct body of knowledge, land and the ways that it is incorporated into culture for production defines the subject of natural economy. What follows was first written as an introduction to natural economy as a distinct body of knowledge, which in the 1980s was the first new school subject introduced into the UK examination system since the Victorian era. But it never caught on. The essay was written to raise the question posed above, and to point out that it was actually raised and answered at the very beginnings of industrialism. The answer then was that we require a value-based national curriculum, which cuts across specialized subject boundaries in order to wean ourselves off the ideology that we should live as if we could liberate ourselves from the bounds of nature.

1 Natural Economy

In his book, Land and Market, published in 1991, Charles Sellers describes the America of 1815, on the eve of a postwar boom that would “ignite a generation of conflict over the republic’s destiny.” Conflict between east and west, rural and urban, Native- and Euro-American, even farmer and wife, that resulted as “history’s most revolutionary force, the capitalist market, was wresting the American future from history’s most conservative force, the land.” Sellers describes a series of interactions between humans and the land, beginning with the subsistence economy of Native Americans. They were supplanted by Euro-American farmers who, in bringing their own village economy to the hinterlands, created an “intermediate subsistence culture.” In time that culture fell prey to the wider market in part because wheat and cotton booms made it profitable for inland farmers to grow and transport surplus crops to expanding urban markets. The outcome was that, eventually, the subsistence farming culture ran out of the cheap land it needed to maintain a reserve of production in order to sustain the family enterprises from one generation to the next. This is manifest in the former family farms of East Coast USA reverting to woodland.

We are now well into the era of rural depopulation, which was beginning to spread worldwide when Sellers was writing. By the 1980s it had became clear to some educators that there was a need for a new subject dealing with the rapid pace of global urbanization which was the shifting power of production from the land to global business conglomerates. In particular, the international division of the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate took the view that it was urgent to present a syllabus, which addressed the drivers of industrialism from which our ecological ills arise. The UCLES subject was called ‘natural economy’ because the knowledge framework we need deals with how biophysical resources of the planetary economy are organised for production. Therefore, the new subject has to be concerned with how the environmental impact of industrialism, and its sub-system of global consumerism, may be resolved for sustainable development. Natural economy complements the subject of ‘political economy’, which deals with how human societies are organised for production. It is linked to it through value systems; i.e. the notional economy, based on the flow of mental energy as ideas and beliefs about how society should be ordered for the greater good we define as living sustainably (Fig 1).

Fig 1 A mindmap of natural economy

Natural economy is a cross-curricular knowledge system which requires teaching resources that are holistic, and exemplify the cognitive leaps across subject boundaries necessary to put short-term plans for environmental improvements in the long term perspective of sustainable development. The term ‘polymath’ describes people who have the mental ability to make such connections. The other requirement is that the subject and its exemplars should be presented in a style that allows learners to navigate effortlessly through a sea of detail. An interactive computer format is essential to command a full understanding of natural economy and its applications to environmental management.

2 Big history

“Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.”
– John Ruskin

The social issues of natural economy came to a head in the United Kingdom during the 19th century. These issues centre on the proposition that land is in limited supply with respect to everyone who, from planner, to rambler, wishes to partake of it as ‘a good’. Three outstanding polymaths, whose lives and writings span the rise of the land issue and who commented forcibly upon it in England are Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, and Henry Rider Haggard. They were part of a counter movement to the economic forces of industrialism, which is illustrated by their lives and writings,

Kingsley was an urban reformer, very much concerned in his novels, lectures and tracts, with relieving the ills of the urban masses that had migrated from the countryside. He was a Darwinian and enthusiast of applied science. Ruskin was a powerful educator who, in his writing on social reform, deplored the crushing influence of industrialism on art, morality, and the natural world. He saw the ‘land question’ as a matter of rapid population growth. Haggard was a rural reformer, who wrote with personal experience about land conflicts in the colonies, and the drift of people from the land. His diary of 1898 is a vivid month-by-month account of the life of a progressive farmer involved with the social problems of village, county, and the national scene. His stories reveal the mind-match that is possible between individuals of different lands, usually through a potent atmosphere of intrigue, violence and romance.

A Victorian knowledge system cannot avoid incorporating spiritual notions, which provided the 19th century drive and justification for social change. In particular, the Victorians found themselves caught within a Biblical worldview of the origins and purposes of human existence. In this sense, religious belief was at the heart of all environmental problems, issues and controversies.

John Ruskin’s writings are what we would now describe as a cross-curricular attempt to encompass the notional, utilitarian, and academic ideas about how we should value and use natural resources. His personal synthesis of religion and natural resources exemplifies the unusual breadth and depth needed to clarify and deepen our values and actions to meet today’s challenges of living sustainably. Ruskin’s standpoint was to interpret God’s plan for humanity, as set out in the Book of Genesis, in terms of the Creator giving Earth substance and form. God willed functions into natural resources so that they may be used by His people to fulfill their divine destiny. He embedded in nature a divine blueprint for a natural economy, which organises the use of nature for production in conjunction with a local political economy. The necessary materials and energy were provided, as physical and biological resources, through planetary and solar economies. The former produces episodes of mountain building associated with Earth’s molten core; the latter governs weather and climate. These flows of materials and energy were set in motion following God’s ‘command that the waters should be gathered’, which produced the planet’s land-sea interactions. At this point Ruskin envisaged the Creator’s blueprint being realised through the denudation of mountains by rainfall. Starting from the divine ‘gathering of waters’ the human natural economy was dependent on the God-given ‘frailness of mountains’.

This notion has been described as the synchronic mode of historical thinking. History is seen as a sequence of single moments set against the eternal truths of God and Nature in a supernatural conjunction.

The first, and the most important, reason for the frailness of mountains is “that successive soils might be supplied to the plains . . . and that men might be furnished with a material for their works of architecture and sculpture, at once soft enough to be subdued, and hard enough to be preserved; the second, that some sense of danger might always be connected with the most precipitous forms, and thus increase their sublimity; and the third, that a subject of perpetual interest might be opened to the human mind in observing the changes of form brought about by time on these monuments of creation”.

This quotation may be taken as an example of Ruskin’s philosophy that environmental features produce ideas, which are then confirmed by studying the features themselves. Ruskin’s holistic knowledge system relates human spiritual values of the Bible to our attitudes to, and use of, the land (Fig 2). For example, the Old Testament has several references concerned with the fruitfulness and flourishing of the planetary economy linked with ‘the finest produce of the ancient mountains and the abundance of the everlasting hills’.

Fig 2a Ruskin’s big history

“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.” (Genesis 1:9-10)

Fig 2b Natural economy according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Other Victorian thinkers tended to slot into this framework. Kingsley and Haggard differed from Ruskin by giving more value to the processes and fruits of science, particularly as applied to industrialism. Charles Kingsley for example, was one of the first to articulate the science of ecology. He also probed into freshwater and marine biology, and was deeply involved with public health issues concerning the supply of clean water to disease-ridden towns and cities. Rider Haggard was personally involved with the more efficient use of land for agricultural production and forestry, subjects on which Ruskin had little to say. All three made practical proposals for social change to improve the lot of artisans and their families.

However, as the 19th century progressed, Ruskin’s synchronic mode of history was giving way to the diachronic mode, in which history simply an irreversible sequence of events that occur one after another. His faith gave him a fixed system of God-given meanings that were unaffected by time. During his lifetime the supernatural eternal truths of Christianity began to disappear because the Church began to be seen more to become what today, most people would regard as a compassionate NGO. Ruskin’s big history based on divine creation has now been replaced by big history that begins with the ‘Big Bang’, which started the biophysical evolution of the universe.

3 Lives and lands

Ruskin and Kingsley were born in the same year, 1819, on the threshold of Victoria’s accession. Ruskin lived a quarter of a century longer than Kingsley, but had completed his major works by the time Kingsley died. In this perspective both writers were dealing with the problems issues and challenges brought about by unprecedented economic, social and scientific changes. Rider Haggard was born a few years after the great 1851 showcase of British industrial achievement displayed in the Crystal Palace, and his life followed this same historical trajectory. But, by 1860s, there were many signs that while sure of the past, people were becoming increasingly less optimistic about the future. Haggard arrived in Cape Town six months after Kingsley’s death, uncertain of his duties, but determined to make success of his opportunity to participate in the colonial administration of Natal province. As it turned out, although only there a few years, he was witness to what turned out to be the beginning of a loss of confidence in the Empire builders, which in South Africa led to the Boer War of 1899. If we place Haggard in the context of a continuity of generations from his boyhood in country society at the peak of the English squirearchy, his mother’s writings about the uncertainties of belief brought about by Darwinism, and the diaries of his daughter, who recorded the impact of the second world war on village life, we have a remarkable view of a century of social change.

Kingsley’s Eversley

” I firmly believe, in the magnetic effect of the place where one has been bred; and have continually the true ‘heimweh ‘ home-sickness of the Swiss and Highlanders. The thought of the West Country will make me burst into tears at any moment. Wherever I am it always hangs before my imagination as home, and I feel myself a stranger and a sojourner in a foreign land the moment I get east of Taunton Dean, on the Mendips. It may be fancy, but it is most real, and practical, as many fancies are.”

When he wrote this, Charles Kingsley was thinking about Devonshire, a notional attachment, which began in a real sense at Holne vicarage under the brow of Dartmoor, where he was born on 12th June 1819. This deep feeling for the hills, rivers and rocky coastline of the West Country was reinforced from1830, when his father was presented with the rectory of Clovelly. In between, and up to the age of 12, thirsty for knowledge, he was further magnetised by the large skies and luxuriant wildlife of fenland, to the east of Barnack, where his father held the living for six years. However, without doubt, Kingsley’s ‘homeland’ was the village of Eversley and its surrounding Surrey heaths. Here he began married life, little thinking that, with a short interval, it would be his home for thirty-three years. Here he applied his mind to heathland ecology, freshwater biology, and his life-long sport of stream fishing. He died at Eversley on 23rd January 1875.

His relatively brief contact with the fens came out later in descriptions of what was in his boyhood something of a watery wilderness, although fast disappearing through the final stages of agricultural improvement. These youthful contacts with dykes and bogs were eventually synthesed with a strong sense of English history to author ‘Hereward the Wake’. Clovelly and its surrounding heritage of Elizabethan seafaring produced ‘Westward Ho!’, and evoked an abiding interest in marine biology. However, it was his day to day contacts with the lanes, fields and commons of Eversley that set him thinking about the geological forces that mould the nooks and crannys of a neighbourhood, and determine the development of its small-scale, and sometimes special, pattern of plants and animals.

As Kingsley’s own educational model of a river system, ‘Water Babies’ incorporates all these points of view. Within a compressed industrial landscape the story expresses a biological and moral quest, which is literally carried along in the flow of a river system, from untainted uplands, supplying water power to northern mills, through an urbanised estuary, into a vast imaginary undersea world, as yet unaffected by industrial development.

Haggard’s Ditchingham

Rider Haggard had an even longer attachment to a particular part of the English countryside than either Ruskin or Kingsley. Part of his wife’s legacy was a substantial country house in the village of Ditchingham. This community is situated on the northern bank of the River Waveney, which here forms the boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. Ditchingham House was his home from 1887 until his death in 1925. His ashes were interred in the village church, and we can do no better than refer to the symbolism of his stained glass memorial, dedicated by his youngest daughter Lilias, as window on view of ‘big history’ (Fig. 3)

Fig 3 Part of Rider Haggard’s ‘big history’ memorial window

The subject of the centre light is the crowned and risen Christ bearing in His hand the world showing eastern hemisphere. On the pallium over his robe are seen the Serpent round the Cross, signifying the Crucifixion, the Keys of Life and Death, Adam and Eve denoting Original Sin and the need of Redemption and the Pelican symbol of Love and Sacrifice.

On the left is St Michael, Angel of the Resurrection holding the Scales of Justice and a Flaming Sward. On the right is St Raphael, Angel of all Travellers bearing his Staff and girded for a Journey.

Below in the centre is a view of Bungay from the Vineyard Hills. On the left, the Pyramids and the River Nile, surrounded by the Lotus Flower emblem of Egypt. On the right, Hilldrop, Sir Rider’s farm in South Africa. These views he loved and they illustrate three sides of his life, Rural, Creative and Imperial.

Above in the upper lights are seen the Chalice, his Crests and Mottoes, and the Flame of Inspiration. In the borders the Open Book, the Crossed Pick and Shovel and various Egyptian symbols, also Oak for strength, Laurel for fame and Bay for victory.

Ditchingham and its neighbouring villages are metaphors for the fundamental aspect of the land question, which starts and finishes by way of arbitration of ‘how much belongs to whom’. Haggard literally lived on a boundary commemorating the disputed territory of two Saxon clans; the ‘North’ and ‘South’ folk claiming descent from the East Anglian ‘kings’ who’s Continental ancestors sailed up the shallow estuaries. Small-scale family feuds are written in the tortuous parish boundaries, which snake off in all directions around the parish church.

From his agrarian base, amidst the flinty fields at edge of the ice-eroded East Anglian clay plateau, Haggard takes us via a ‘good read’ on real and imaginative excursions into the many facets of human nature. Through his factual reports, and the characters of his fiction, we may interact with the lives of farm workers, see the machinations of colonial administrators laid bare, sympathise with the victims of British imperialism, and enter alternative civilisations powered by supernatural forces. In this context, his life is an extraordinary effort to come to grips with the transiency of civilisations, and the individual lives that produce its cultures. Like Ruskin, but in his own way, he was using the gift of a powerful imagination to explore the ordering of human nature for a just and prosperous society, against the background of an apparently indifferent Universe. He proposed practical social reforms to cope with the former, which required political will to enforce. Till the end he thought the power of imagination might reveal invisible strands of immortality connecting the material cosmos with an infinite spiritual structure. Individuals, like himself, with this exceptional power would be the gatekeepers who could, for good or evil, draw aside ‘the curtain of the unseen’.

On migration
“A still greater matter is the desertion of the land by the labourer. To my mind, under present conditions which make any considerable rise in wages impossible, that problem can only be solved by giving to the peasant, through State aid or otherwise, the opportunity of transforming himself into a small landowner, should he desire to do so, and thus interesting him permanently in the soil as one of its proprietors. But to own acres is useless unless their produce can be disposed of at a living profit, which nowadays, in many instances, at any rate in our Eastern counties, is often difficult, if not impossible. Will steps ever be taken sufficient to bring the people back upon the land; and to mitigate the severity of the economic and other circumstances which afflict country dwellers in Great Britain to such a reasonable extent that those who are fit and industrious can once more be enabled to live in comfort from its fruits P In this question with its answer lies the secret, and, as I think, the possible solution of most of our agricultural troubles. But to me that answer is a thrice-sealed book. I cannot look into the future or prophesy its developments. Who lives will see; these things must go as they are fated-here I bid them farewell”.
31 Dec 1898

On emigration
“What I do hold a brief for, what I do venture to preach to almost every class, and especially the gentle-bred, is emigration. Why should people continue to be cooped up in this narrow country, living generally upon insufficient means, when yonder their feet might be set in so large a room? Why do they not journey to where families can be brought into the world without the terror that if this happens they will starve or drag their parents down to the dirt; to where the individual may assert himself and find room to develop his own character, instead of being crushed in the mould of custom till, outwardly at any rate, he is as like his fellows as one brick is like to the others in a wall?

Here, too, unless he be endowed by nature with great ability, abnormal powers of work, and an iron constitution, or, failing these, with pre-eminent advantages of birth or wealth, the human item has about as much chance of rising as the brick at the bottom has of climbing to the top of the wall, for the weight of the thousands above keep him down, and the conventions of a crowded and ancient country tie his hands and fetter his thought. But in those new homes across the seas it is different, for there he can draw nearer to nature, and, though the advantages of civilisation remain unforfeited, to the happier conditions of the simple uncomplicated man. There, if he be of gentle birth, his sons may go to work among the cattle without losing caste, instead of being called upon to begin where their father left off, or pay the price in social damage; there his daughters will marry and help to build upon great empire of the future, instead of dying single in a land where women are too many and marriage is becoming more and more a luxury for the rich. Decidedly emigration, not to our over peopled towns, but to the Antipodes, has its advantages, and if I were young again, I would practice what I preach”. Nov 18 1898

On exclusion
“Of late years there has been a great outcry about the closing of some of the Norfolk Broads to the public, and the claim advanced by their owners to exclusive sporting rights upon them. Doubtless in some cases it has seemed a hard thing that people should be prevented from doing what they have done for years without active interference on the part of the proprietor. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that it is only recently the rush of tourists to the Norfolk Broads has begun. It is one thing to allow a few local fishermen or gunners to catch pike or bag an occasional wild fowl, and quite another to have hundreds of people whipping the waters or shooting at every living thing, not excluding the tame ducks and swans. For my part I am glad that the owners have succeeded in many instances, though at the cost of some odium, in keeping the Broads quiet, and especially the smaller ones like Ben acre, because if they had failed in this most of the rare birds would be driven away from Norfolk, where they will now remain to be a joy to all lovers of Nature and wild things.

These remarks, I admit, however, should scarcely lie in my mouth when speaking of Ben acre, since on our return towards the beach, after rambling round the foot of the mere, we found ourselves confronted with sundry placards breathing vengeance upon trespassers, warnings, it would seem, which we had contemptuously ignored. Should these lines ever come under the notice of the tenant of that beautiful place, I trust that he will accept my apologies, and for this once ‘ let me off with a caution”. May 31st 1898

Ruskin’s Coniston

John Ruskin lived for 23 years in a country house, with its stunning mountain views to the West over Concision Lake, from 1877 to his death in 1900. In a lecture to the people of Kendal in 1877 he described his attachment to the Lake District as follows: –

“I knew mountains long before I knew pictures; and these mountains of yours, before any other mountains. From this town of Kendal, I went as a child, to the first joyful excursions among the Cumberland lakes, which formed my love of landscape and of painting: and now being an old man (he was 58 years old), I find myself more and more glad to return.”

His other ‘home’ was the Swiss Alps, and his purchase of the lakeside estate of Brentwood in the Lake District was a logical decision about the question of where to spend the rest of his life, Switzerland or Cambria? Both lands focused his mind on two problems; the geological forces that produce cataclysmic upheavals in Earth’s surface, and the graphic depiction of mountains as landscape. He saw these fundamental questions, one of science, and the other of art, as two sides of the same coin. One aspect of his lateral thinking was to connect them through the budding science of meteorology, which had begun to classify weather patterns in using the shapes and distribution of clouds. In this context, Ruskin was fascinated by the beauty of ever-changing mountain skies which has a complex physical basis in the vertical temperature gradients and the relative instability of air flows.

Ruskin’s Venice

Ruskin made eleven trips to Venice during his lifetime. The first was made with his parents in 1835. In the winter of 1840-1, also with his parents, another tour included Genoa, Rome and Naples, as well as Venice, which he hailed as ‘a Paradise of Cities’. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Venice to Ruskin’s life, emotionally as well as intellectually. Initially seduced by its romantic beauty, as all English visitors are, he then chose to undertake a far deeper study of its art and architecture than anyone had previously attempted. Ruskin’s affair with Venice was also to give a social commentary that was to affect British life after his death in the guise of national insurance, national health, universal free education, the concept of ‘big history’ and even the National Trust.

6 Conclusion

Why did not these anti-industrialism polemics feed into the British education system? The answer also deals with the failure of natural economy in the 1980s to replace geography and biology. Although at that time the UK education system was in the throes of the reform, which produced the national curriculum, it was part and parcel of the Thatcherite ideology. The values, which drove the political economy, were, as now, the objective of year on year increasing economic growth. Values for living sustainably have to be adopted before the education system will change to support the new ideology. We can contrast this with the teaching of the Native Americans who were living with no concept of economic growth and ecological principles, which will eventually catch up with the West in crisis.

The idea that pieces of non-human nature can be owned is so obvious within industrial cultures that it is hard to call into question, yet it has not been so apparent to many other peoples. The Native Americans of New England, for example, had quite different conceptions of property than those of the colonists coming from England. The Native Americans recognized the right to use a place at a specific time. What was “owned” was only the crops grown or the berries picked. Thus, “different groups of people could have different claims on the same tract of land depending on how they used it. Such rights of use did not allow for the sale of property. These differences remain to this day As Buffalo Tiger, a Miccosukee Seminole Indian stated:

“We Indian people are not supposed to say, ‘This land is mine! We only use it. It is the white man who buys land and puts a fence around it Indians are not supposed to do that, because the land belongs to all Indians, it belongs to God, as you call it The land is a part of our body, and we are a part of the land. We do not want to ‘improve’ our land; we just wish to keep it as it is. It’s hard for us to come to terms with the white man because our philosophy is so different. We think the land is there for everyone to use, the way our hand is there, a part of our own body”

Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee, comments similarly
“We cannot separate our place on earth from our lives on the earth nor from our vision nor our meaning as a people We are taught from childhood that the animals and even the trees and plants that we share a place with are our brothers and sisters So when we speak of land, we are not speaking of property, territory, or even a piece of ground upon which our houses sit and our crops are grown We are speaking of something truly sacred.

Even if nonhuman nature is regarded as the sort of thing, which can be owned, how can it be owned privately? How can one person take claim to land or other parts of nature? By what right does one person exclude others from parts of the earth? If it was not created by those who claim to own it, how can such a claim be legitimate? Although private ownership of the earth is now a common dogma, it was not at the outset of the capitalistic regime. Then the conception of nature as privately owned required justification”.

Until institutions change to mirror better the economy of the biosphere and interconnected human values, the value-based national/international curriculum will never become a reality. Schools as institutions only mirror and complement the world within which they operate. Therefore, natural economy in the context of big history and similar educational innovations will become institutionalised only when culture is not compartmented into specialities and disciplines.

1969 Welsh Environment Journal

The late 1960s marked the general emergence of environmental awareness.  As head of the department of zoology in Cardiff  I encouraged a small group of postgraduates to publish the Welsh Environment Journal.  WEJ was a mixture of reviews, interviews and reportage, which highlighted Welsh examples of global environmental issues.  It circulated throughout Wales and several copies turned up in the parliamentary library at Westminster, where they prompted a flow of congratulations from MPs who found the contents informed political debate. 

1971  Natural economy

WEJ opened up student discussions about the limitations of narrow subject teaching in a world that was increasingly dominated by cross-subject environmental problems with political implications.   During one of my field courses on the Welsh nature reserve of Skomer Island this grass roots student interest in curriculum reform emerged as a proposal for a new multi subject degree.   Surprisingly, the idea was enthusiastically taken up by academic staff in all the pure and applied science faculties of the University.  It became the philosophical thread for an honours course in ‘Environmental Studies’.  This course integrated the inputs from eleven departments, from archaeology, through metallurgy, to zoology.  It ran successfully, attracting some of the most able students until the university merged with a neighbouring institution in the late 1980s, when the new policy was to abolish all cross-discipline teaching.

Education has always been the driver of political change to remove  environmental barriers to human betterment.  Towards the end of the 1980s, the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate evaluated the Cardiff environmental studies course as the basis for a new subject about world development in their international GCSE.  This evaluation had been prompted by the Duke of Edinburgh, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who in 1986 had directed UCLES to come up with a cross-curricular subject as a UK contribution to world development education.   I met with the UCLES team at a headteacher’s conference in Cardiff and joined a group of Cambridge advisors and teachers which eventually turned the joint honours ‘environmental studies degree syllabus  into the GSCE school subject ‘natural economy’. Natural economy was launched in 1991 as a part of the Cambridge University International GCSE examination system.  Although this period coincided with the creation of a root and branch educational reform to create a UK national school curriculum, there was no widespread demand for change with respect to the limitations of ‘traditional subjects’.  However, natural economy was taken up by UK schools within the independent sector and by European schools taking the International Baccalaureate.  Namibia and Nepal adopted it under guidance from UCCLES as a subject to replace geography and biology at A level; using practical examples of these country’s cross subject issues of economic development. The design was consciously interdisciplinary drawing on, for example, Biology, Economics, Geography and Anthropology and focusing on real-life situations, contexts and behaviours. The making of mindmaps to encourage systems thinking was a key element of the original syllabus.  The examination, now called .environmental management’, attracts thousands of candidates mostly from ‘international schools’.

Late 1980s Distance learning

In an effort to reach a wider range of students I worked with the European Community’s Schools Olympus Satellite Education Programme from Gwynedd’s education centre at Llangefni on the Isle of Angelsey.  The nearby Cwm Idwal mountain national nature reserve was used as a practical model for demonstrating conservation management as the practical element of natural economy beamed across Europe.

A partnership was formed between the University of Wales, the UK Government’s Overseas Development Administration and the World Wide Fund for Nature to produce a cultural ecology model of Nepal with the help of a sponsorship from British Petroleum.

An interoperable CD version of natural economy for computer-assisted learning was created in the Department of Zoology at Cardiff with a grant from DG11 of the EC.  This work was transferred to the Natural Economy Research Unit (NERU), which was set up in the National Museum of Wales in the late 1980s. 

1993 SCAN

SCAN (Schools and Communities Agenda 21 Network) was created in St Clears Teachers Resource Centre for West Wales with funds from the Countryside Council for Wales, Dyfed County Council and Texaco Pembroke Oil Refinery. The stimulus was the ‘Young People’s Agenda 21. that emerged from the Rio Environment Summit in 1992.   SCAN was designed by a group of Pembrokeshire teachers to act as an online focus for community action in the context of curriculum targets being integrated with neighbourhood environmental management objectives for the Local Agenda 21.  The assumption was that schools working with the communities they serve could play a key role in the introduction of sustainable development principles into everyday living. SCAN’s first community action plan was produced by Johnston Primary School, and activated the local authority to make significant environmental improvements in the village. Links were made with the European Schools Network based in Portugal for pupils to compare their concerns about the local environment and spread ideas about how they could be tackled locally by school and community working together.  

Through initial pump priming by Countryside Council for Wales, SCAN thrives to this day as part of the National Museum’s education service in Cardiff.  However, it has turned out that the school/community interface is not an easy one for either party to penetrate and sustain without central support that links the two policy areas of education and sustainability. Also, within the museum, SCAN has come to focus on biodiversity rather than the broad interdisciplinary context required for teachers to interact with managing broader neighbourhood behaviour change needed for living sustainably.   Nevertheless, SCAN is a good working example of how to organise and sustain an on-line bilingual interactive distance-learning network with national coverage.  As far as I know, there is nothing like it elsewhere in Europe.

1994 Going Green Directorate (GGD)

The GGD grew from a 1994 gathering of schoolteachers and academics in West Wales. The Countryside Council for Wales, Dyfed County Council, and the local Texaco oil refinery sponsored the meeting. This partnership was based in the St Clears Teacher’s Resource Centre and Milford Haven High School and its junior feeder schools. From here, a successful award- winning system of neighbourhood environmental appraisals was established, and networked from school to school.

The objective of the GGD was to promote practical conservation management through environmental appraisal and the long-term management of neighbourhood historical assets, green spaces and community services in order to promulgate a sense of place, improve quality of life and enhance biodiversity.  This introduced the need to collaborate with local government and eventually led to the integration of knowledge about the natural economy with the local political economy.

1995 Community offices

Through a series of school-based environmental appraisals it soon became clear that different communities faced different environmental issues but all had a need for a community office as a school community interface to coordinate and manage local projects for sustainability.  To this end, local business sponsorships were obtained to establish two prototype community offices in the IT departments of Crickhowell High School and Pembroke High School to test the following four on-line elements. 

• Interdisciplinary information about world development with tools for building personal bodies of knowledge linking culture and ecology; 
• Citizenship toolkits for making and operating long-term plans for sustainability that deal with neighbourhood environmental issues and family life; 
• Open forums associated with a dedicated web viewer for networking ideas and achievements between ‘islands of sustainability’; 
• A central Webmaster to hold the network together on a day-to-day basis. 

These were the days of pioneering the embryonic Internet with rural ‘cyber cafés’ and the SCAN team got involved in a series of local initiatives in Wales and England to introduce computers and software into communities to help develop local action plans..  Now, with the availability of cheap computer memory and broadband all of these features are now commonplace components of free online networks throughout the world, which are gathering momentum for social networking.

1998 Community conservation management

The fundamental educational philosophy behind SCAN in the 1990s was to promote a practical move towards a more locally based and neighbourhood-focused education.  Yet it is only now being accepted that this is the only practical route to move people towards sustainable behaviours.  

Interdisciplinary knowledge and know-how about making and operating community action plans for sustainable living are bound together with locality.  Community cannot be distinguished from locality because it is locality, in terms of such factors as history, demography and income, that sets the agenda for how the community functions.  This idea was actually backed by the EC LIFE Environment programme (a partnership between SCAN, the UK Conservation Management System Consortium (CMSC), and the University of Ulster) in the late 1990s.

The aim was to produce and test a conservation management system for industries and their community neighbourhoods, using cultural ecology (a development of natural economy with political economy) as the holistic framework.   The aim was to provide a web enrichment resource for education/training in conservation management in schools and communities.  The work was organised on the premise that traditional subject-based teaching is an impediment to learning about how to function as an involved citizen in a world dominated by cross-subject politicised issues of environment and economic development.    Within this broad cross-curricular framework, students are able to develop an understanding of: (1) the earth’s resources, (2) the problems caused by careless use of these resources, (3) the conflicting opinions on this topic, and (4) how to get updated information so that people can be wise users and stewards of  Earth.  Pilot work in these directions was funded in Cardiff schools by the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation.

At this point it is worth defining the above interdisciplinary area of citizen participation in neighbourhood action, which is wider than natural economy or environmental management. There are two meanings of natural when referring to economy:

·           Being in a state regarded as primitive, uncivilized, or unregenerate.

·           Of, relating to, or concerning nature, e.g. a natural environment.

In the first instance, ‘a natural economy’ defines a money-free barter system by which a producer exchanges his goods and services for others which he cannot produce.

In the second instance ‘the natural economy’ refers to the managed processes by which various kinds of natural assets are acquired as raw materials to their final preparation for consumption or marketing. 

The working definition of ‘natural economy’ for the Cambridge syllabus was ‘the organisation of nature for production.’ 

Where does politics fit in?  From the time of the Brandt 1980 report it has been clear that all nations have to cooperate more urgently in international management of the atmosphere and other global commons and in the prevention of irreversible ecological damage.  This political imperative was embedded in the environmentalism surrounding the Rio Earth Summit and extends from government to families, individuals and communities which all have a role to play.  This can only happen through participatory governance within the local political economy. Political economy deals with the laws governing the production and distribution of goods and services, in other words the organisation of people for production.  It was John Ruskin who brought political economy into line with modernism by insisting that production and consumption patterns should be re-drawn in a way that would create a just and fair society.  His vision was of a society that allowed individuals to achieve a higher plane of being or wholeness (a “felicitous fulfilment of function”).  Most importantly, he sought to prove that the political economists employed faulty reasoning and the implausible concept of economic man to prevent the emergence of this just society and the associated ‘whole’ or perfected man.  Political economy and natural economy are then two sides of the coin of universal human betterment and are encompassed within two-way interactions between culture and ecology. It is in this politicised area that environmentalism entered politics under labels like conservation, or public health, preservation of nature, smoke abatement, municipal housekeeping, occupational disease, air pollution, water pollution, home ecology, animal protection or many other topic areas.

1999-2003 Community conservation management plans

The practical outcome of cultural ecology is the making of community action plans for environmental improvements by managing local ecosystem services .  The CMS Consortium, which develops and promotes the use of software databasing for planning and recording biodiversity management plans, linked up with several UK communities through their local authorities to test the suitability of the CMS software package for volunteers carrying out environmental improvements.  The most successful effort came from the small Suffolk village of Parham, which adopted a community version of SCAN to carry a village environmental appraisal and used the CMS to make a biodiversity action plan to manage hedgerows, ponds and three village greens.  Suggestions for simplifying the CMS professional package for volunteers resulted in a community management system based on a PC network of electronic diaries.

2004-08 COSMOS

Becoming a citizen in today’s world focuses learning on cultures of sustainability with multi-subject organised syllabuses.  This defines the COSMOS project.

Current work in COSMOS involves creating and testing the elements of a global distance concept mapping for communities in the form of a prototype ‘citizen’s environmental network’.  The latter was envisaged almost two decades ago in the UK Strategy for Sustainable Development, where it was referred to as a community tool for the Biodiversity Strategy.  The aim was to spread ideas and achievements about operating plans for environmental improvements as an exercise in interactive citizenship.  It was to be pump-primed by Government and then run by community volunteers, but nothing has happened in the interim to realise this community-led objective.  COSMOS provides on-line resources to promote the creation of local special areas of sustainability and make the long-term action plans necessary for the community to move towards sustainable development.  These plans should give priority to strengthening local groups and institutions using local resources to meet local needs.

The software for community use should be of an international standard and available free or at low cost, with good inbuilt Help and networked via a dedicated IT/GIS web viewer.   COSMOS uses a combination of electronic diaries with Google Docs as a user-friendly online software template for organising a community office (Fig 1).  Google Docs consists of a Web-based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application offered free by Google.  It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users.   Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can be created within the application itself, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. They can also be saved to the user’s computer in a variety of formats. By default, they are saved to the Google servers. Open documents are automatically saved to prevent data loss, and a full revision history is automatically kept. Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.  Together with Google site maker, a community can go on line with a home PC at no cost.  Google forums can also be integrated into the system

2009-12  Participatory governance

Currently, discussions are underway in Wales with community development officers, education advisors and conservation organisations to assemble COSMOS as an e-learning adjunct to the SCAN model to provide a knowledge framework within the Welsh Assembly Government’s sustainable development strategy and associated social drivers for people to locate themselves sustainably in place and time.  Living sustainably is a global concept.  In this respect it should have an international audience to learn about how others of different faiths and cultures are tackling the issue reciprocally in the interests of communal and world peace through understanding. 

One format for setting up such an international e-learning network dealing with the topic of ‘living sustainably’ is a wiki.

• A wiki is a website managed centrally that allows users to easily add and edit content within an HTML browser, which invites all users to edit any page or to create new pages within the wiki Web site, using only a basic Web browser.

• A wiki therefore promotes meaningful topic associations between different pages by making page links almost intuitively easy and showing whether an intended target page exists or not.

• A wiki is not a carefully crafted site for casual visitors. Instead, it seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site as a knowledge system.

·         A wiki enables communities to write documents collaboratively as collections of pages referred to as a “wiki pages”.  The entire collection of pages, which are usually well interconnected by hyperlinks, is “the wiki”. A wiki is essentially a database for creating, browsing, and searching through  information as text, picture, video and audio files.

·         A wiki allows for non-linear, evolving, complex and networked text, argument and interaction.  Wikis are generally designed with the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them.

Thus, while wikis are very open, they provide a means to verify the validity of recent additions to the body of pages. The most prominent, on almost every wiki, is the “Recent Changes” page—a specific list numbering recent edits, or a list of edits made within a given time frame.

A suitable software system chosen to develop the wiki is ‘Wikispaces.com’

 Wikispaces is setup as a free international online collaboration tool, which allows multiple users to interact and work together. The Wikispaces idea uses a similar user interface as Wikipedia, where users can create a document, edit it, and hold discussions about the documents or any edits that have taken place. You can:

·         create a document, or space, for editing, like Wikipedia;

·         let anybody view and edit it;

·         choose to restrict the editing process only to people who you already know, by inviting only trusted users and setting up a password;

·         and or an extra fee, you can even restrict the viewing of your space.

Like Wikipedia, a history of document changes is kept, and a log is made of which user made which changes and at what time, so that collaborating authors can keep track of the work being done. While the power of the basic collaboration tools is not what you’d expect if you are used to a typical word processing suite, Wikispaces is a useful free application where multiple users across the globe can collaborate on simple documents or ideas.

The living sustainably wiki (www.livingsustainably.wikispaces.com ) is integrated with a concept  map lodged at the ICOPER European Community demonstration web site.  ICOPER promotes technology enhanced learning in higher education under the scheme for adopting higher education standards for European education. (http://www.icoper.org/)

The educational proposition of the ICOPER concept map is that a citizen’s environmental network to spread ideas and achievements should be focused on the production of action plans by communities, families and individuals.  Although ‘hair shirt’ environmentalist self denial is not going to overcome the global ecological crisis, to cooperate effectively we need to think more deeply about how to embrace value systems based on humanitarian beliefs. This is a reminder that in its derivation the word ‘ethics’ means not just a set of beliefs or values, but a way of life and personal orientation to the world.  Therefore, community action plans need to incorporate both material and spiritual values because, for our fulfilment as human beings, we need not just economic but moral and spiritual goals for the long term care of our planet.  Plans for living sustainably have to find space for poetic truths about the environment alongside those of science.  In other words, we have to plan how we can stop trying to meet non-material needs by material means and work to alternative visions of modernisation that permit richer choices about the paths to collective wellbeing.

The aim of community action plans is to promote behaviour change in citizenry, defined as environmental re-socialisation, to take up the biophysical world in a sustainable way.  These plans are actually part of a community action cycle (Fig 1), where two-way feedback and support for meeting the objectives of the plans comes to and from local political strategies and the help given by non-governmental organisations, which provide know-how and fund the process of change.  Within this perspective of participatory governance a community action cycle can be seen as a democratic mechanism to devolve political powers and resources to neighbourhood bodies.

Fig 1 Diagram of a community action cycle

2013 Modular learning

With the ability of the Internet to cut across subject and demographic boundaries, online education has rapidly become not just an acceptable pedagogy, but one that is in strong demand. Recent statistics reveal that enrolment in online programs increased an estimated eight fold between 2001 and 2009. Further, while the overall growth rate in higher education approached 2% in 2008-2009, the growth rate for online education was nearly 21%.

Online education not only provides educational opportunities for those who could not or would not otherwise obtain them, either because of age, a tight classroom timetable or cost.  It has recently become a preferred modality for many “traditional” students who often schedule a blend of traditional courses with personal online courses. While approximately 12 million post-secondary students in the US currently take some or all of their classes online, it is expected that this number will jump to more than 22 million students in the next five years.

Online modules offer advantages in presenting the interactions between people and ecology in bite-sized information packages.  As an experiment I am assembling interactive modules dealing with cultural ecology in the context of participatory governance of Wales assembled on the Articulate/PowerPoint engine www.culturalecology.info/wales/player.html

 Other primary links

SCAN (http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/scan/schools/ )

CMSC (www.cmsconsortium.org/)

Natural Economy & COSMOS (www.culturalecology.info)

Making community action plans (http://www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/cwicnet/About.htm )

Every generation writes its own description of the natural world, which generally reveals as much about human society as it does about nature. Donald Worster, 1977

 1 Background

The ecosystem approach

In 1998, the United Nations’ Environment Programme, through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at its meeting in Malawi, launched the ‘ecosystem approach’ to conservation management as an international policy. The Malawi conference defined the ecosystem approach diagrammatically (Fig 1) as a cross-cutting process of nature conservation through four thematic areas linking ecosystems at a landscape level with culture.  These themes of cultural ecology were categorised as ‘marine and coastal’, ‘inland waters’, ‘agricultural’, and ‘forests’. 

The four named themes in the original presentation of the ecosystem approach have now been augmented by the theme of ‘community biological diversity’. This theme encompasses the flows of resources into local communities that come from  ecosystems and provide a range of social benefits.  The services can be categorised by the following spatial characteristics:

* they are provided and used locally or at a wider landscape level;

* when they are provided locally they can be a form of global consumption, independent of proximity to the place of provision.

Fig 1  Major themes of the ecosystem approach (UNEP/CBD Malawi 1998)

http://www.cbd.int/doc/meetings/cop/cop-04/information/cop-04-inf-09-en.pdf

The CBD recommended that the ecosystem approach should be taken because delegates decided that classical nature conservation had concentrated exclusively on rare uninhabited habitats, and failed to recognise that ecosystem functioning is vitally important for overall environmental quality in places where people live and work. 

Because of the complexity of all themed areas identified at Malawi and their human interactions, the CBD stressed that managing the ecosystem approach needs to be adaptive, allowing for the modification of plans through ‘learning by doing’.  The CBD presented this adaptive management system diagrammatically to show that monitoring the outcomes of the plans provided feedback for adjusting the underlying objectives and hypotheses of management (Fig 2).

Fig 2 Adaptive management a  tool for research and management

http://www.cbd.int/doc/meetings/cop/cop-04/information/cop-04-inf-09-en.pdf

Ecosystem services

Humanity has always depended on the services provided by the biosphere and its ecosystems. Further, the biosphere is itself the product of life on Earth. The composition of the atmosphere and soil, the cycling of elements through air and waterways, and many other ecological assets are all the result of living processes-and all are maintained and replenished by living ecosystems. Humanity is ultimately fully dependent on these flows of ecosystem services, while buffered against environmental change by culture and technology, This is why the ecosystem approach has now been adopted world wide as the central platform for the management systems of broad based nature conservation to deliver ecosystem services to sustain human well-being. 

This ecological approach to the human economy can be traced to Herman Reinheimer’s book entitled ‘Evolution by Cooperation: a Study in Bioeconomics’.  His thesis was that all organisms are ‘traders’ or ‘economic persons’ and must work to earn their way by rendering services to one another.  A community of organisms that ceases to participate in the exchange of ecological services “cannot escape impoverishment”.  In other words, the provision of services to humanity by ecosystems is actually part of a two-way obligation, which is expressed in the human economy through conservation management.

Reinheimer’s ideas about’ecosystem services’ were taken up in the late 1970s  primarily as a communication tool to explain the dependence of human society on nature.

UNEP’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA),  published in 2005, marked a major milestone in the historical development of the ecosystem services concept. It sought a strong scientific understanding for how ecosystems affect human welfare and how they can be managed.  Towards this end, the MA set out a typology of ecosystem services under four broad headings: ‘provisioning services’, ‘regulating services’, ‘cultural services’ and ‘supporting services’ (Fig 3).  Ecosystem services now incorporates firm economic dimensions and provides help to decision makers for implementing effective conservation policies to support human well-being in the context of sustainable development. 

Fig 3 Biodiversity and ecosystem services (UNEP March 2008)

http://www.unepfi.org/fileadmin/documents/bloom_or_bust_report.pdf

2 Role of local government

The theme of ‘community biological diversity’ is predominately concerned with ecosystem services that are managed at the local government/community interface.  Here the objectives are to provide, security, health and good social relations in neighbourhoods, which, world wide, are increasingly urban (Fig 3).  This leads to the hypothesis that cultural ecosystem services, as constituents of well-being, can be strongly correlated with the quality of life and particularly the well-being of those people who can become directly occupied with land use. However, up to now, the specific forms and relations between urban landscape elements such as parks, gardens, undesignated community green/blue spaces and quality of life have been elusive.

However, the exact terminology relating to ecosystems services is less important than the point that ecosystems provide valuable services for people. There is no single way of categorising ecosystem services, but they can be described in simple terms as providing:

* natural resources for basic survival, such as clean air and water;

* a contribution to good physical and mental health, for example, through access to green spaces, both urban and rural, and genetic resources for medicines;

* natural processes, such as climate regulation and crop pollination;

* support for a strong and healthy economy, through raw materials for industry and agriculture or through tourism and recreation;

* social, cultural and educational benefits, and well-being and inspiration from interaction with nature.

The MA community assessments were conducted across five continents in many different settings. The contexts ranged from remote, highly traditional people using ecosystems on a day to day basis, to recently democratized but poor semi-urban people who are forced to rely on ecosystems as safety nets during times of extreme poverty.  At the other end of the spectrum were urbanized professionals who care about ecosystems and who want to manage them better for biological and cultural values. Apart from being in different countries and on different continents, the community assessments that formed part of the MA varied widely in terms of the livelihoods of the communities involved, the nature of the people’s relationship with their natural resources, the cultural characteristics of the community and the biomes or ecosystems where people were situated.

Urban ecosystems

Regarding the importance of urban ecosystem services, more than half the world’s population now lives in cities, compared with about 14% a century ago. The net flow of ecosystem services is invariably into, rather than out of urbanised places. These flows have increased even more rapidly than has urban population growth and the average distance of these flows, for example in supplying supermarket foods, has increased substantially as well. 

Urbanisation radically modifies the ecology of landscapes where people live and work. The effects include alteration of habitat, such as loss and fragmentation of natural vegetation.  Novel habitat types are created, such as roadside verges and avenues of trees.  Resource flows are altered resulting in reduction in net primary production, increases in regional temperature and degradation of air and water quality.  Many urban ecosystems experience more frequent disruption with the alteration of species composition, species diversity, and proportions of alien wildlife, particularly plants.  Urban biodiversity, as measured by the number of different species living in cities, is often higher than that of rural regions.  This is perhaps due to agricultural practices that favour turning large tracts of rural land over to monoculture of specific food plants and animal species.  However, there is also a tendency for urban social inequity to be matched with inequity in the environmental quality of the urban landscape. 

ICLEI, an international organisation that represents local governments for sustainability, mounted the first world congress on ‘Resilient Cities’ in 2010 and included biodiversity and related ecosystem services in their talks as a cornerstone for climate change adaptation. Members of ICLEI have made a commitment to sustainable development through the Local Government Biodiversity Roadmap and  Local Action for Biodiversity (LAB).

The EU supports such further local authority commitment and awareness raising of the importance of ecosystem services.  For example, by honouring the most sustainable cities with the European Green Capital Award, and establishing the legal framework to protect biodiversity through instruments such as the Natura 2000 network under the EU Habitats and Birds Directives, air quality directives, the Water Framework Directive and the development of a soil directive.

The EU is also developing a strategy on green infrastructure to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services in the 83 % of the EU territory falling outside the Natura 2000 network, including most parts of cities. The green infrastructure concept brings considerations for biodiversity and ecosystem services to the heart of wider spatial planning. It will be key to further strengthening sustainable urban development and related EU-wide spatial policies and actions like the urban dimension in regional policy, the EU Territorial Agenda and the Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities.

The key messages from the EU are:

* In Europe, where the overwhelming majority of people live in urban areas, tackling the interlinked challenges between biodiversity and its network of towns and cities is crucial to help halting biodiversity loss.

* Urbanisation can be an opportunity or a threat for biodiversity. Seizing the opportunity demands a mix of high quality urban green areas with dense and compact built up zones.

* Quality of life in cities depends on the existence of sufficient attractive urban green areas and corridors for people and wildlife to thrive. But equally important for urban life are the ecosystem services delivered by biodiversity in green areas outside city boundaries. This will entail the cultural shaping of ecosystem services to deliver cultural assets to communities and neighbourhoods.

* Although biodiversity and ecosystem services are global common goods, local and regional authorities have the legal power to designate conservation areas and to integrate biodiversity concerns into their urban and spatial planning. Public commitment is apparent in the numerous participatory Local Agenda 21 processes aimed at building sustainable communities that identify biodiversity as a precondition for resilient cities.

* Besides protecting areas, it is essential to integrate biodiversity into spatial planning at regional and local levels, including cities. Developing the European Green Infrastructure concept presents an opportunity to do this.

However, there is relatively little research on how urban ecosystems can be designed, built, maintained, and adapted to enhance ecosystem services such as water filtration, climate moderation, flood regulation, and a variety of cultural ecosystem services, including local heritage which is a record of past ecosystem services. Furthermore, cities cast large ecological shadows because they import products and services from distant places.

http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/resources/Raudsepp-Hearne.pdf

3  Community ecosystem services plans

A community ecosystem services plan (CESP) is essential for managing the integrated delivery of ecosystem services to communities, neighbourhoods and families.  CESPs are vital to the cost-effective integrated inputs of top down resources into communities.  They are about the transfer of the ecosystem services approach into environmental management, although the type of conservation management system necessary to achieve this has not been sufficiently addressed so far. 

Fundamentally, a CESP functions as a project database for channelling governmental/ private sector resources into joint local authority community actions and records progress towards outcomes that enhance and maintain local well-being.  In this managerial sense, promoting the ideas of ecosystem services falls within the guidance to local authorities on implementing the UK’s Biodiversity Duty according to the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act of 2006.  By promoting understanding and awareness of community ecosystem services, local authorities can meet their Biodiversity Duty by helping to encourage land managers, businesses, educational services and the general public, to act in ways that benefit biodiversity conservation.

Fig 4 Local authority guidance on the ‘Biodiversity Duty’ http://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/biodiversity/documents/la-guid-english.pdf

The role of local authorities in providing external advice, education and awareness raising activities, can be split into four core areas (Fig 4).  Raising awareness of ecosystem services and biodiversity run hand in hand as a cross-cutting theme that relates to all local authority functions, and is of significant importance in facilitating the implementation of the Biodiversity Duty. The core functions have close links and are also inter-related. For instance, many activities aimed at engaging the community are also likely to raise awareness of biodiversity, and may provide opportunities to link with local schools, environmental NGOs or public advisory services.

The key messages to local authorities regarding their Biodiversity Duty are:

• Local authorities have an important role in promoting understanding and awareness of local ecosystem services, which underpins a wide range of biodiversity conservation activities.

• Having regard for the conservation of biodiversity involves incorporating messages about the place of biodiversity messages into a wide variety of interactions with land managers, businesses, other organisations and the general public.

• Methods include the operation of the education system, provision of advisory services, promotion of community engagement in ecosystem services, and raising awareness of their importance in everyday life through communications with the public.

4 Cultural shaping of ecosystem services for human well-being

Culture is the result of the two-way interaction between people and environment in search of ecological assets.  The interaction is a source of creativity, imagination and innovation. It is a driving force for new and sustainable designs for life and a spur to economic development.  In this respect, the current pattern of ecosystem services is the result of changes in the environmental knowledge, practices and beliefs that have occurred over the last 70,000 or so. Between 50 and 100,000 years ago the human population began to grow and spread, first in Africa and then across the world. With this expansion came a diversification of their languages, subsistence systems, patterns of social organization, and other cultural features. As more complex societies began to evolve about 5,000 years ago, subcultures- classes, castes, occupational groups, religious faiths -began to diversify within cultures. In the very long run, cultures actually created the environments to which its members must adapt genetically. This leads to the co-evolution of genes with culture because culture permits adaptation to a wide range of environments. 

Adaptation results in the cultural reshaping of the Earth’s surface through the processes of gathering ecological assets.  One can look at this cultural moulding of landscape from the standpoint of civilizations and nations all the way down to hamlets, neighbourhoods and individuals.  Within this geographical spectrum of ecosystems and services it is possible to discern two levels of ecosystem management.  On the one hand ecosystem services are provided that are clearly cultural assets at the neighbourhood and family level.  On the other hand, there are natural assets of the wider landscape with which the local cultural assets merge and overlap.  This distinction maps a typology of ecosystem services, which can be used to define the geographical elements of a conservation management system.  This map is essential to trace outcomes through CESPs.  In this connection, a CESP consists of scheduled actions, which are held in a database to enable a manager to track multiple projects to and from selected ecosystem services to people in the places where they live. 

The smallest focal point for delivery of ecosystem services as cultural assets is the neighbourhood, which is increasingly conceptualised spatially as the square mile that people accept as being ‘their place’. It is sometimes easy to take for granted what one values in neighbourhood and the changes happening around it can seem hard to influence. To make it easier, the ‘Talking About Your Place’ toolkit was produced by Scottish Natural Heritage to help address these issues: it can help people gain a better understanding of their local place and develop ways of using this understanding to shape and enrich local plans and decisions about the provision of ecosystem services. It may also encourage celebrations of what’s special about place and stimulate schools to work with the people and places they serve to produce community ecosystem services maps. http://www.snh.gov.uk/docs/B1117673.pdf

In Wales, guidance for people to evaluate their square mile has been produced by the Design Commission for Wales under the following themes, which are fundamental to making a community well supplied with ecosystem services where people are content to live and work.

* context and character;

* movement;

* public realm;

* built form;

* materials and details.

http://rescuemissionplanetwales.wikispaces.com/My+square+mile

Both approaches take the view that cultural heritage is an ecosystem service because it can contribute to a sense of place by making people aware of past ecological interactions of those who came before and have left evidence of their way of life in the local landscape.

5 Making management maps

An example of a provisional typology for mapping community ecosystem services is set out in Figs 5-7.   It addresses the need for citizens to become more innovative and resilient but also more engaged with the management of ecosystem services by becoming more resourceful and pro-social.  As a set of pathways to action it is essentially a system to help build bridges between the kind of society we say we want to live in, and the kind of society we do live in. Only by overcoming this ‘social aspiration gap’ will communities be better placed to achieve more environmentally sustainable lifestyles facing them.  To be cost effective and efficient means working with existing community organisations and through established communications channels  based on current ways of thinking and doing things. 

http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/369490/The-Ecology-of-Innovation.pdf

Fig 5 Cultural reshaping of ecosystem services for human well-being

Taking as a starting point the local authority’s biodiversity duty, a potential communication channel would be through the existing structure set up to address this duty, which is expressed mainly in the production of the local biodiversity action plan and reporting on the state of local habitats and species to central government. To extend this current duty to the management of ecosystem services, a suitably trained area project manager within the biodiversity section of the local authority would be responsible for promoting and resourcing action plans for community projects and reporting on their outcomes. These projects would address the need to manage people’s interactions with ecosystem services in the community’s one square mile and the wider landscape (Figs 6 and 7).

The CESP management system could help bring together the principles of ecosystem services, which focus on life support systems, with more non-material services such as cultural assets and tourism.  Enhancing the local production of ecosystem services that support human well-being can enhance the quality of life in cities while reducing the environmental demand on distant ecosystems. However, to achieve such a goal requires the integration of ecosystem service concepts within engineering, architecture, and urban planning.

Fig 6 Environmental services as cultural assets for communities neighbourhoods and families

There is no standard way of making connections between citizens and the management of the ecosystem services upon which they depend for well-being.  However, there can be no doubt that when community-led projects are well connected, both into their communities and into higher level policies and resources of government, the project team is more efficient.  It has more detailed and locally specific knowledge about needs and how they can be met and also about local assets and resources. Local knowledge can identify and fill very specific gaps in provision that might be missed or be unappealing to larger scale providers.   Local community organisations guided to operate their own CESPs can be better at generating new ideas from different sources by accessing people that are not usually reached. They are able to motivate those around them by building on existing networks and established, trusting relationships to meet their own planning goals.

  Fig 7 Environmental services as natural assets in the wider environment