1 The Ecosystem Approach

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) describes the Ecosystem Approach to sustainable development as “a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way”. This approach, which was adopted by the CBD in 2000, has a broad scope that goes beyond ecosystems themselves to encompass social, cultural and economic factors that are fully interdependent with biodiversity and ecosystem services. Now, in line with the strategic plan of the CBD, the UK Biodiversity Partnership places greater emphasis on landscape-scale approaches.  These focus on the social structures of human settlement in towns and villages to maintain the integrity of natural resource systems and less on narrower protected site approaches or on recovering target species (Fig 1).

Fig 1

The Ecosystem Approach is actually a managerial methodology to aid decision making which will help to achieve cultural sustainability.  It has been adopted by the CBD as the fundamental tool for delivery of the Convention’s primary objectives and is strongly endorsed by the UK government and the European Union.

The Ecosystem Approach can help to achieve integration of the three goals of sustainability:

• sustainable use of natural resources;
• equitable sharing of the benefits derived from their use;
• conservation of natural resources, based on fully functioning ecosystems

It seeks to integrate and manage the demands on ecosystem services so that essential needs for human well-being can be met indefinitely, and benefits provided for all, without deterioration (Fig 2).

Fig 2

The Ecosystem Approach emerged as a focus of discussion for those concerned with the management of biodiversity and natural resources in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly amongst commentators in North America. At that time the limitations of traditional approaches to resource management were being recognized. It was argued that a new focus was required to achieve robust and sustainable outcomes, involving integrated management at a landscape-scale with more decentralized decision making and public participation. Much of the recent interest in the Ecosystem Approach can, however, be traced to the influence of the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), which in 1995 adopted it as the ‘primary framework’ for action (IUCN, 2004). Under the convention, the approach is the basis for considering all the cultural goods and services provided to people by biodiversity and ecosystems (Secretariat of the Convention for Biological Diversity, 2000).

According to the CBD, the Ecosystem Approach embodies a core set of management principles (Table 1).

Table 1: The Principles of the Ecosystem Approach

Adopted by The Conference Of The Parties to the Convention On Biological Diversity at its Fifth Meeting, Nairobi, 15-26 May 2000. Decision V/6, Annex 1. CBD COP-5 Decision 6 UNEP/CBD/COP/5/23

1. The objectives of management of land, water and living resources are a matter of societal choice.

2. Management should be decentralised to the lowest appropriate level.

3. Ecosystem managers should consider the effects (actual or potential) of their activities on adjacent and other ecosystems.

4. Recognising potential gains from management, there is usually a need to understand and manage the ecosystem in an economic context. Any such ecosystem-management programme should:

a. Reduce those market distortions that adversely affect biological diversity;

b. Align incentives to promote biodiversity conservation and sustainable use;

c. Internalise costs and benefits in the given ecosystem to the extent feasible.

5. Conservation of ecosystem structure and functioning, in order to maintain ecosystem services, should be a priority target of the Ecosystem Approach.

6. Ecosystems must be managed within the limits of their functioning.

7. The Ecosystem Approach should be undertaken at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales.

8. Recognising the varying temporal scales and lag-effects that characterise ecosystem processes, objectives for ecosystem management should be set for the long term.

9. Management must recognise that change is inevitable.

10. The Ecosystem Approach should seek the appropriate balance between, and integration of, conservation and use of biological diversity.

11. The Ecosystem Approach should consider all forms of relevant information, including scientific and indigenous and local knowledge, innovations and practices.

12. The Ecosystem Approach should involve all relevant sectors of society and scientific disciplines.

These principles seek, for example, to promote an integrated approach to management that operates across both natural and social systems and between different ecosystems. An understanding of the way in which natural and social systems are coupled is seen as particularly important because, it is argued, management decisions have to be seen in their economic and social context. The principles proposed by the CBD accommodate the conservation and sustainable use of resources, and the sharing of benefits derived from natural resources. However, while management strategies are essentially a matter of societal choice, the principles proposed under the CBD recognise that decisions have to be grounded on a scientific understanding of biophysical limits.

2  Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Ecosystem Approach to environmental management was boosted by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA).  This was a global appraisal called for by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000. Initiated in 2001, the objective of the MA was to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and the scientific basis for action plans needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of those systems and their contribution to human well-being. The MA has involved the work of more than a thousand experts worldwide. Their findings, contained in five technical volumes and six synthesis reports, provide a state-of-the-art scientific appraisal of the condition and trends in the world’s ecosystems and the services they provide (such as clean water, food, forest products, flood control, and natural resources) and the options to restore, conserve or enhance the sustainable flows of resources through Earth’s ecological system to the human societal system (Fig 3).  

Fig 3

The following five paragraphs summarises the main findings of the MA.

 Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

The changes that have been made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development, but these gains have been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services, increased risks of nonlinear changes, and the exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people. These problems, unless addressed, will substantially diminish the benefits that future generations obtain from ecosystems.

The degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century and is a barrier to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

The challenge of reversing the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands for services can be partially met under some scenarios considered by the MA, but will involve significant changes in policies, institutions and practices that are not currently under way. Many options exist to conserve or enhance specific ecosystem services in ways that reduce negative trade-offs, or that provide positive synergies with other ecosystem services.

The bottom line of the MA findings is that human actions are depleting Earth’s natural capital, putting such strain on the environment that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. At the same time, the assessment shows that with appropriate actions it is possible to reverse the degradation of many ecosystem services over the next 50 years, but the changes in policy and practice required are substantial and not currently underway; time is rapidly running out.

3 Planning and recording tools

We know that the Ecosystem Approach is not solely biodiversity-based but also reconciles social and economic goals of living sustainably within a unifying action planning system linking culture and ecology.  This management system channels resources from government to a variety of stakeholders. Operational strategies for the Ecosystem Approach therefore not only have to deal with the workings of protected nature sites, but also include an understanding of neighbourhoods to address the local community problems linked to sustainable behaviours and environmental poverty. Tackling these problems is facilitated by a broad ecological approach to managing local inputs to meet co-produced operational outcomes for living sustainably. Long term continuity of management is essential, and local operational plans at neighbourhood level are necessary to avoid the loss of purpose and direction when policies change or key players in the community move on.

Management processes are strategic, financial and operational in nature. Therefore the key to success in applying the Ecosystem Approach to sustainability is planning to align these processes across various levels as well as across business functions of the various funding agencies and departments. Sound business results come only from the perfect execution and tracking of plans, making it imperative to connect the entire set of management processes of the Ecosystem Approach in a seamless system from strategies to operations with feedback loops between processes.

A robust and flexible planning and recording system is necessary to apply the Ecosystem Approach to all kinds of sustainable places.  It has to follow the universal management logic applicable to running a neighbourhood action plan, e.g. for reducing crime, or a corporate enterprise.  At a community level it has to address the production of community assets, such as sports centres, and plan the actions to rectify neighbourhood incivilities such as graffiti, litter and vandalism.  As a system it has to connect corporate strategic targets to measurable local operational objectives. The barriers to reaching these objectives are addressed by projects, which schedule the work to be done, the resources required and records what was achieved. There are feedback reporting loops from outcomes using performance indicators to measure managerial success in reaching the objectives (Fig 4).

Fig 4

 

http://www.maweb.org/en/About.aspx

 http://www.lwec.org.uk/sites/default/files/postpn_377-ecosystem-approach[1]_0.pdf

http://www.ecosystemservices.org.uk/docs/NR0107_pos%20paper%20EA_D1.3.pdf

1 Irrelevance of GDP

In February 2008, the President of the French Republic, Nicholas Sarkozy created “The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress”. The Commission’s aim has been:

• to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of social progress,  including the problems with its measurement;
• to consider what additional information might be required for the production of more relevant indicators of social progress;
• to assess the feasibility of alternative measurement tools,
• and to discuss how to present the statistical information in an appropriate way. 

It is an indicator of the inadequacy of classical economic theory that a group of distinguished economists, five of them Nobel Prize winners, would assert that in measuring social progress serious attention should be given to self-reports of subjective feelings.

The unifying theme of the report is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from economic production to quantifying people’s well-being. And measures of well-being should be put in a context of sustainability.

Regarding material living standards i.e. income, consumption, and wealth, the Commission made the following four recommendations;

i: Look at income and consumption rather than production.

GDP is the most widely-used measure of economic activity. But GDP mainly measures market production not economic well-being. Material living standards are more closely associated with measures of real income and consumption.

ii: Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth.

Income and consumption are crucial for assessing living standards, but in the end they can only be truly gauged in conjunction with information on wealth. A vital indicator of the financial status of a firm is its balance sheet, and the same holds for the economy as a whole. This means having comprehensive accounts of its assets (physical capital – and probably even human, natural and social capital) and its liabilities (what is owed to other countries). Measures of wealth are also central to measuring sustainability because what is carried over into the future necessarily has to be expressed as stocks – of human, physical, or natural capital. Measurement of these stocks has to include the common capital of the planet:  the atmosphere which is used as a sink for carbon dioxide, aquifers of water that are overpumped, ocean fisheries that are overharvested and large swathes of forest which are being razed.

iii: Emphasise the household perspective.

While it is informative to track the performance of economies as a whole, trends in citizens’ current material living standards are better followed through measures of household income and consumption. Indeed, the available national accounts data shows that in a number of OECD countries real household income has grown quite differently from real GDP, and typically at a lower rate. The household perspective entails taking account of payments between sectors, such as taxes going to government, social benefits coming from government, and interest payments on household loans going to financial corporations. Properly defined, household income and consumption should also reflect the value of in-kind services provided by government, such as subsidized health care and educational services.

iv: Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth.

Average income, consumption and wealth are meaningful statistics, but they do not tell the whole story about living standards. For example, a rise in average income could be unequal across income groups, leaving some households relatively worse-off than others. Thus, average measures of income, consumption and wealth should be accompanied by indicators that reflect their distribution across persons or households. Ideally, such information should not come in isolation but be linked, i.e. one would like information about how well-off households are simultaneously with regard to all three dimensions of material living standards: income, consumption and wealth. After all, a low-income household with above-average wealth is not necessarily worse-off than a medium-income household with no wealth.

v: Broaden economic measures to include non-market activities.

There have been changes in how households and society function. For example, many of the services people received from other family members in the past are now purchased on the market. This shift translates into a rise in income as measured in the national accounts and may give a false impression of a change in living standards, while it merely reflects a shift from non-market to market provision of services. Many services that households produce for themselves are not recognized in official income and production measures, yet they constitute an important aspect of economic activity. While their exclusion from official measures reflects uncertainty about data more than it does conceptual dissent, more and more systematic work in this area should be undertaken. This should start with information on how people spend their time that is comparable both over the years and across countries. Comprehensive and periodic accounts of household activity as satellites to the core national accounts should complement the picture.

2 Localism

The Commission was not primarily concerned with obtaining better estimates of material well-being, but rather in broadening the measurement of well being to encompass multiple domains of localism, with respect to social progress, classified in the following key dimensions:

* material living standards (income, consumption, and wealth);

* health;

* education;

* personal activities including work;

* political voice and governance;

* social connections and relationships;

* environment in relation to present and future conditions;

* insecurity, of an economic as well as a physical nature.

Localism may be viewed as a system, the social action cycle, by which people establish a social niche and take up living sustainably as a right and a responsibility. This may be coupled with the concept of living with just enough to lead a ‘good life’, which may be used as a target for a sustainable economy. Resources drawn from the planet to have a good life may be seen in conjunction with the political uptake of economic localism.  Local people are enabled and empowered with tools and resources to have a significant input in building a neighbourhood economy and making environmental improvements for living sustainably.  The social action cycle therefore becomes responsible for the social transmission and inheritance of cultural knowledge, and material culture necessary for building a stable human niche through activities that positively assert the embeddedness of self and heritage, both cultural and biological, in a neighbourhood.  It is linked to the biological action cycle by which other beings construct species niches by modifying their environment and thereby influencing their own and other species’ evolution

Looking back in my late 70s, I am struck by the riches my family has accumulated compared with my father, who as a child, roamed barefoot in the streets of Grimsby, then the largest fishing port in the world.  Now, that economy is displayed in the local heritage museum and the town is notorious for its young people and adults not in employment, education or training.  The view of the free marketers is that it is precisely economic growth that will lift these people out of poverty and unemployment, as it has done throughout human history, with population being the primary driver of prosperity. Accordingly, improvements in productivity occur by innovation and efficiencies in the use of raw materials. Market growth will be a creative response, with more goods being available to more people at lower prices; but the sums just do not add up.

It takes the Earth nearly 18 months to produce the ecological goods and services we currently use in one year. Furthermore, even a modest 2% economic growth rate implies a doubling of consumption every 35 years.  Population growth is added to the debit side since each new person requires the basics of existence. Then there is the issue of the “carbon intensity” of consumerism, which needs to fall by 95% to meet the 2050 agreed targets for greenhouse gases. The vision of ‘business as usual’ is that humanity will become ecologically bankrupt with competitive conflict between nations.

Two out of three economists do not believe that future social progress will create ever more prosperity. So we must turn to the other historical thread of social progress.  This is a process that endows an individual or collective with the ability to orchestrate change in their lives to provide a degree of autonomy and control over the world around them, including jobs and environmental services.  With regards education, specialisms will still needed to support a material economy.  But they will be branches from a core curriculum that relates well being to contact with a nearby and concrete reality rather than a far off and abstract one.   The central educational concept is therefore localism, which can be applied to any activity that positively asserts the embeddedness of self in a community.  Economic localism is now a feasible future for people to determine what happens to the economy and provides opportunities to address deep-rooted social and environmental ‘doorstep problems’.

 Some would have it that localism was part of the thinking of hunter/ gatherers.  The native American, N. Scott Momaday, describing the mind set of the Buffalo hunter puts it this way.

“A man crouches in the ravine, in the darkness there, scarcely visible.  He moves not a muscle; only the wind lifts a lock of his hair and lays it back along his neck.  He wears skins and carries a spear.  These things in particular mark his human intelligence and distinguish him as the lord of the universe.  And for him the universe is especially this landscape; for him the landscape is an element like the air.  The vast, virgin wilderness is by and large his whole context.  For him there is no possibility of existence elsewhere”.

As a more recent phenomenon, localism appeared in Britain in the 17th century when topographers and poets valued the diversity of local culture as an alternative to the rigid uniformity of the London Court.  Modern localism emerged in the 1960s when ideas of ‘enablement’ and ’empowerment’ were promoted as a means of strengthening democracy, so that more decisions are made by local people, the stakeholders, rather than central government.

Localism now spans the political spectrum, with debate at the edges as to who foots the bill, state or community.  Engagement and empowerment of local people is therefore a relevant starting going for a new ecopedagogy to support local routes to take no more than a fair share of Earth’s resources, whilst ensuring others have no less than a decent environment. Unfortunately, the ‘elephant in the room’ is the immovable and inflexible monolithic curriculum designed for a past era when the global exploitation of land and sea, with no thought to the future, was the national imperative of empire building. 

Those were the days when environment did not matter!

http://enmat.wikispaces.com/

http://virtualmuseology.wikispaces.com/file/view/Making+Ecoscopes.pdf

 

Supreme Being Shiva that continuously dissolves to recreate

in the cyclic process of creation, preservation,

dissolution and recreation of the universe.

“Evolutionary wisdom is quite simply the deep realisation of our nature as nature. I am not referring to an abstract knowledge of other primate species as our ancestors, but rather to a deep sense of our co-emergence with the elements, the sea and atmosphere, cellular life and sunlight, plants and animals, sentience- the whole evolutionary shebang. When we can experience ourselves as part of the processes of biological and cosmic evolution, we automatically begin to break free from the domination of ego. We are finally able to loosen the tight shoe of self. Our lives gain new dimension, context, gestalt. We begin to give ourselves some space”.

(Wes Nisker, ‘Buddah’s Nature’)

1 Ethical propriety of living sustainably

Human culture in all its diversity is the outcome of the capacity for conceptual thinking.  We live in a visually intensive society.   Symbols, like artifacts, are things which act as triggers to remind people in a culture of its concepts; the rules, beliefs, etc by which it is organised. They act as a shorthand way to keep people aligned.  In so far as art is undoubtedly an outcome of human conduct, it should be drawn into the domain of human ecological behaviour expressed as living sustainably, which itself has become one of the most ambitious and fertile aspects of the 21^st century thought. A new concern for art is therefore to consider what is identified as the ethical content of symbols to promote a conservation culture; their moral and aesthetic style and their impact in mass-education for behaviour change.  The history of images used for this purpose dates from the 1960s but ancient religious imagery is also relevant.  In this connection Clifford Geertz, in his book ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, wrote:

“As we are to deal with meaning, let us begin with a paradigm viz. that sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos – the tone, character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood – the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order”.

Seven forms of behaviour are implicit in conservation management of Earth’s resources:

Cosmopolitanism

Justice

Spirituality

Education

Equality

Fraternity

Care for environment

It can be argued that cosmopolitanism is the philosophical pillar for living sustainably.  The other ‘ism’ for liberating self in community is communitarianism, which defines human beings first and foremost in terms of their cultural identity, while according to cosmopolitans, reason should be the governing principle of human interaction. The cosmopolitan belief in the emancipatory power of the human capacity for reasoning derives from the idea that reasoning is a shared capacity, capable of providing the basis for moral principles, which aim to deliver humankind from the mire of ignorance and superstition

Thomas Pogge defines cosmopolitanism in terms of three important characteristics:

• Individuality–the consideration is for individual people, not groups, tribes, families, or nation states:
• Universality–status of moral consideration is equal to all, not just to a particular group like whites, men, or those in the “developed” world, and
• Generality–the special and equal moral status of all individuals has global force. Persons are units for everyone’s concern, which means you should not simply concern yourself with your own fellow compatriots in a more local sphere. In short, our moral responsibility spans across geographical boundaries.

All seven concepts are part of the ethical propriety of contemporary cultural ecology. As symbols they represent a worldview of the social framework needed for humanity to survive ‘peak oil’ and maintain the movement towards global democracy that is needed for transformation into a learning rather than consuming society, with less greed, more spirituality and care for the future.

Sustainable development policies generally embody an economic determinism with respect to technological change. It avoids the issue of ethics and assumes environmental and economic goals are compatible. Yet makers of social policy today are grappling with the ethical dilemmas posed by everyday conflicts between the economic and environmental requirements of living sustainably. Such propriety is related to art’s instrumentality. This is a contemporary aesthetic issue in the fullest sense of the word. The desire to create legitimate, easily read patterns, models, pathways for systems thinking about people and environment, is one that is traced throughout the rise of environmentalism from the early 1960s to the present time. Memorable images, either directly experienced or seen through a mediated format, are those that people think about. They are usually simple compositions with immediate impact. They are images that trigger the emotional and rational aspects of the mind’s personality, to crystallise a meaningful message. They are pictures recalled again and again long after the original object of oral perception has faded from memory (Fig 1).  It has been argued the industrial, mass production model of education, as schooling being confined to factory-like buildings for persons between the ages of four and twenty-something, should change. Education must urgently be regenerated by spatial and temporal expansion into life-long learning about living sustainably in physical, architectural and social spaces that breathe with the community.

 Fig1 An image map of ethical propriety for living sustainably.

 

As long ago as the 1930s Otto Neurath invented the ‘community museum’ in Vienna, dedicated to presenting the social issues of the time in a universal pictorial language. His aim was to draw the attention of the man in the street to these, hoping for a behavioural change for the better.  ‘When a Viennese citizen enters this museum,’ he wrote, ‘he finds reflected his problems, his past, his future – himself’.

2 Oneness with the universe

People must create and maintain a local accommodating social, economic, and natural environment for a desirable quality of life, over time, indefinitely. Sustainable communities don’t evolve naturally from the pursuit of individual economic self-interests; they must be created and sustained by the conscious and purposeful decisions of people working together with ethical propriety for the common good. Sustainable communities must continually reassess the ecological, social, and economic assets of their communities, and through the processes of local planning, nurture a continuing culture of sustainability. The community planning process is important, but planning can be effective only if it is guided by a shared sense of purpose and common understanding of the ethical principles necessary to achieve that purpose.

Each community is different, with different resources, capacities, visions, and capabilities. Thus, the developmental goals, plans, and strategies must be tailored to maintain a particular sense of place. However, the basic purpose and principles of sustainability are not arbitrary or voluntary. They are inviolable principles of nature and natural law that must guide all sustainable societies. Here, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyse human nature — both social and personal — and deduce binding rules of moral behaviour.  The Sanskrit word for ethics is dharma (“to hold”). It signifies that which upholds or embodies law, custom, and religion, and is analogous to the concept of ‘Natural Law’ in Christian ethics. Jesus’ ministry was focussed on how people should behave towards each other in this world.  This trans-religion metaphorical emphasis on an image of communitarianism is also a feature of the Hindu Upanishads, the authorless philosophical texts considered to be an early source of Hindu spirituality. In the Upanishads, the thread (sutra) is described as the link between this world and ‘the other world’ and all beings. It connects self with universe and in all things it ‘must be followed back to its source’.   Eastern mystics also see the universe metaphorically as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic.

 All these simple, everyday images emphasize that the universe has to be grasped dynamically, as it moves, vibrates and dances.  In Indian philosophy, the main terms used by Hindus and Buddhists have dynamic connotations. The word Brahman (Shiva) to denote the power that is the source and sustainer of the universe, is derived from the Sanskrit root brih – to grow- and thus suggests a reality which is dynamic, alive and expanding. The Upanishads refer to Brahman as ‘this unformed, immortal, moving’, thus associating it with cosmic motion even though it transcends all forms. The Hindu Rig Veda uses another term to express the dynamic character of the universe, the word Rita. This comes from the root ri- to move. Cosmic oneness is thus intrinsically dynamic, and the apprehension of its dynamic nature is basic to all schools of Eastern mysticism.  In this context, Buddhist thought is tremendously rich in the arena of human consciousness and its connectedness with nature.  Buddha himself was very close to understanding reality as he knew that matter was both impermanent and interconnected; like a candle flame, the world is in continuous flux and is impermanent.

The most important characteristic of the Eastern worldview – one could almost say the essence of it – is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality.  This is a cosmic reality of cultural ecology and why, as a concept, it offers a new metaphysical focus for living sustainably in the present, a present of things now, a present of things to come; and a present of things past, in a dynamic equilibrium.

3 Science of the real

Science attempts to separate, categorize, quantify, and objectify physical experience, labelling certain aspects as “real” and others as “not real”. In contrast, metaphysics includes science, but goes beyond it to encompass all aspects and dimensions of life experience as “real”.  Fritjof Capra takes the view that modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a comprehensive web of relations between the tangible and intangible inputs to the consciousness.  Like Eastern mysticism, it recognises that this web is intrinsically dynamic.

The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave-nature of subatomic particles, and is even more essential in relativity theory, where the unification of space and time implies that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of subatomic particles can therefore only be understood in a dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation. 

The scientific ‘particle’ conception of matter has contributed to an incorrect conception of self, founding the illusion that we exist as discrete bodies without relations to all other matter. Recent discoveries on the wave structure of matter show that human beings do not exist in isolation, but are in fact structures of the Universe. Thus humanity does not have dominion over the earth and all living things by divine decree, on the contrary, humans are intimately interconnected both to all other matter in the Cosmos, and to all other life on Earth.  In his book ‘The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism’, Capra argued that modern science and Eastern mysticism offer parallel insights into the ultimate nature of reality. But, beyond this, Capra suggested that the profound harmony between these concepts, as expressed in systems language, and the corresponding ideas of Eastern mysticism, was impressive evidence for a remarkable claim: that mystical philosophy offers the most consistent background to our modern scientific theories.  If this is so, then mysticism should be added to our ecological models of self and environment.  Indeed, it has been said that cosmology is semi-mathematical mysticism.

4 Metaphysics

Humanity is part of this dancing universe and contemporary metaphysics is the branch of philosophy responsible for the study of OUR existence WITHIN NATURE AS NATURE. Metaphysics tries to transcend the idea of religion by all encompassing ideas like letting go of “written in stone” beliefs that never change, realizing the self as the outcome of coalescing particles, and seeing all beings as equals in spirit.  Literally, it has to do with the conception of existence with the living universe and humankind’s place within.  It is the foundation of a worldview. Metaphysics means ‘after physics’ and was a term coined to bring unity to the study of the obvious physical expressions of nature.  At this point in our conscious evolution, metaphysics has become the most comprehensive and most effective means of gaining knowledge and understanding of who we really are, why we are here, and the true nature of the physical universe that we can perceive from our present point of view.  It answers the question “What is?” It encompasses everything that exists, as well as the nature of existence itself. It says whether the world is real, or merely an illusion. It is a philosophical conception of universe and the role assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.   It is a fundamental view of the world around us.  The metaphysics of cultural ecology addresses the problem that humanity has become disconnected from Nature in our modern world of cities, cars and economics. 

Science helps us perceive and understand the qualities of various aspects of physical existence, and religion and spirituality can help us integrate what we call non-physical experience into our lives.  It is only through metaphysical studies that the “big picture” of the universe as an ecosystem, within which culture has always been embedded, can be seen and applied.  The impact of gaining knowledge of the big picture and learning how to manipulate and affect our world at that level is an aspect of human ecology applied to living sustainably.

5 The mind/matter maze

The Buddha, well before Thomas Aquinas, an important Medieval philosopher, and theologian, or Heisenberg, who made seminal contributions to quantum mechanics, stressed the primacy of the mind in the perception and even “creation” of reality. A central concept of Buddhism is the idea that “everything is made from the mind.” Any distinction between subject and object is false, imagined, at best an expedient nod to demands of conventional language. In the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Buddha uses metaphor to elucidate:

“The mind is like an artist/It can paint an entire world. . . If a person knows the workings of the mind/As it universally creates the world/This person then sees the Buddha/And understands the Buddha’s true and actual nature.” (Chap. 20)

In other words, we think we are observing nature, but what we are observing is our own mind at work. We are the subject and object of our own methodology. Moreover, this mind encompasses the entirety of the universe; there is nothing outside of it, nothing it does not contain, according to the Buddha.

Such insights have long intrigued Western thinkers, as Buddhism hinted of a new avenues of travel through the mind/matter maze.

It led scientists like Albert Einstein to declare:

“The religion of the future will be cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. . . If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism”.

Einstein not alone in his positive assessment of Buddhism’s potential for going beyond the boundaries of Western thought. The British mathematician philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, declared,

“Buddhism is the most colossal example in the history of applied metaphysics.”

He also made the point when he emphasised the enormous gap between what natural science describes and what we know as living, sensing, experiencing human beings. His contemporary Bertrand Russell, another Nobel Prize philosopher, found in Buddhism the greatest religion in history because

“it has had the smallest element of persecution.”

But beyond the freedom of inquiry he attributed to the Buddha’s teaching, Russell discovered a superior scientific method- one that reconciled the speculative and the rational while investigating the ultimate questions of life:

“Buddhism is a combination of both speculative and scientific philosophy. It advocates the scientific method and pursues that to a finality that may be called Rationalistic. In it are to be found answers to such questions of interest as: ‘What is mind and matter? Of them, which is of greater importance? Is the universe moving towards a goal? What is man’s position? Is there living that is noble?’ It takes up where science cannot lead because of the limitations of the latter’s instruments. Its conquests are those of the mind”.

As early as the 1940’s, the pioneering physicist Niels Bohr sensed this congruence between modern science and what he called “Eastern mysticism.” As he investigated atomic physics and searched for a unified field of reality, he often used the Buddha in his discussions on physics in his classes. He made up his own coat of arms with the yin/yang symbol on it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the supervising physicist of the Manhattan project to create the first atomic bomb.  On the 16^th July 1945, after witnessing the successful test, he quoted from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture, that is part of the ancient epic Mahabharata, the words of Shiva;

‘Now I am become Death the destroyer of worlds’

The actual section is:

‘If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky

That would be like the splendour of the Mighty one

I am become Death

The shatterer of worlds’

His familiarity with the Hindu epic had made him aware of a scientific parallel in Buddhism to the puzzling riddles of modern physics.  The cutting-edge discoveries of his team of nuclear physicists seemed to echo the enigmatic wisdom of the ancient sages. He wrote:

“The general notions about human understanding… which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.”

If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say ‘no;’ if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say ‘no.’

The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of man’s self after his death; but they are not familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth-century science.

The dialogues between Buddhist masters, such as the Dalai Lama, and scientists have focused so far primarily on three areas. One is astrophysics, concerning primarily how the universe developed. Does it have a beginning? Was it created or is it part of an eternal process? Another topic is particle physics, regarding the structure of atoms and matter. The third is neurosciences, about how the brain works.

In science, the theory of the conservation of matter and energy states that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed.  Particle physicists emphasize the role of the observer in defining anything. For example, from a certain point of view, light is matter; from another point of view, it is energy. What type of phenomenon light seems to exist as depends on many variables, particularly on the conceptual framework the investigator is using to analyse it. Thus, phenomena do not exist inherently as this or that from their own sides, unrelated to the consciousness that perceives them.

Buddhism asserts the same thing: what things exist depends on the observer and the conceptual framework with which the person regards them. For example, whether a certain situation exists as an intractable problem or as something solvable depends on the observer, the person involved. If somebody has the conceptual framework such as: “This is an impossible situation and nothing can be done,” then there really is a difficult problem that cannot be solved. However, with the frame of mind that thinks, “This is complicated and complex, but there is a solution if we approach it in a different way,” then that person is much more open to try to find a solution. What is a huge problem for one person is not a big deal for another. It depends on the observer, for our problems do not inherently exist as monstrous problems.   Thus, science and Buddhism come to the same conclusion: phenomena exist as this or that dependent on the observer.  “Wisdom” in this case means seeing things as they are. Most of the time, the Buddha taught, our perceptions are clouded by our opinions and biases and the way we are conditioned to understand reality by our cultures. Buddhist scholar Wapola Rahula said that wisdom is “seeing a thing in its true nature, without name and label.”  Breaking through our delusional perceptions, seeing things as they are, is enlightenment, and this is the means of liberation from suffering.  However, to say that the Buddha was only interested in releasing us from suffering, and not interested in the nature of reality, is a bit like saying a doctor is only interested in curing our disease and is not interested in medicine.  Thus, Buddhism comes nearest to a path of metaphysical practice, that meets the spiritual needs of scientists seeking an insight into the true nature of reality. However, these teachings, that it is possible to gain release from the sufferings of life by essentially good and compassionate behaviour, combined with a sense of transience in meditation, are clearly a causal belief and brings Buddhism into focus as part of the human survival tool kit, which is a fundamental propensity of the evolution of the human brain to see events in causal terms.

Metaphysics has developed over the centuries at the same time as human consciousness has expanded to include science and spiritual awareness as tools to explore and observe the true nature of reality. When comparing this religious/spiritual belief, generated by a cellular engine genetically programmed in the circuitry in our brains, with belief used to make a scientific judgement, the polymath Lewis Woolpert distinguished it as operating on different principles:

“It prefers quick decisions, it is bad with numbers, loves representativeness, and sees patterns where often there is only randomness. It is too often influenced by authority, and it has a liking for mysticism.  Religious and mystical beliefs will continue for the foreseeable future to be held by millions of people, not only because mysticism is in our brains, but also because it gives enormous comfort and meaning to life. And it provides a basis for causal beliefs about fundamental human issues. Just look at the strength of religion in an advanced industrial culture like the USA. And while we may be hostile to the beliefs of others, we need always to remember that it is having beliefs that makes us human. We have to both respect, if we can, the beliefs of others, and accept the responsibility to try and change them if the evidence for them is weak or scientifically improbable. The loss of religious beliefs could have very serious consequences, and so could the enforcement of those beliefs on others. It is the action based on beliefs that ultimately matters, and respect for the rights of others is fundamental”. 

6 Mixing and matching

The relationship between scientific and religious beliefs is that people have the right to hold whatever beliefs appeal to them, but with a fundamental provision that those beliefs must be reliable if they lead to actions that affect the lives of people. In the West it has become commonplace to find people picking and choosing among various spiritual traditions and practices, selecting whatever is most useful, meaningful or intriguing at the moment. While such cafeteria-style spirituality is frequently criticized as superficial, it is common in a pluralistic open-minded culture, where supernatural forces of gods are no longer part of the belief system.  In this connection, an ‘athiest reductionist materialist’ aims not to disparage the beliefs of others, even though she does not share them. This aim may not always be successful as she is neither religious nor has any beliefs in a spiritual world of paranormal happenings. Her thinking is based on a belief in the scientific process, and the necessity for evidence.  She is committed to science and believes it to be the best way to understand the world.  A Christian Buddhist, on the other hand, accepts the Buddhist quest for reality supported by the moral exhortations of Jesus as a man about justice, loving your neighbour and improving the world.  The Christian values were originally religion-based but have become normative secular values among all people in countries with a Christian heritage. Parochial belief of Christianity may have declined, but awareness has grown of the need to work towards a universally endorsed secular ethic for healing the world. The golden rule teaches people to “love your neighbour as yourself.” From a Judeo-Christian tradition, this philosophy holds that an individual should be as humane as possible and never harm others unless there is no other reasonable choice.

Reality, or physical reality, sought by a Christian Buddhist includes everything we experience. Thoughts, ideas, emotions, perceptions, even what we call dreams and hallucinations, life and death; all are included in this experience that is their “reality”.

Many high ranking Buddhist monks emphasize the natural relationship between deep ecology and Buddhism which will reveal reality of humankind in nature. According to the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh:

“Buddhists believe that the reality of the interconnectedness of human beings, society and Nature will reveal itself more and more to us as we gradually recover; as we gradually cease to be possessed by anxiety, fear, and the dispersion of the mind. Among human beings, society, and Nature, it is us who begin to effect change. But in order to effect change we must recover ourselves, one must be whole. Since this requires the kind of environment favourable to one’s healing, one must seek the kind of lifestyle that is free from the destruction of one’s humanness. Efforts to change the environment and to change oneself are both necessary. But we know how difficult it is to change the environment if individuals themselves are not in a state of equilibrium.”

In this way modern Buddhism is a metaphysical enquiry into the state of equilibrium between humankind, nature and the cosmos.  The metaphysics of environmentalism encourages us to ask basic questions about the ecological place of our species in the universe, in the hope that deeper questioning will lead to more profound solutions to the growing environmental crisis faced today. ‘Shallow ecology’ fights against pollution in wealthy countries alone, while ‘deep ecology’ looks for the fundamental roots of ecological problems within a global cultural perspective of environmental justice.  Christ’s approach to environmental justice is based on his commandment: to love our neighbours as ourselves. This requires respect for all creation. Love of neighbour requires justice with equality, which prohibits the selfish destruction of the environment without regard for those in need today or for the needs of future generations. It is worth contemplating in this connection the origin of the word neighbour from nigh bour; he who tills the next piece of land.  The common purse shared by Jesus and his first followers vividly demonstrates that Jesus repeated and deepened the old call for transformed economic relationships among people who are sceptical about top down rationalistic systems.

 

Boss in South aisle of ‘Angel Choir’,

Lincoln Cathedral (1256-80)

http://www.ecobuddhism.org/index.php

http://www.arcworld.org/faiths.asp?pageID=66

http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2010/08/christian-buddhism/

http://praxeology.net/hindurandu.htp

http://www.lavonn.net/id65.html

http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/imageethic.htm

http://readperiodicals.com/201101/2253131381.html#ixzz1ovKuPnzu

http://ajust.wikispaces.com/file/view/isee_text.pdf

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6554.html

http://web.missouri.edu/~ikerdj/papers/Saskatchewan%20–%20Principle-based.htm

http://www.dougcraftfineart.com/PeakOilandOurFutureEssaybyDougCraft.pdf

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=397968§ion=6.2

http://www.metafuture.org/articlesbycolleagues/JenniferGidley/Gidley%20Beyond%20homogenisation%20.pdf

http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/blog/index.cfm?start=1&news_id=934

The advantages of community engagement for local authorities:

Wrexham Borough Council Leader Aled Roberts showed through a series of examples how his own local authority had benefited from involving residents in setting up and running local services. This experience also demonstrated that there is no single model of neighbourhood regeneration because communities are best placed to decide how it should be done. Quoted from ‘’Bringing Neighbourhood Centre Stage in Wales; 2008′

http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/1910-regeneration-neighbourhood-involving.pdf

1 The basics of networking

When the UK strategy for sustainable development was first launched, the idea of a national citizen’s environmental network was proposed.  The aim was to unite people to share their ideas and achievements in making and running community action plans for living sustainably.  It was envisaged that the ‘copycat network’ should be initiated and controlled at the community level.  However, the idea as it was originally proposed did not materialise.

An environmental network needs to have the following two features:

·         A system for social networking

·         A freely accessible database for presenting the community’s planning process and its current state of progress towards meeting outcomes of citizen-led environmental improvements.   

The Internet is now available to accommodate these two features on line.  The first requirement is exemplified by text-based screen presentations such as  ‘wikis’, blogs and ‘conversational threads’; the second is illustrated by the ‘web viewer’ for presenting versions of the relational databases that are used to record planning as a process, which can both be interrogated on line.  

An Internet community consists of:

• People, who act socially as they strive to satisfy their own needs or perform special roles, such as leading or moderating.

• A shared purpose, such as an interest, need, information exchange, or service that provides a facility for the community.

• Policies, in the form of tacit assumptions, rituals, protocols, rules, and laws that guide people’s interactions.

• Software systems, to support and mediate social interactions and facilitate a sense of togetherness”

These common activities help to create a sense of community by providing a common feeling of identity, with which the members of the community can associate themselves. This growth of trust between members of a community is an important factor in the success of an online community, and those common factors that help shape the behaviour of community members become practiced habits which help to construct the norms and identity of the community as a whole.  The strength of the network is frequently perceived to impart a heightened vitality to the community, and contributes to a strong sense of community identity.

2  Social networking

Social networking is the process of initiating, developing and maintaining friendships and collegial or project sharing relationships for mutual benefit. Current discussions surrounding social networking deal with web-based or technology-mediated tools, interactions, and related phenomena, but social networking really takes place in many forms, including face to face.

Much technology-facilitated social networking is done in the form of person-to-person exchanges that can be classified as question and answer, point and counterpoint, announcement and support.

Technologies that facilitate social networking tend to emphasize ease of use, spontaneity, personalization, exchange of contacts, and low-end voyeurism. .Some technologies that are often considered social networking technologies may not be socially oriented in and of themselves, but the communities that form around such technologies often demonstrate key elements of social networking (for example, the discussion communities that form around collaboratively authored wiki content).

Online community networks are often developed and deployed to supplement residential communities in an effort to revitalise and grow neighbourhoods and to revive civic engagement and local community identity in society. In this context, the ubiquity of the Internet enables and encourages users to pursue ‘personalized networking’ which leads to the emergence of private ‘portfolios of sociability’. ‘Proximity’ is the factor in on line residential communities which produces networked individualism.  This gives online residential communities a competitive advantage over dispersed online communities. Residential networks allow residents to interact online and to continue developing online interaction offline, in real life and face to face. This offline and place-based dimension introduces challenges to the design, development and rollout of online community networks.

Reaching a critical mass of users is considered to be the key criterion of success and has been reported as one of the most common stumbling blocks: “If you build it, they will not necessarily come”. However, other studies have shown that a critical mass of interconnected users alone is not sufficient for a community network to live up to higher expectations, such as increasing social capital in the community, fostering sociability and establishing community identity.  Those geographic communities already rich in social capital may become richer thanks to community networks, and those communities poor in social capital may remain poor, or simply put, connectivity does not ensure community.  Something else has to be done.  The Internet neither destroys nor creates social capital,  people do, and the Internet will not automatically offset the decline in more conventional forms of social capital, but  it has that potential.

Some examples of popular social networking technologies include:

• asynchronous discussions via discussion boards or newsgroup
• instant messaging, e.g. MSN, AIM, and ICQ
• text-messaging or SMS
• message logging and sharing, such as Twitter
• document sharing and controlled collaborative authoring, such as Zoho or Google Docs & Spreadsheets
• loosely structured collaborative authoring and information sharing, such as wikis.
• photo sharing, such as Flickr and Picasa
• video sharing, such as YouTube
• blogs (life-sharing, news analysis, and editorializing)
• online communities, such as Nings, Facebook, etc.
• Second Life – sort of a combination of many of the above communication and collaborative tools

3  Planning

An understanding of planning logic is necessary for all human activities, from baking a cake to running a multi national corporation.  The basic procedure for making a community action plan is to set a measurable objective, schedule the work to be done to meet it, and report what was actually done. Monitoring is then carried out to check how close the outcome is to the objective. Plans are essentially diaries of what to do, what was done and what remains to be done.

Plans can be made on paper, but using software is better.  The planning logic in the Copycat System for making community action plans is based on the conservation management system, the CMS, used by UK Environment Agencies to produce conservation management plans for nature sites.  In a wider community context, conservation management is equated with planning for sustainability in all aspects of community life.  Every neighbourhood becomes a distinctive place worthy of environmental improvement. A community action plan can be modelled on the preservation or enhancement of its core green heritage assets, no matter how small. The plan can then be extended to include the management of other community assets/issues, such as health, transport, security, energy use, tidiness, and opportunities for employment and recreation.  In this context the basic planning logic unifies action and recording across sectorial boundaries.

Making a start with local ‘green’ issues is good beginning because the increase and maintenance of local biodiversity is the central principle of sustainable development on all  geographical scales. . In this respect, ‘Come Outside!’ is a Wales-wide scheme, which enables communities to gain the benefits that the outdoors has to offer. By addressing community needs and aspirations through outdoor activities, participation becomes valued and the benefits are sustained.   Dave Horton, Senior Community Development Worker Ely/Caerau, where this scheme was trailed in Cardiff, said:

 “This project is aimed at uniting the communities of Ely and Caerau and giving people the confidence to enjoy their local environment.

“It also offers the local community a chance to learn new conservation skills such as planning and managing green spaces.”

4  Planning and recording logic

To plan to make a difference we need to know and record the answers to the following sequence of 10 questions. 

1 What is the current condition or state of the issue, system or object?

2 What is its desirable or favourable state?

3 What has to be done to achieve that state?

4 Who is to do it?

5 What do they need to do it?

6 When is it to be done?

7 How is it to be done?

8 What was actually done?

9 What difference did it make?

10 Who needs to know?

This is the planning logic of the CMS and in this sense the software is basically an interactive, dedicated PC diary.

The operational procedure to implement a Copycat System for action planning  is to:

a) Direct community leaders to a local nature reserve that is already running the planning system according to the above planning logic for a demonstration.

b) Use the reserve’s plan to show resident’s groups how to apply the planning logic to produce their own action plans.

5 Planning for a good ‘sense of place’

Sense of place encompasses the meanings that a given place holds for people and the attachments that people develop for that place. It is expressed when people say they feel good about where they live.

There is an environmental element, pinpointed by what have come to be known as ‘front door issues of environmental poverty’ and an economic element (the ‘back kitchen’ issues of traditional poverty.

Environmental justice seeks solutions to front door issues of environmental poverty.

These issues are usually defined in the ‘square mile’ where people live, walk and socialise.

The objective is therefore ‘to increase the proportion of people who feel good about their square mile’. Success in achieving this objective is measured with before and after social surveys. Valid and reliable surveys for measuring sense of place exist and have been tested successfully as assessment instruments. These yield outcome performance indicators.

The factors that influence the objective are many and varied. They fall into four groups:

i Sociability, which includes:

Number of women, children and elderly

Social networks

Volunteerism

Evening use of the neighbourhood

Street life

ii Uses and activities, which includes:

Ownership of local business

Land use patterns

Property values

Rent levels

Shops

iii Comfort and image, which includes

Crime

Sanitation rating

Littering/refuse collection

Condition of buildings

Trees, gardens and grass

Graffiti

Local history/heritage highlights

Signage

Recreation/play areas

Creative arts groups

iv Access and linkages, which includes

Traffic

Public transport

Pedestrian and cycling activity

Condition of roads and pavements

Parking patterns

Success in creating a good sense of place depends on bringing many different providers together to address one or more of above factors in an action plan. The factors can be monitored from time to time through neighbourhood surveys to measure the effectiveness of plans dealing with specific issues. Before and after attitudinal surveys provide performance indicator to check out progress towards the community’s overall planning objective of establishing a good sense of place

6  Global Copycat

The management of rice growing has been revolutionised by a new  copycat movement that shares knowledge between growers in a community commons.  This is the SRI system that essentially promotes rice production using low planting densities with low water input.  The system is diametrically opposed to traditional methods.  The SRI group is diverse and accommodates different viewpoints and is open about conflicting viewpoints. There are members who support hybrid rice and mechanisation, and others who vigorously champion traditional varieties, organic methods, and hand tools. Yet, the group has shown tremendous participation in sharing and creating common resources. This was called upon recently when the National Food Security Mission (NFSM) was engaging with civil society organisations, and there was an urgent need to quickly put together information on the number of farmers using SRI methods and their acreage. A database was created in a very short span of time online across the country. Such a task would have otherwise taken weeks, if not months. It would be folly to see the use of internet in isolation, however. The SRI network uses it as a tool for networking, learning and sharing, and it is not a substitute for real face to face work in the field. In fact, some of the more active SRI promoters have little time and access to the net and cannot contribute to the e-group, but yet they do keep following the conversations.

There is a case for exploring how such networks function as conduits for knowledge and information flows and the process of co-creation of knowledge that can be applied to a range of environmental improvements that require the spreading of grass roots know how.  This is the need throughout the world, where communities of all kinds are working to preserve local lifestyles, encourage their core values and maintain the distinct sense of place that matters to them. People can only protect what they hold most dear in their community by bringing important local stories into play in ways that help create a better widespread understanding of where they live and what they can do to protect and enhance community assets.

Some examples of Copycat networking tools are:

http://www.blything.wikispaces.com

www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/lincolncms

www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/cwicnet

www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/rigsby 

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

Management of natural resources through a fee on release of pollution and taking of resources would produce a monetary representation of the value of the earth’s air and water, biota and minerals. As these resources can be thought of as public property, as belonging to all, we can rightly share the proceeds of the pollution fees and resource fees among all people equally. Such a sharing of the wealth of the commons would secure each and every one of us against the threat of abject poverty. A system that combines equal ownership of the commons with free markets and private ownership of man-made capital would include essential elements of both capitalism and communism.

 

The magnitude of the challenge we face, the stakes involved, and our democratic principles all point to the need to secure the participation of the largest portion of our society in deciding what human impacts on earth we will allow. We cannot and should not expect that levels of resource extraction or pollution will be much in excess of what most people would consider as acceptable. Neither should we expect to hold emissions or taking of resources to levels below what the people will accept. A democratic society would set limits on environmental impacts such that about half considered the levels about right or somewhat too strict while the other half considered the limits about right or somewhat too lenient. If some of us believe that we know better than most what human impacts should be judged sustainable and acceptable, we will have the instruments of change in a free society to bring our fellow citizens around to our view: Reason and sustained pressure, education and the free flow of information. John Champagne (2001)

 

 

1 How many people?

 

The world population is the totality of all living humans on planet Earth. As of today, it is estimated to number 6.986 billion by the United States Census Bureau.  According to a separate estimate of the United Nations, it has already exceeded 7 billion. The UN estimates that it will reach 12 billion around the middle of the 21^st century.  A predicted figure of 9 billion is being used in futures modelling.  Any of these figures may be taken to support the idea that the planet is overpopulated, because the environmental consequences of the excessively high human population and its continued growth are already destroying the Earth’s life-support system. The evidence is climate change, wildlife extinction, soil erosion and desertification.  All economic activity occurs in the natural, physical world. It requires resources such as energy, materials and land. In addition, economic activity invariably generates material residuals, which enter the environment as waste or polluting emissions. The Earth, being a finite planet, has a limited capability to supply resources and to absorb pollution. A fundamental question is how different economic activities influence the use of natural resources and the generation of pollution. This leads to the question of how many people can the Earth really support.

 

The modern debate was started in 1971 by Paul Ehrlich:

 

“There are 3.6 billion human beings on the face of the Earth. According to our best estimates, there are somewhere between three and seven times more people than this planet can possibly maintain over a long period of time.”

 

The best estimate now for a population that can live sustainably with a North American standard of living, good health, nutrition, prosperity, personal dignity and freedom, is 1 to 2 billion people. To achieve this goal, the global population has to be stabilised and then gradually reduced to achieve a sustainable society in terms of both economics and environmental resources.  It has been calculated that if this policy were implemented, more than 100 years would be required to make an equitable adjustment through global governance.

 

With the current world population at around 7 billion, the obvious question is how are we currently supporting this much larger population? The answer is that most people have a lower standard of living than the one enjoyed by North Americans.  Their environmental impact is lower.  So we come to this inescapable question: “What kind of world do we want?” If we want a world where everyone can have a Western lifestyle, then the global human population has to be substantially less than it is now. If we wish to keep the current Western standard of living where it is, while allowing the rest of the world to grow substantially in numbers, the consequence is to doom that “other world” to perpetual misery and lost expectations, while doggedly holding on to the fringes of a Western way of life as desperately as possible. On the other hand, what would be the situation if resources were to be spread evenly across a world population rising to 12 billion during the next fifty years?

 

Regarding food production, a report, titled Agrimonde, published in 2009 by the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and the Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development (CIRAD), concluded that the world will be able to feed a predicted population of nine billion in 2050.  This came from consideration of two scenarios. One stresses economic growth but gives low priority to the environment, whereas the other emphasizes feeding the world while preserving ecosystems. The second scenario, based on a food intake of 3,000 kcal per person per day in all regions of the world, including 500 kcal per day of animal origin, would require an increase of 30% in farm output — compared with 80% for the first scenario — and would mean a substantial cut in food consumption in some countries and a big increase in others.

 

With respect to allocating material resources, ultimately, the quantity of non-food materials consumed currently by 7 billion of us on the planet will need to average out to six metric tons per year per person, requiring a steep cut in the resources currently enjoyed by people in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the U.S.  As it stands now, an average American uses 88 kilograms of materials per day. Also our modern gadgets require at least a steady supply of 60 different elements, ranging from the toxic to the treasured, such as gold.  The scarcity and expense of providing limited materials points to a future gadget-free world.

 

2 Common pool resources

 

Equal justice cannot prevent and indeed always supports growth in population and personal consumption. Such growth, though not inevitable, is a constant environmental threat. If continual growth should ever occur, it eventually causes the breakdown of the ecosystems which support civilization. Henceforth, any viable ethics linking culture and ecology for living sustainably must satisfy the following related requirements:

(1) An acceptable system of ethics is contingent on its ability to preserve the ecosystems which sustain it.

(2) Biological necessity has a veto over the behaviour which any set of moral beliefs can allow or require.

(3) Biological success is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for any acceptable ethical theory. In summary, no ethics can be grounded in biological impossibility; no ethics can be incoherent in that it requires ethical behaviour that ends all further ethical behaviour. Clearly any ethic which tries to do so is mistaken; it is wrong.

 

These requirements are Herschel Elliott’s summary of a general statement on the ‘tragedy of the commons’.  They are aimed at establishing an ethical basis for a common global property regime based on conservation management.

 

The first behavioural adaptations of human primates were associated with having local access to a common pool of natural resources.  This pool consisted of the products of a local ecosystem.  The harvest was obtained through cultural adaptations to the environment as a source of goods collected from lands or waters over which no one individual had exclusive rights.  Such community or family resources are known generally as common pool resources (CPRs), or simply the “commons”. Common pool resources exist in many different ecosystems and under a variety of public or community ownership regimes. Typical historical examples include village pastures and woodlands, state or community forests, waste lands of valleys and uplands, coastal waters, rivers, lakes, village ponds, and the like.  At a family level, materials gleaned from CPRs consist of a wide range of items for personal use and sale, including food, fodder, fuel, fibre, small timber, manure, bamboos, medicinal plants, oils, and building materials for houses and furniture. For the most part, these resources held in common were not always managed for sustainable use.  This is evident from particular case histories such as Easter Island. The story of the Easter islanders is tragic, but at the same time a good lesson for all of us. As colonists, they had a highly developed civilisation for about 600 years, but neglected the destructive effect of their lifestyle on the island’s ecosystems, and ended in a cultural catastrophe having exceeded the island’s carrying capacity.  Dutch sailors who landed in 1722 found a primitive society with about 3,000 people living in squalid reed huts or caves, engaged in almost perpetual warfare in a desperate attempt to secure a portion of the meagre food supplies available on the island and its surrounding marine ecosystems.

 

Ecologists define ‘carrying capacity’ as the population of a given species that can be supported indefinitely in a defined habitat without permanently damaging the ecosystem upon which it depends. However, human technology can support different consumption patterns and, also trade, by which a community can import goods from far-distant ecosystems.  Therefore a simple territorial head-count cannot apply to measure the carrying capacity of human beings. Human carrying capacity must be interpreted as the maximum rate of resource consumption and waste discharge that can be sustained indefinitely without progressively impairing the functional integrity of local ecosystems. The corresponding human population is a function of per capita rates of material consumption and waste output or net productivity divided by per capita demand. This formulation is a simple restatement of Hardin’s ‘Third Law of Human Ecology’:

 

(Total human impact on the ecosphere) = (Population) x (Per capita impact).

 

Throughout history, when access to common pool resources was unrestricted it was difficult to keep them from being overexploited. Degradation of open access resources in the form of over-fishing, deforestation, and over-grazing is an increasing burden on the poor – a trend that leads away from wealth.

 

Nevertheless, even today, throughout the world, rural families with access to large areas of forest or aquatic commons – both rich and poor – are still able to benefit from CPR income.  The commons are of particular importance to landless households, for whom they provide a major fraction of total income. In contemporary Indian society it has been estimated that common pool resources provide about 12 percent of household income to poor households.  The economic value of such resources held in common was, at the beginning of the present millennium, estimated to be about $5 billion a year, or double the amount of development aid that India received at that time.  This is just one example of how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs for equitable sharing.

 

3 Tragedy of the commons

 

Generally, in the past, the supply of natural resources exceeded any demands that humans placed on them. There was no need for markets to manage the harvest. Natural resources were treated as a free good. The abundant supply meant that there were no shortages. People could take what they wanted when they wanted because the supply always exceeded the demand.  But a ‘free for all’ cultural interaction between people and a limited CPR leads inevitably to what has been called ‘the tragedy of the commons’.  It develops in this way. Imagine a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

 

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

 

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

 

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of the total productivity of the commons.

 

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing the commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in an ecosystem that has a limited productivity. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.  In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but social selection favours the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits, as an individual, from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.

 

Only education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed and eventually codified in a system of fair allocation.

 

Common-pool, resources share two characteristics: (1) exclusion or the control of access of potential users is difficult, and (2) each user is capable of subtracting from the welfare of all other users. These two universal characteristics of commons are referred to as the “exclusion problem” and the “subtractability problem,” respectively. In this sense common-pool resources may be defined as those “in which (i) exclusion of beneficiaries through physical and institutional means is especially costly, and (ii) exploitation by one user reduces resource availability for others.”

 

In theory, and often in practice, a group using a CPR can solve the exclusion problem and the subtractability problem. The key is the ability to limit the access of outsiders and to self-regulate its own use. Common property management works through incentives. If members of a group are assured that future harvests would be theirs by right, and not end up being harvested by others, then they have the economic incentive to self-regulate through a system of conservation management.

 

Exclusion means the ability to exclude people other than the members of a defined group. Evidence suggests that successful exclusion under communal property is the rule rather than the exception. However, stresses of population growth, technology change, and economic transformation may contribute to the breakdown of communal property mechanisms for exclusion. The creation of open access by external forces, such as colonialism, warfare and globalization, limits communal property controls for exclusion.

 

Subtractability refers to the ability of social groups to design a variety of mechanisms to regulate resource use among members. In many cases, resource users have been able to avoid “tragedy” by devising rules for self-governance, monitoring mechanisms, and sanctions that rely neither on government control nor private property rights.  Much of the common property literature addresses this issue, and the conditions for effective self-governance. Regulation is not easy and it has been estimated that there may be as many as 40 critical enabling conditions that may be important for the success of commons institutions.

 

In many cases, community-based management systems are inferred to be successful, not because conservation or sustainability can be shown, but because they have survived for long periods through various crises. Such successful commons institutions have received special attention for theory building, precisely because they are long-enduring. Many of them have historical roots such as in the English village greens, Swiss Alpine commons, Japanese village common lands, and Japanese coastal fishery commons. However, is the long-term survival of a community-based management system a good indicator of its sustainability?

 

Resource management systems tend to go through cycles of crisis and recovery and of institutional renewal. Societies are rarely, if ever, in balance with their resources, and commons institutions are rarely stable for long. Instead of equilibrium, one may expect crises and cycles of change, thus shifting the analytical emphasis from stability to resilience, and to increasing the capacity of management systems to learn from experience and to adapt to change and live in harmony with nature. Ancient English village greens and new ones recently created are exemplars of how local biodiversity can be maintained as a community good.

 

4 Lessons from the seashore

 

The concept of communities living in harmony with nature, was popularized in the 18th century. It refers to the idea of people who have not adopted a market economy.  By-passed by modernity they have retained the uncertain livelihoods associated with harvesting local ecosystems in perpetuity.   Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped spread the idea, when, in Émile, he wrote: “Everything is good in leaving the hands of the creator of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”   The theme was articulated by poets and painters imbued with the sounds and pictorial patterns of what were thought to be ancient ways of life.  In his 1992 book Nature’s Metropolis, the environmental historian William Cronon gives an empirically rich description of how the cultural ecology of the American Midwest and its native population were remade through the operation of the market: Bisons and pine trees had once been members of ecosystems defined mainly by flows of energy and nutrients and by relations among neighbouring organisms including humankind. Rearrayed within the ‘second nature’ of the market, they became commodities: things priced, bought, and sold within a system of human exchange. From that change flowed many others. Sudden new imperatives revalued the organisms that lived upon the land. Some, like the bison, bluestem, and pine tree, were priced so low that people consumed them in the most profligate ways and they disappeared as significant elements of the regional landscape. Others, like wheat, corn, cattle, and pigs, became the new dominant species of carefully tended agro-ecosystems. Increasingly, the abundance of a species depended on its utility to the human economy: species thrived more by price than by direct ecological adaptation. New systems of value, radically different from their native American predecessors, determined the fate of entire North American environment and the culture of hunter-gatherers of the Great Plains was destroyed.

 

In mid 19^th century Europe, a similar search was undertaken by urban dwellers for contact with superstition and simplicity of rural peoples who had managed to maintain close to their supposed equilibrium with nature.  This was the quest of Paul Gauguin in 1886 when he travelled to Pont Aven on the coast of Brittany, where he thought that by being among primitive Bretons he could live in harmony with nature.  He was just one of many painters who sought to escape the burgeoning culture of mass production by planting themselves in European coastal communities.  Here the daily lives of families was determined by old skills of boating and fishing that had evolved to enable the shoreline communities to survive, albeit precariously, with what was essential a hunter-gatherer culture, harvesting the marine commons. Gauguin discovered that the culture he valued in Pont Aven was the result of recent expressions of local kinship, with a newly emerged ethnic pride and solidarity.  He continued his quest by moving to the French colony of Tahiti only to find the balance between native and ecosystem had been disrupted for ever by French colonialism. 

 

The small fishing communities, like Pont Aven, who, in the mid 19^th century made a subsistence living by fishing the continental shelf of Western Europe, continued to evolve a mass-fishing culture that was necessary to satisfy ever increasing markets.  In the United Kingdom this distinctive industrial culture of fisher folk, from Scotland to the tip of Cornwall, finally became extinct in the 1980s when the marine commons upon which their economy depended had to be reduced and shared under law through the adoption of a common European fisheries policy.  The extinction of British communities, which the French called ecomenes, that evolved by adopting methods of industrial fishing was only partly the outcome of sharing by law.  Actually, the fish stocks of the North Sea had begun to decline by the beginning of the 20^th century and since then no amount of political wrangling has been able to restore the productivity of the North Sea commons to their fecundity at the dawn of the era of mass trawling. The English town of Grimsby at the mouth of the Humber was the amazing phenomenon at this time. In the space of 100 years, from 1800 to 1900, its population increased sixty fold. It was created from a small medieval community on a tiny muddy creek by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company and it rose to become the premier fishing port in the world. In Grimsby’s heyday it was a prosperous and thriving community, with a population of around 60,000 composed of fortune-seekers from across Britain and the world. The town was self-made in the great tradition of Victorian England. Now, as the result of the European common fisheries policy and over-fishing the size of the fishing fleet has shrunk from over 500 trawlers in the 1950s to only 12 today.  But Grimsby still processes just under 1 million tonnes of fish a year. To put that figure into context, it is almost five times the UK’s EU fishing quota.  However the fish Grimsby adds value to by cooking and packaging comes mostly from Iceland and the Faroe Islands, two countries which are not involved in the EU’s fish quota system. Grimsby’s food processing economy is not sufficient to support a sustainable culture, however, and in 2011 the town was one of Britain’s worst blackspots for youth unemployment, having a quarter of its young people aged 16 to 24-years not in education, employment or training; a group marker for economic unsustainability known as ‘NEETs’.

 

 

5 Ecological footprints and ‘fair shares’

 

Starting with Agenda 21 of the Rio Environmental Summit in 1992, the idea that all people on Earth belong to one global community sharing atmosphere, seas and forests in common has gained ground.  In particular, a global culture of conservation management is emerging with the goal of organising the planet’s capacity to absorb greenhouse gases arising from the spread of all kinds of mass production.  Management of the biosphere under a common property regime is an appropriate worldwide strategy for avoiding a global tragedy of the commons.  However, the adoption of such a strategy of sustainability by the international community at the predicted population of 12 billion by 2050 would inevitably entail the Western countries consuming less to meet the needs of the future. To do this requires the promotion of values that encourage consumption standards that are within the bounds of the ecologically possible and to which all could reasonably aspire. So far there have been two ways of measuring what that level of consumption has to be. One such measure is our ecological footprint; the other entails calculated what a fair share of the world’s resources would be for every one.

 

An ecological footprint is the sum of those areas of ecologically productive space needed to sustain the lifestyle of each person. This would be the area of cropland necessary to produce the food we eat; the area of grazing land for producing animal products; the area of forest to produce wood and paper; the area of sea to produce the fish and seafood we consume; the area of land to accommodate housing and infrastructure; and the area of forest necessary to absorb the CO2 from our energy consumption of fossil fuels.

 

Regarding ecological footprints, it is estimated that Earth has about 22 billion acres of ecologically productive land. This is comprised of about 3.3 billion acres of arable and cropland, 8.4 billion acres of pasture land, and 10.1 billion acres of forest land. Not all of the arable land is of high quality.  Improving agricultural productivity by use of fertilizers and insecticides, or shifting to monoculture forestry, affects ecosystems in other, often deleterious, ways. Expansion of land use in any of those categories can only be done at the expense of one of the other categories, and development of the land for human structures of all kinds competes for this same area. Not only that, but we have to share this land with the other organisms on Earth who might not be able to tolerate the necessary land use ‘improvement’ measures, or to survive the fragmentation of their habitats.

 

To live with a population of 12 billion and maintain a current Western footprint humanity would need 13.5 billion acres of land for food production and 14.4 billion acres for wood products on a steady-state basis to be sustainable, and we would have degraded about 3.6 billion acres for human structures. For humans alone, excluding the needs of other organisms, there is not that much land available simply by considering these sorts of personal footprints!

 

Furthermore, the food footprint calculations cited above used U.S. yields, which are significantly higher than average global yields. If average global yields were used in those calculations, our food footprints would be closer to 3 acres. Earth’s carrying capacity for a population with 3-acre food footprints might be no more than about 4 billion people (12 billion acres of arable, crop and pasture land ÷ 3). Each year more of our most productive farmland is buried under human structures, and both good and marginal farmland becomes unusable due to poor farming practices, so even the estimate of a sustainable carrying capacity of 4 billion people eating and living as Europeans and North Americans may be too high.

 

Another consideration is that the standard of living enjoyed by the developed world had been achieved at the expense of the developing world and was made possible by an economic system that exploited the poor – both individuals and entire nations. The result is an historical situation we have where the eight richest people in the world earn more than the 600 million poorest together, with certain individuals earning more than even affluent countries like New Zealand. The per capita income of Sweden, for example, is equal to the combined per capita income of the 23 poorest African countries, that of the USA to the poorest 35 African countries.

 

While some enjoy unprecedented wealth and luxury, 2.8 billion people are living in extreme poverty, earning less than US$2 a day. One in seven people suffers chronic hunger and 45000 die of starvation every day. This inequity is felt at both a global level, between developed and developing countries, and at a national level where there is great disparities of wealth within countries. Judging by the increasing purchase of luxury goods made in the West by entrepreneurs of the Far East, these inequalities of wealth are being perpetuated in the developing nations.

 

The Fair Shares concept basically looks at the individual’s access to resources – both sink and source. This is calculated on a country-by-country basis as a factor of the national population; as a percentage of the global population; the amount of product produced; and the sink capacity or emissions produced.  It is based on the premise that the total material input into world economy must be halved.  This figure comes from the call to reduce consumption made in 2008 by the Group of 8 — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia — for a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.  The communiqué does not specify if the 50 percent cut is relative to 1990 emission levels (the Kyoto regime) or to current ones. This makes a big difference because emissions have grown significantly over the past 18 years.

 

If the cut is relative to current emissions, it is unlikely that it will be adequate to avoid the more dangerous consequences of global warming. Most scientists agree that nations with developed economies (such as the G8 members) will need to cut emissions relative to today by about 70–80 percent by 2050.  The Fair Shares concept also includes the idea that we have to reduce our resource consumption not because we will run out of resources, but because of the environmental impact of extracting and using those resources.

 

Fair share calculations give us an idea of each person’s fair share of Earth’s resources. For example, it has been calculated that for the European community there would have to be a reduction of the per capita share of primary energy (50%), cement (85%), iron (87%) and aluminium (90%).  Regarding the use of aluminium each person is only allowed 1.2 kg of the metal – that is about 32 drink cans a year. One of the reasons for this is that annually the global production of aluminium uses as much energy as the whole of Africa.

 

The long and tortuous road necessary to produce a sustainable cultural ecology for human survival is not a quick fix to make a peaceful society. Since the Second World War over 20 million people have died in armed conflict and 31 million people are annually affected by it. These figures do not include crime-related deaths. Of the 2.3 million people reported as killed by conflict from 1991-2000, over three quarters were from countries with a low Human Development Index. At the heart of most of these conflicts lies the issue of who gets to control and benefit from resources, whether agricultural land, minerals, fossil fuels or water. Many countries are already experiencing problems with illegal immigration and an influx of both political and environmental refugees. If the imbalance of wealth and power is not dealt with, this problem will only become worse in the future, when it could become the driver for a catastrophic tragedy of the global commons.

 

 

http://www.taxpolicy.com/common/john.htm

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97jun/consume.htm

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

http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/24131_17_Hollway_Ch_17.pdf

http://www.ecofuture.org/pop/rpts/mccluney_maxpop.html

http://dieoff.org/page121.htm

http://www.aae.wisc.edu/pubs/misc/docs/em13.pdf

http://communityfishingheritageuk.wikispaces.com/

http://bcn.boulder.co.us/basin/local/sustain6.htm

http://www.sustainablesettlement.co.za/issues/resources.html

http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx1262xPA-PriorityProductsAndMaterials_Report.pdf

  Since the 1960s, strategies for the governance of sustainable development have been centred on the conservation management of habitats and species.  The associated idea is that bottom-up community action plans must be at the heart of the new economic, social and environmental order.  The conceptual linkage between culture and ecology is landscape and the theme of ‘communities in landscapes’ provides the holistic planning and educational framework for behaviour change.  Landscapes suitable to illustrate the theme are the relatively small valleys of the North Wales coast.  Originally they were settled below an impassable mountain barrier as self-sufficient communities that harnessed the products of river, land and sea.  They never participated in the 19^th developments of the mineral wealth of coal and slate in adjacent places and tourism sealed their fate.  Now, sandwiched between mountain and sea, they exemplify strategic and operational plans for engaging with local sustainability issues of biodiversity and post-industrial economics.

 

These issues in the maritime area of the Menai Strait and Conwy Bay were identified in the 2009 ’Making the Most of the Coast’ partnership initiative, which explored the practical application of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) The natural resources of the study area, which comprise high quality landscapes, biodiversity and cultural history, support a wide diversity of commercial, recreational and other activities. Nevertheless, the coastal area is recognised as being socially and economically deprived due to its remoteness, high unemployment rates, and reliance on a narrow economic base.  However there are numerous economic regeneration initiatives currently being developed regionally and locally.

 

The upland area is where livestock farmers are the traditional guardians of the landscape and their activities can change the character of tracts of land by altering specific features associated with farming such as buildings, farm roads and tracks, and walls or fences. But land management can also affect the character of the wider landscape: reseeding, improved grassland, chemicals, drainage, and overstocking can all have a major impact on the semi-natural ecosystems. Glastir is the latest Welsh government scheme to pay farmers to meet the new challenges facing the upland countryside, such as water management, carbon capture and climate change, which the original support schemes based on reducing the grazing density of sheep and cattle weren’t designed to do.

 

Cultural ecology

Ideas about a framework of governance of human-environment relations are traced back to Charles Darwin. His concept of natural selection suggested that certain social characteristics play a key role in human survival in the natural environment. This is the basis of cultural ecology, which involves communities interacting with social, environmental and biological factors to live in equilibrium with habitats and species, local and distant, upon which they depend for income, food, energy and shelter.

 

Community action cycle

The following diagram (Fig 1) sets out the above cultural ecology framework as a community action cycle.  This is a system by which government and its agencies reach out to communities with strategies and financial allocations, through conservation management systems, to preserve and restore habitats and species to maintain natural capital.  This is one input to cultural capital.  The other input comes from the conservation management of provisioning services.  These are the management systems by which government strategies and financial allocations add directly to cultural capital through improving jobs/homes etc.  The improvements in natural capital and cultural capital are monitored and fed back to guide the development of government policy.

 

 

Fig 1 Ecological framework community action cycle

 

Cultural capital

We now think of our planetary survival kit in terms of the basic cultural capital, i.e. the social practices and objects acquired to make/improve social relationships/status, needed for human well being. This capital consists of meaningful local places, valued landscapes, physical and mental health, leisure, recreation and tourism, aesthetic and inspirational benefits, spiritual and religious benefits, cultural heritage and diversity, education and ecological knowledge. 

 

Natural capital

Cultural capital is supported by the basic ecosystem processes, which comprise our natural capital.  Examples of ecosystem processes are weathering, decomposition, soil formation, nutrient and water cycling, macro-climate, evolutionary processes, ecological interactions with other living things and climate change.  Natural capital is another way of describing the way in which rocks, soils and ecosystems underpin all the things that humans do.  Natural Capital is needed in order to develop the cultural capital that we create. Since nature protection by definition is a social and political process, it stands to reason that our responses to the biodiversity crisis will have to focus on questions of human social organization to maintain a sustainable equilibrium between culture and ecology.

 

Provisioning services

We live off cultural capital by inventing provisioning services such as food production, including wild-caught resources (e.g. fish, honey, game), fibre/ timber/ minerals, fuel, bio-materials, water, and ornamental nature-goods. Provisioning services involve environmental management of natural capital.

 

Conservation management

Provisioning services have to be managed to establish a stable economic relationship between culture and ecology through controlling the impact of local climate, hazards, coastal erosion, flood protection, diseases/pests, pollination, noise, and soil air and water quality. Sustainable development depends upon adopting a conservation management curriculum to live off sustainably-used ecosystem services, so that we only consume the ‘interest’ on the natural capital, rather than exploiting the capital itself.  The long term aim of conservation management is therefore to stabilise the provision of environmental inputs to culture in order to maintain the economic, social and environmental well being of people and communities by:

 

* promoting social justice and equality of opportunity;

 

* respecting the environment’s physical and ecological limits; using, as individuals, only our fair share of the earth’s resources.

 

Maintenance of biodiversity

At the heart of human survival is the maintenance of biodiversity.  This was highlighted in the European Commission’s Communication, ‘Halting The Loss Of Biodiversity By 2010 – And Beyond Sustaining ecosystem services for human well-being’.  It emphasises the connections between biodiversity and our well being and the need for synergistic management.  Published in 2006, it says:

 

‘Over recent decades, humanity has benefited enormously from development, which has enriched our lives. However, much of this development has been associated with a decline in both the variety and extent of natural systems – of biodiversity. This loss of biodiversity, at the levels of ecosystems, species and genes, is of concern not just because of the important intrinsic value of nature, but also because it results in a decline in ‘ecosystem services’ which natural systems provide. These services include production of food, fuel, fibre and medicines, regulation of water, air and climate, maintenance of soil fertility, cycling of nutrients. In this context concern for biodiversity is integral to sustainable development.

 

This ecosystem approach to manage human production was actually adopted by the world community as long ago as 1968 at the “Biosphere Conference” organized by UNESCO. This was the first intergovernmental conference examining how to reconcile the conservation of natural capital with the use of natural resources for economic development, thereby foreshadowing the present-day notion of sustainable development.  This conference resulted in the launching of the UNESCO “Man and the Biosphere” (MAB) programme in 1970. One of the original MAB projects consisted in establishing a coordinated World Network of sites representing the main ecosystems of the planet in which genetic resources would be protected, and where research on ecosystems as well as monitoring and training work could be carried out. These sites were named “Biosphere Reserves”, in reference to the MAB programme itself.

 

Each biosphere reserve is intended to fulfil 3 basic functions, which are complementary and mutually reinforcing:

 

• a conservation function – to contribute to the conservation of landscapes, ecosystems, species and genetic variation;
• a development function – to foster economic and human development which is socio-culturally and ecologically sustainable;
• a logistic function – to provide support for research, monitoring, education and information exchange related to local, national and global issues of conservation and development.

 

This tripartite view actually sets out the requirements of a conservation management curriculum for educating people in an ecological framework for living sustainably.

 

In 1993, the international Convention on Biological Diversity defined the ecosystem approach as:

 

“a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way”

 

The Convention on Biological Diversity in 2000 reaffirmed the definition as the primary framework for action under the Convention and it was endorsed by the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. It recommends that ecosystem management should be central to sustainable development based on the multiple functions that ecosystems perform and the multiple uses that humans make of these functions.

 

The ecosystem approach

Human social evolution in the West has been a steady move away from dependence on local ecosystems to reliance on those of distant lands. Former cultures based on local provisioning services, such as fishing, have been shorn of their cultural roots in the local natural capital by unmanaged exploitation.

 

The principles of the ecosystem approach of 2002 can be summarised into three main themes:

 

* It operates on large scales or “Landscapes”. Conservation should consider the structure, functions, and dynamism of the ecosystems. Ecosystem managers should set long-term objectives considering the effects on adjacent and other ecosystems. These holistic approaches call for balance between the different forces at play in the landscape and also call for environmental considerations to be integrated with the different sectoral policies. This can also be considered as an attempt to integrate conservation and development at the landscape level.

* It addresses the root causes of biodiversity loss. Ecosystem managers should address the economic drivers adversely affecting biodiversity, align incentives to promote an appropriate balance and the integration of conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity, as well as internalise costs and benefits.

* It involves a wide range of relevant actors. There should be the decentralization of management to involve the lowest level, and consideration of the different societal choices and knowledge to be made from a community level.

 

The actual principles of the Ecosystem Approach are:

 

1. The objectives of management of land, water and living resources are a matter of societal choice.

2. Management should be decentralised to the lowest appropriate level.

3. Ecosystem managers should consider the effects (actual or potential) of their activities on adjacent and other ecosystems.

4. Recognising potential gains from management, there is usually a need to understand and manage the ecosystem in an economic context. Any such ecosystem-management programme should:

a. Reduce those market distortions that adversely affect biological diversity;

b. Align incentives to promote biodiversity conservation and sustainable use; and

c. Internalise costs and benefits in the given ecosystem to the extent feasible.

5. Conservation of ecosystem structure and functioning, in order to maintain ecosystem services, should be a priority target of the ecosystem approach.

6. Ecosystems must be managed within the limits of their functioning.

7. The ecosystem approach should be undertaken at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales.

8. Recognising the varying temporal scales and lag-effects that characterise ecosystem processes, objectives for ecosystem management should be set for the long term.

9. Management must recognise that change is inevitable.

10. The ecosystem approach should seek the appropriate balance between, and integration of, conservation and use of biological diversity.

11. The ecosystem approach should consider all forms of relevant information, including scientific, indigenous and local knowledge, innovations and practices.

12. The ecosystem approach should involve all relevant sectors of society and scientific disciplines.

 

Conservation with social justice

In ecology, ‘sustainability’ describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time.  This is a necessary precondition for human well-being. Long-lived and diverse wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems.  Sustainability is also the human capacity to endure and conservation management is the tool by which humans, as part of nature, are able to guarantee the long-term maintenance of well being.  Well being has economic, and social dimensions as well as ecological ones, and encompasses the concept of ‘union’, an interdependent relationship and mutual responsible position with all living and non living things on Earth. This philosophical interpretation of conservation moves well beyond definitions driven by progress-oriented economic perspectives that see humans as providing stewardship through the responsible management of habitats and species.

 

Taking this wider view of conservation, there are two major ways of managing human impact on ecosystem services. One approach is management of natural capital; this approach is based largely on information gained from earth science, biology, and ecology. Another approach is management of the provisioning services underlying the consumption of resources, which is based largely on information gained from the economics of social justice.

 

Human sustainability interfaces with social justice through the social and ecological consequences of economic activity. Conservation management for sustainability has to address this challenge of cultural ecology by controlling factors in the domains of international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyles and ethical consumerism. Conservation management for living more sustainably can take many forms from reorganising living conditions (e.g., ecovillages, transition towns and sustainable cities), to reappraising work practices (e.g., using permaculture, green building, sustainable agriculture), or developing new technologies that reduce the consumption of resources.

 

The Welsh government’s ‘natural environment framework’

At the heart of the history of modern Wales is the exhaustion of the massive coal deposits which kick-started the industrial revolution and led to the rise and fall of mining, mineral and metal working cultures. In this context it is not surprising that the long-standing international/European recommendation for cultural ecology to be at the heart of sustainable development was picked up by the Welsh Government in 2009 and published as a strategic document ‘A Living Wales’.

 

‘A Living Wales’ is so-called in part because it seeks to create a real linkage between Wales’ many existing strategies, plans and policies aimed at producing synergistic, sustainable development benefits.  This requires a matrix of the aims, objectives and grant giving programmes of all agencies that have an input to managing the country’s Green and Blue Infrastructure. They may all then be focused on ‘communities in a landscape’. Those, such as River Basin Management Plans, the Wales Woodland Strategy, Glastir (a Welsh farming/wildlife scheme), and Local Development and National Park Management Plans, and several relevant technical advice notes to planning authorities (TANS), are already in place or soon to be so. Just as important will be the Rural Development Plan, the Climate Change Strategy, the Wales Spatial Plan and forthcoming Marine Policy Statement and Marine Spatial Plan for Welsh waters, and the developing National Infrastructure Plan and Networked Environment Regions initiative.  Policies and strategies for Food and Farming, Transport, Economy, Regeneration, Health and Education have a vital role to play.

 

A Living Wales is now being progressed as the Government’s Natural Environment Framework (NEF). The amalgamation of the three government agencies responsible for habitats and wildlife, forestry and other environmental services will be part and parcel of the aim of embedding sustainable development as an objective in all policy and its delivery.  One of the vital characteristics of holistic community work at the landscape level, whether it is a local housing estate or a watershed catchment, is that landscape management is ‘people’ centred. This is important because people are an integral element of the landscape and hence should be widely involved with its management for their benefit.

 

Bringing environment to home

Although a local natural environment framework governing livelihoods cannot be incorporated directly into home life as it used to be for fisher families and semi-self sufficient country folk, there are still many indirect routes to draw environment and home together (Fig 2).

 

A strong body of psychological research, supported by widespread anecdotal evidence, confirms the hypothesis that mental contact with our dependence on nature leads to increased mental health and psychological development. This research helps explain the attraction of parks and tree lined streets for city-dwellers and supports the value of increasing contact with nature for children and adults.  Research settings include a full range of encounters with nature on holiday, walking in a tree-lined streets, neighbourhood open space or a local nature reserve, playing in a city park or backyard, gardening, tending a small plot of urban grass or a vacant city lot with its attendant ecosystem, and even watching nature scenes on TV.

 

While different psychological approaches (evolutionary, behavioural, cognitive, psychodynamic, systems-based, humanistic, and transpersonal) focus on different aspects of the psychological benefits of nature experiences, all have shown that nature experiences, direct or indirect, are desirable and healthy. This is phenomenal agreement! There is also limited, but suggestive, research that these findings are cross-cultural and universal.  This kind of environmental education was defined by the UNESCO Tbilisi Declaration in 1978 as being based on a sub-liminal learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible local and international action.  No doubt this educational experience can be re-enforced by social marketing; a challeng to embed NEF in Welsh homes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig 2 Routes for environmental education in the home

 

 

 

The North Wales landscape model

As society struggles to come to grips with increasing degradation of the land, its resources, and faltering ecosytems, all governments are realizing their limited resources and professional capacities, to assist social change towards a sustainable future. Increasingly, authorities from a variety of disciplines such as economics, social sciences and biological sciences, are also recognizing the limited capacities of traditional forms of compartmentated public sector organization.  Working across boundaries is required to deal effectively with the scale, complexity, and inter-relatedness of environmental problems for long-term sustainability. This recognition challenges the ability of governmental silo bureaucracies to adjust to, or engage, in more integrated on-ground models. Partnerships between government and communities at all levels are vital in the quest for integrated sustainable development and conservation with social and environmental justice. It is at the community level that all channels of advice, funding and services converge.

 

The landscape model (Fig 3; Table 1) is an attempt to meet this challenge.  It is a demonstration model of a citizens environmental network to encourage people to assemble an holistic view of communities and their habitats.  It covers a small part of Wales centred on the watershed catchments of rivers running off the northern flank of Snowdonia.   It includes the coastal valley landscapes of rivers from the Cegin (Maesgeirchen)to the Clwyd (Kinmel Bay).

 

 Fig 3 North Wales coastal valleys model: Maesgeirchan to Kinmel Bay

 

 

http://www.communitywalk.com/conwy_a_model_of_cultural_ecology/map/1459746

 

Table 1 River systems and their oastal communities

 

River/watershed	Coastal community
Cegin	Maesgeirchen
Ogwen	Llandygai
Rhaedr	Abergwyngregyn
Ddu	Llanfairfechan
Gyrach	Dwygyfylch
Conwy	Conwy
Llanelian, Branar, Glyn-Lws	Llandudno, Colwyn Bay, Llanddulas
Clwyd	Kinmel Bay

 

Picturing the functional topography of the units of communities and ecosystems moves the functional units of community programmes beyond a traditional narrow organisational focus for delivery. It requires evolution of providers and recipients towards a common conservation management curriculum.   Such a knowledge framework can encourage the use of integrated multi-issue landscape models. A new definition of conservation management and holistic thinking can emerge coupled with bottom up negotiation and organizational learning whereby communities can present themselves to the world.

 

This kind of landscape model has much common with UNESCO’s biosphere reserves. The problem with the UNESCO designation, of which there are only nine in the UK, is that by so signalling an area, everywhere else is undervalued.

 

The North Wales valley system is not a biosphere reserve, but nevertheless contains areas of riverine, upland and coastal ecosystems promoting solutions to reconcile the conservation of outstanding biodiversity with its sustainable use. As a living landscape unit it can serve in some ways as an integrated set of ‘living laboratories’ for testing out and demonstrating integrated management of land, water and biodiversity. 

 

The basic format is a knowledge framework and a set of software toolkits for integrating ecology, culture, education and sustainability to encourage the production of community action plans with the outcomes being reported on line in community wikis. In this context, conservation management is equated with planning for sustainability in all aspects of community life and any neighbourhood becomes a distinctive place worthy of environmental improvement. A community conservation management plan, can be modelled on the preservation or enhancement of its core green heritage assets, no matter how small. The plan can then be developed for other community assets, such as transport, security, energy use, tidiness, and opportunities for employment and recreation.

 

The demonstration model of a community led reporting system can be seen at:

 

 http://www.communitywalk.com/communities_in_landscapes_north_wales/map/1459746

 

It consists of a development of the Google geographical information system, called Community Walks, to which existing Wikipedia entries of actual communities are attached. A “wiki” is an interlinked set of Web pages written by the people who use it: the beauty of a wiki is that anyone can edit and contribute. Wiki Spot is another nonprofit, member-supported effort, dedicated to helping communities use wikis and connect them on line to create a citizen’s environmental network.

 

Making community action plans

In the UK Strategy for Sustainable Development, the idea of a ‘citizen’s environmental network’ was proposed as a way of helping communities make action plans and tell others about their ideas and achievements.

 

Community-led environmental improvements are often limited by the lack of: –

 

• a logical management structure which links objectives with grass roots operations, particularly with regards monitoring the success in achieving practical targets;
• a recording system for maintaining year on year momentum, which also has an integral reporting system for keeping all members of the community up to date;
• access to standard methods and procedures which have proved successful in the past;
• the inadequacies of paper systems to centralise management, recording, and communication.

 

To remove these limitations requires access to feedback from the experiences of many communities.  This GIS networking promotes the rapid development of ideas and methods to promote environmental appraisal and the long-term management of neighbourhood historical assets, green spaces and home and community services. The overall outcome is the promulgation of a sense of place, improvements in quality of life, reduction in environmental impacts of day to day living, and the enhancement of biodiversity.

 

 

On line references

 

http://www.culturalecology.info/

 

http://www.ccw.gov.uk/landscape–wildlife/managing-land-and-sea/sustaining-ecosystem-services.aspx?lang=en

 

http://conserveonline.org/workspaces/conservationcurricula/

 

http://ajust.wikispaces.com

 

http://www.ceh.ac.uk/sci_programmes/CarbonCatchmentsConwy.htm

 

http://landmap.ccw.gov.uk/files/CaseStudy_10.pdf

 

http://www.conwy.gov.uk/upload/public/attachments/466/Llanrwst_Vision__consultation_document_Aug_20111.pdf

 

http://conwy.leadpartners.co.uk/docs.asp?doc=llandudno&sec=llandudno

 

http://images.library.wisc.edu/EcoNatRes/EFacs/NAPC/NAPC15/reference/econatres.napc15.dbrunckhorst2.pdf

 

http://www.northwalesweeklynews.co.uk/conwy-county-news/local-conwy-news/2011/09/15/two-wards-no-longer-deprived-in-conwy-county-55243-29421934/

 

http://www.landscape-forum-ireland.com/proceedings_1998/holistic_landscape_management.html

 

http://www.field-studies-council.org/media/25080/Afon%20Conwy%20map.pdf

 

http://www.communitywalk.com/map/index/1459746

 

http://www.ceh.ac.uk/sci_programmes/CurrentConwyResearch.html

 

http://mie.esab.upc.es/ms/informacio/sostenibilitat/Learnig%20sustainable%20development.pdf

 

http://www.sierraclub.org/policy/conservation/justice.aspx

 

http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/pwilshus/scholarship/snr_sqwh2.pdf

 

http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/G02526.pdf

 

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-3789-contested-nature.aspx

 

http://www.unesco.org/mab/doc/faq/brs.pdf

 

http://practicalconservationmanagement.wikispaces.com/

 

http://educationforconservation.wikispaces.com/

 

http://iasc2008.glos.ac.uk/conference%20papers/papers/B/Backhaus_102702.pdf

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14443812/Developing-Recommendations-for-the-Delivery-of-Integrated-Coastal-Zone-Management-ICZM-in-the-Menai-Strait-and-Conwy-Bay

 

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=402770§ion=3.1

 

http://wikispot.org/Create_a_wiki

 

Holisic thinking.

To bring conservation management to the heart of family life requires an ability in each individual to conceptualise the wholeness of self and environment as an integral set of beliefs to live by and a practical context that gives meaning to life.  In other words, nature and the oneness of humankind should not be something observed from a distance, but be all-encompassing and self-defining. The long overdue task of education is therefore to teach people to live mentally so close to others, both other living things and other people, in all their diversity, that they have difficulty distinguishing themselves from them.  This biocentric outlook as a belief system in cultural ecology may be summarised as learning to see:

• that we are biochemically, physiologically and behaviourally the same as all other kinds of organisms.
• that each kind of organism is a unique individual pursuing its own good in its own way signifying a fundamental reality common to all organisms.
• that the chances of an organism faring well or poorly at the levels of individuals, populations, communities and species, are determined by its relations with other living things.
• that each kind of organism is not a special object, or superior product of creation but the product of a system that has also produced every other kind of organism.

By being with others in all these ways we accept responsibilities with regard to protecting natural ecosystems and biotic communities of our planet.  These responsibilities are in every case based on the fact that our treatment of those ecosystems and communities can promote human values and/or human rights. In this context, the rule of restorative justice imposes a duty to deal with acts which adversely affects the good of other organisms. 

Restoring the balance of ecological justice gives voice to victims in forums designed not to deliver verdicts but to ascertain truth and restore the trust underlying afflicted communities. Justice is conceived as preceding, creating the political space for, and supplementing justice defined in retributive, and distributive terms. That is, restorative justice politicizes those communities that so often become the front lines for the environmental justice movement. When the environment is harmed, who should represent the trees? When an animal on the protected species list is killed, who will speak for that species? Surrogates are used, such as First Nation leaders or environmental experts.  The community may be represented by those who express an interest in prosecution, and or mitigation.

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This ability to think and act biocentrically may be described as ecosacy; i.e. a third basic ability to be taught alongside literacy and numeracy. The term ecosacy comes directly from the Greek oikos meaning house, and household management, including making decisions about the natural resources that flow into it. To be ecosate means having the knowledge and mind-set to act, speak and think according to deeply held beliefs and belief systems about people and other life forms in nature, which may be conceptualised as ‘a community of beings’.

The educational framework of ecosacy is cultural ecology. The term has its origin in the work of Steward in the 1930s on the social organization of hunter-gatherer groups. Steward argued against environmental determinism, which regarded specific cultural characteristics as arising from environmental causes. Using band societies as examples, he showed that social organization itself corresponded to a kind of ecological adaptation of a human group to its environment. He defined cultural ecology as the study of adaptive processes by which the nature of society and an unpredictable number of features of culture, are affected by the basic adjustment through which humans manage the flows of materials and energy through given environment.

Cultural ecology originated from an ethnological approach to the modes of production of native societies around the world as managerial adaptations to their local environments. It has long been accepted that this anthropological view is too narrow. It isolates knowledge about the ancient ways of resource management from possible applications to present day issues of urban consumerism. Because traditional systems often involve long-term adaptations to specific environments and resource management problems, which fall within the modern definition of ‘conservation’, they are of interest to resource managers everywhere. Also, there are lessons to be learned from the cultural significance of traditional ecological knowledge with regard to the sometimes sacred dimensions of indigenous knowledge, such as symbolic meanings and their importance for social relationships and values.

Conservation management is now an institutional process of political adaptation to the environmental impact of global industrial development. Conservation systems are concerned with stabilising the functional relationships between people and the environment, and managerialism has to be integrated into people’s perceptions of how they fit within ecological systems and the biocentric outlook.  In the latter context conservation management can be a practical outcome of restorative justice.

 

Energese: towards an energy systems language

 The search for a dynamic mapping system for a scientific biocentric outlook began with research into the human cultural use of metabolic and work energy.  In particular, the seamless couplng in a species energy model of the biosphere, was first sytematically explored by Howard T. Odum in the 1960s.  He began with the flows of energy and matter through ‘Silver Spring’, a common type of spring-fed stream in Florida, with a constant temperature and chemical composition. This study was the first complete analysis of a natural ecosystem. Odum started with an overall model and in his early work used a diagramming methodology very similar to the Sankey diagrams used in chemical process engineering. In this model, energy and matter flows through an ecosystem of herbivores, carnivores, and decomposers. Starting from that overall model Odum mapped in detail all the flow routes to and from the stream. He measured the energy input of sun and rain, and of all organic matter – even measuring the bread the tourists threw to the ducks and fish – and then measured the energy that gradually left the spring. In this way he was able to establish the stream’s energy-sharing budget.

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By the end of the 1960s Odum’s electronic circuit ecological simulation models were replaced using a more general set of energy symbols. When combined to form systems diagrams, these symbols were considered by Odum and others to be the language of the habitat, which could portray generalized patterns of energy flow and species interdependence.  Describing such patterns and also reducing ecosystem complexities to flows of energy, Odum believed, would permit discovery of general ecological principles, beginning with the fact that to gain energy for food, or as fuel for work, some energy has to be expended.  Energy is therefore an investment, even in its most accessible forms. The energy return on investment is the energy produced from the fuel extracted divided by the energy required to locate, extract, refine and distribute that fuel.  The difference between what is expended and what is then used  is the energy gain.   In a wild animal population, having to allocate effort to gather rare energy may mean less winter fat, increased embryo resorption, and lower birth weights. The potential impacts of such a situation on a human community could include less leisure time, a lower standard of living, higher taxes, and an increase in childhood mortality. In other words, energy gain defines important features of particular human cultures and their development.  The juxtaposition of human and animal energy flows in this way indicates that the concept of energy gain has potential to aid our understand commonalities across living systems.  It is therefore a valuable approach to investigating past and future human behaviour change associated with ecological resource transitions and the social provision of ‘just shares’ in environmental goods and services.

Regarding the application of the principle of ‘just shares’ to the use of energy in human economic development, if all persons have a basic right to climatic stability, then aggregate global emissions must be capped at a level that is at or below the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb those emissions. If all have a basic right to these ‘survival emissions’, then the costs associated with achieving those necessary reductions from current emissions must be assigned on the basis of historical luxury emissions.  They must also grant nations and persons entitlement to some basic minimum per capita level of emissions. Recognizing a less basic right to develop along with these two basic rights requires that developing countries be allowed per capita emissions shares that include both survival and luxury emissions – with the latter being a necessary, but insufficient, condition for development

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Culture; environment; history.

By the 1980s the human ecological-functional view had prevailed as a scientific approach to the environmental and social impacts of industrialism. It had become a conventional way to present scientific concepts in the ecological perspective of human animals dominating an overpopulated world, with the practical aim of producing a sustainable culture. This is exemplified by I. G. Simmons book Changing the Face of the Earth, with its telling subtitle “Culture, Environment History” which was published in 1989. Simmons was a geographer, and his book was a tribute to the influence of W.L Thomas’ edited collection, Man’s role in ‘Changing the Face of the Earth, that came out in 1956. In his book, Simmons arranged the historical ideas of energy flow and culture in chapters, each of which is characterised by a stage of socio-economic evolution.  The quantities of energy used by human groups at various historical stages, together with the purposes for which it was used, is illustrated in the following diagram.  In the book, chapter 2 deals with the lowest group on the diagram; chapter 3 with the hunters; chapter 4 with both types of agriculturalist, and chapter 5 with the remaining groups.  Chapter 6 deals mostly with alternatives to the ‘technological society’, but also considers an integral part of it in the shape of nuclear energy.

  

The next diagram illustrates the energy sources available at different economic stages each referring to a chapter (2-6) of the book.

 

Simmons’ book was one of many interdisciplinary culture/ environment publications of the 1970s and 1980s, which triggered a crisis in geography with regards its subject matter, academic sub-divisions, and boundaries. This was resolved by officially adopting conceptual frameworks as an approach to facilitate the organisation of research and teaching that cuts cross old subject divisions. Cultural ecology is in fact a conceptual arena that has, over the past six decades allowed sociologists, physicists, zoologists and geographers to enter common intellectual ground from the sidelines of their specialist subjects.  Simmons felt that the above table and diagram defined the unifying theme of energy flow which runs through his book.  In this respect, it could be considered as the first attempt to produce a comprehensive syllabus for imparting energy literacy. 

Within it are the first glimmerings of a yearning for a softer world exemplified by a quotation from Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891).  Here Hardy contrasts the adoption of the energy from coal to drive the plough and mechanised harvester with the age-old use of the metabolic energy of farm labourers.  The world was on the cusp of industrialisation.

‘He (the engineman)…. was in the agricultural world but not of it.  He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the field served vegetation, weather, frost and sun’

Nearly a century later, the rural energy revolution was complete, and Simmons quoted from R. S. Thomas description of a Welsh hill farmer celebrating his freedom from metabolic toil.

Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor.
Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil;
He is a new man now, part of the machine,
His nerves of metal, and his blood oil.
The clutch curses, but the gears obey
His least bidding, and lo, he’s away
Out of the farmyard, scattering hens.
Riding to work now as a great man should,
He is the knight at arms breaking the fields’
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.
The sun comes over the tall trees
Kindling all the hedges, but not for him
Who runs his engine on a different fuel.
And all the birds are singing, bills wide in vain,
As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.

Thomas, who was born in Wales with a Celtic ancestry, wrote in 1946. “Are not three-quarters of our modern ills due to the fact that we have forgotten how to live . . . ?”  He was seared by modern soullessness and modernity’s destruction of the Welsh countryside by roads and housing projects and vacationers. Thomas’ political response was Welsh nationalism of the time, with its intense preoccupation with the past. For him, England represented modernity and therefore all that was superficial, mechanical, materialistic, vulgar, and vapid. Observation of the beauties of the natural world, particularly the landscape and bird life, was for him a spiritual exercise, a view that now leads into the realm of ‘deep ecology’ in environmental education.

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It was in the 1970s that international efforts were made to produce an interdisciplinary education programme as the only way to deal with our abuse of nature and its finite resources. The First United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, raised the urgent need for environmental education  and the International Environmental Education Programme of UNESCO – UNEP was launched in the following year. The momentum continued and, in 1977, during the First Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education in Tblissi, Georgia, UNESCO-UNEP approved the guiding principles and goals of environmental education as being important for the future of humankind and urged all nations to incorporate environmental issues into their education systems. This call was reinforced in 1987 in Moscow. The goals in brief were:

1 – To promote a clear awareness of the economic interdependence of social, and environmental policy in all ecosystems.

2 – Allocate to each person the tools (knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, etc.) to protect and develop the environment within the objectives of sustainable development.

3 – Create a whole society with clearly defined ethical standards with responsibility towards the environment.

However, UNEP-UNESCO recognised that as new concepts these goals had to be introduced into national education systems filled with traditional subjects, and recommended that environmental education should be incorporated within these existing subjects.  Nevertheless, it was recognised that when environmental education is considered as a negotiable option in an overcrowded curriculum, its value is greatly diminished.

The latter point was emphasised forcibly two decades later, when in the year of the first Earth environment summit David Orr, published his book ‘Ecological Literacy’. He concluded that environmental education will be ineffective in advancing its own goal of creating an environmentally or ecologically literate citizenry as long as it continues to discipline itself within the norms of general education.  Yet, here we are in 2011 still discussing the importance of making spaces within a general curriculum to meet the 1972 goals.  It is ironic that the goals to save humankind are regarded as less important than the pedagogy of subjects established to expand the economic fruits of the European industrial revolution. These disciplinary boundaries, norms, routines, and standardizations that characterize conventional education, work against the experiential, affective, collaborative, interdisciplinary, action-oriented, and transformative goals of UNESCO-UNEP.  It is the trench warfare of practitioners of traditional subjects that prevents environmental education breaking with the traditional curriculum models and appearing as a new multidisciplinary stand-alone examinable subject.  This infighting is compounded by the fuzzy nature of environmental studies, where there can be as many ways of creating an ideational framework as there are teachers.  Indeed, research into environmental education, has shown that problems with study design, materials, and methods of analysis have greatly limited the relevance of outcomes.

Conservation curricula

In view of the virtual impossibility of presenting environmental education as a stand-alone subject, a sharper focus is needed on an educational concept that is believed to be both rational and prudent– namely, “resource conservation.”  Yet, There can be little doubt that knowledge about conservation planning and active environmental management is either missing or confined to the periphery of environmental education. 

For example the UNESCO_UNEP 90 page educational module on ‘Conservation and Management of Natural Resources’ urges that pupils should ‘plan’ for the use of various natural resources, but nowhere is there a requirement to teach the generic process of how to make a plan.   The following extracts make this need and the deficiency clear.

(i) Environmental education should – stress both the need for active participation leading to specific action, and a desire and concern to play a real part in the work of planning, developing and managing the environment.

(ii) Group evaluation based on activities

Imagine an ideal situation in which you are in charge of the planning and running of a small town of 5,000 inhabitants situated deep in the country, with rivers and forests and crops and pasture-land all around it. Make a detailed plan explaining how you intend to go about your task, what you would construct and how you would manage it.

The essence of a curriculum, compared with a knowledge framework, is that the former is the course of actions and experiences through which people become the individuals they should be to play a role in the creation of solidarity in society.

The need for education in conservation management was clear enough to Orr in 1994 when he wrote: 

“Those now being educated will have to do what we, the present generation, have been unable or unwilling to do: stabilise world population; stabilise and then reduce the emission of greenhouse gases; protect biological diversity; reverse the destruction of forests everywhere; and conserve soils. They must learn how to use energy and materials with great efficiency. They must learn how to utilise solar energy in all its forms. They must rebuild the economy in order to eliminate waste and pollution. They must learn how to manage renewable resources for the long run. They must begin the great work of repairing as much as possible, the damage done to Earth in the past 200 years of industrialisation. And they must do all this while they reduce worsening social and racial inequities. No generation has ever faced a more daunting agenda”  ((Orr, D. Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, D.C.: Island Press)).

In calling for a wise use of Earth’s resources, Orr’s stabilising agenda is an urgent plea for curricula that encourage humankind to plan for the future by behaving to keep a rein on consumerism, keep a richness of nature, keep a resilience in community, keep a reserve of production and keep a focus on environmental justice to combat the social destruction wrought by inequality as a cross-cutting theme. These are five major global managerial principles by which we should plan our environmental demands to maintain ourselves in balance with Earth’s ecological productivity whilst maintaining equal shares for all.  In other words, the issue of conservation is far greater that maintaining a few tens of acres of woodland in a favourable condition.  Ecosystem management is required on a planetary scale, the extremes being geo-engineering and sociology applied to deliver just shares of Earth’s bounty; with the attendant question, how can it all work politically?

Educationalists may tackle these principles and questions starting from different windows on the processes by which we manage natural resources and people for production.  However, all stabilising curricula must point to the need for human endeavour to mainstream conservation planning and management in school, home, workplace and recreation.  Conservation here refers to the protection and sustainable use of all human resources, including management of environmental inequalities, cultural heritage, natural resources, community open spaces and protected nature sites.  Therefore, a conservation management curriculum is essentially an applied systems-approach to culture and ecology focusing on the ways in which natural resources and human resources can come together through ‘just shares management systems’ for living in harmony with nature. 

Orr’s summary of a stabilising curriculum is just one of many variations on the theme of education for sustainability, where there will always be argument about the purposes of environmental education, the meanings of sustainability and the best way to respond to climate change. However, in terms of its basis in predictive logic, training in conservation management should be an essential centrepiece of training for citizen action.  The aim is to develop individuals who are capable of making wise choices regarding appropriate and effective citizen behaviours and who are willing and able to apply those behaviours responsibly to environmental issue remediation. Thus, learners become familiarized with the methods of action at their disposal as citizens, and become skilled in the use of those actions.  From being concerned with global environmental issues they turn to environmental issues experienced in daily life.

  Delivery.

By definition, a conservation management curriculum is a stand-alone knowledge system because it is based on the simple logic of planning by setting measurable objectives and scheduling tasks to meet the targets. 

The content of the learning environment can expand from the logic base of environmental management to fill the time and space available.  This makes it ideal for flexible modular delivery within existing subjects. Regarding the problem of creating space within an overcrowded array of traditional subjects, there are new self-learning developments in the Web.  These can provide individuals with various opportunities of personalizing the tools and services, and performing self-directed learning in an open and social context with their personal learning environments. Social software enables people to actively reflect, publish and share learning experiences; gain awareness and monitor other learners, communities and networks; publicly store and maintain the evidences of their learning; and personally retrieve socially gathered information. Learners can autonomously combine various tools, material and human resources into personal learning environments in order to enter with their personal environments into various learning activities and citizen’s environmental networks. 

Some ideas along these lines may be seen at a workspace set up at ConserveOnline for exploring ways of incorporating conservation management into education at all levels as conservation curricula, with the aim of delivering knowledge and tools for learning about how to make and operate plans for a sustainable future.

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“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 lose the comforts that we few hundreds of millions enjoy, which are bought at the cost to the illiterate billions who we know cannot rise to our life styles. At the centre of our behaviour 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 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.   

We are now well into the era of rural depopulation, which was starting to spread worldwide at the 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.  This marked 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 promote a school 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 has to deal with how biophysical resources of the planetary economy are organised for production.  Therefore, education 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 good-life we define as living sustainably (Fig 1). 

Fig 1 A mind map of natural economy 

  

Natural economy was designed by Cambridge teachers as a cross-curricular knowledge system, which requires teaching resources that are holistic, and exemplify the imaginative leaps across subject boundaries necessary to put short-term plans 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 pupils to navigate effortlessly through a sea of detail.  An interactive mind map format is essential to command a full understanding of natural economy and its applications to environmental management.  It is also essential to have social models of the past, which continue to echo through the ages, in order to understand current issues of the relationships of people and land.  For example, there is much fear around regeneration in ordinary communities because of past models such as the Highland Clearances that had no regard for the ordinary people that would be displaced and were driven on a class agenda. A century or so later, the Scottish Slum Clearances that, though well intentioned, broke up the connectiveness of families, neighbourhoods, societies, clubs, brass bands, orchestra’s etc and left a remnant of misery that led to siege mentality, crime and anti-social behaviour. 

2 Land for the few 

What became known historically as the ‘Clearances’ were considered by 18th century Scottish landlords as necessary “improvements” to their landed estates. The social upheaval is now regarded as an international model of social injustice and ethnic cleansing.  As the outcome of the relationship of the Scottish elite with their hereditary tribal lands, the clearances are thought to have been begun by Admiral John Ross of Balnagowan Castle in Scotland in 1762. Actually, MacLeod Chief of the Clan MacLeod, had begun experimental work on Skye in 1732. Chiefs engaged Lowland, or sometimes English, managers with expertise in more profitable sheep farming, and they “encouraged”, often forcibly, the population to move off suitable land, which was given over to sheep pasture. A wave of mass emigration from the land came in 1792, known as the “Year of the Sheep” to Scottish Highlanders. The dispossessed tenants were accommodated in poor crofts or small farms in coastal areas where farming could not sustain the communities and they were expected to take up fishing. It is said that in the village of Badbea in Caithness the conditions were so harsh that, while the women worked, they had to tether their livestock and even their children to rocks or posts to prevent them being blown over the cliffs. Others were put directly onto emigration ships to Nova Scotia, the Kingston area of Ontario and the Carolinas of the American colonies. There may have been a religious element in these forced removals since many Highlanders were Roman Catholic. This is reflected by the majority representation of Catholics in areas and towns of Nova Scotia such as Antigonish and Cape Breton. However almost all of the very large movement of Highland settlers to the Cape Fear region of North Carolina were Presbyterian, which is evidenced even today in the presence and extent of Presbyterian congregations and adherents in the region. 

In 1807 Elizabeth Gordon, 19th Countess of Sutherland, touring her inheritance with her husband Lord Stafford (later made Duke of Sutherland), wrote that “he is seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements, and we both turn our attention with the greatest of energy to turnips”. As well as turning land over to sheep farming, Stafford planned to invest in creating a coal-pit, saltpans, brick and tile works and herring fisheries. That year his agents began the evictions, and 90 families were forced to leave their crops in the ground and move their cattle, furniture and timbers to the land they were offered 20 miles away on the coast, living in the open until they had built themselves new houses. Stafford’s first Commissioner, William Young, arrived in 1809, and soon engaged Patrick Sellar as his factor who pressed ahead with the process while acquiring sheep farming estates for himself. Elsewhere, the flamboyant Alexander Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry portrayed himself as the last genuine specimen of the true Highland Chief while his tenants were subjected to a process of relentless eviction. To landlords, “improvement” and “clearance” did not necessarily mean depopulation. At least until the 1820s, when there were steep falls in the price of kelp, landlords wanted to create pools of cheap or virtually free labour, supplied by families subsisting in new crofting townships. Kelp collection and processing was a very profitable way for local landlords to use this labour, and they petitioned successfully for legislation designed to stop emigration. This took the form of the Passenger Vessels Act 1803. Attitudes changed during the 1820s and, for many landlords, the potato famine, which began in 1846, became another reason for encouraging or forcing emigration and depopulation. 

According to Tom Devine, who wrote up this episode in Scottish history, it is hardly surprising in view of these self-interest developments, that the first official survey of landownership, conducted by the government in 1872-3, confirmed that the historic Scottish structure remained intact. Some 659 individuals owned 80 percent of Scotland, while 118 held 50 percent of the land. Among the most extraordinary agglomerations were those of the Duke of Sutherland. who possessed over 1 million acres, the Duke of Buccleuch with 433,000 acres, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon 280,000 acres and the Duke of Fife 249,000 acres.  As in the Highlands, the wealthy of the towns were acquiring Lowland estates throughout this period. Yet this process had not reversed the 18th century pattern whereby the properties of greater landowners grew while those of the small lairds declined further. Studies of the land market in Aberdeenshire suggest that only a relatively small proportion of territory (less than 15 percent of the total acreage) was bought by new families in the 19th century.  Most of these sales were of property belonging to previous incomers rather than traditional owners. Throughout most of the Lowlands, therefore, the territorial ascendancy of the most powerful families, who possessed huge estates running into many thousands of acres, remained inviolate. Buccleuch, Seafield, Atholl, Roxburgh, Hamilton and Dalhousie, to name but a few of the greatest aristocratic dynasties, still controlled massive empires. Scotland, had the most concentrated pattern of private landownership in Europe, even more so than in England, where the territorial power of the landed aristocracy was also unusually great by comparison with other nations.

A full century after the Industrial Revolution no economic or social group had yet emerged to challenge this mighty elite. Great industrial dynasties such as the Coats, Tennant and Baird families did buy into the land, but their total possessions were miniscule compared to those of the hereditary landowners, while their deep interest in acquiring landed property was itself a confirmation of its continuing attraction and significance Landowners in this period did not simply gain from the swelling rent rolls as grain and cattle prices rose steadily and investment in land bore profitable fruit. Industrialisation also contributed handsomely to the fortunes of several magnates by affording them the opportunity to exploit mineral royalties. Among the most fortunate Scottish grandees in this respect was the Duke of Hamilton, whose lands included some of the richest coal measures in Lanarkshire, the Duke of Fife, the Earl of Eglinton and the Duke of Portland. Landowners were heavily involved in railway financing and, indeed, before 1860 were second only to urban merchants as investors in the new transport projects. Some patrician families also benefited from considerable injections of capital from the empire to which the landed classes often had privileged access through their background and the associated network of personal relationships and connections. In the north-east, for instance, one conspicuous example of the lucrative marriage between imperial profits and traditional landownership was the Forbes family of Newe. They had owned the estate since the 16th century but its economic position was mightily strengthened and its territory increased from the middle decades of the 18th century when the kindred of the family began merchanting in India. By the early 19th century the House of Forbes in Bombay was producing a flow of funds for a new countryseat, enormous land improvements and the purchase of neighbouring properties in Aberdeenshire. Examples of the connection between imperial profit and landownership of the kind illustrated by the Forbes family could be found in every county of Scotland. 

Another important dimension is the extension of the grip of the Scottish aristocracy into England.  Two prominent families are the Crichton-Stuarts and the Douglas-Hamiltons,  The former as the 1nd Marquis of Bute, married into the Windsor family of South Wales.  His son developed the Windsor’s mineral estate based on the lordship of Cardiff Castle; his grandson, become the richest man in Europe on coal and property revenues.  This fortune was achieved through controlling the world’s supply of coal from mines in the South Wales valleys and the docks built on the marshy waste surrounding Cardiff Bay.  The Douglas-Hamiltons, in the person of the Duke of Hamilton, based on the Isle of Arran and the Borders, acquired an estate in three Suffolk villages, from which he was able to participate in English political system through a seat in the House of Lords as Duke of Brandon and Hamilton.  

3 Land for everybody 

The Highland Clearances were just one example of the land issues of natural economy that 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 fiction, about upper-class Englishmen adventuring abroad, reveals 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 that 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 sustainable development.  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 dispensing justice for rich and poor alike.  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’. 

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”. (6.I34-35)

 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’. 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.  

Fig 2a Ruskin’s natural economy 

“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 the Seas.” (Genesis 1:9-10)

 

Fig 2b Natural economy according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment  http://maweb.org/en/index.aspx 

The concept of land was approached by Victorian educators through five cultural ideologies (systems), and fourteen associated behaviours (processes), which still facilitate social change.   

Land Processes 

1  Annexation of land  

2  Attachment to land  

3  Conservation of land

4  Depiction of the land

5  Cession of land

6  Conquest of land          

7  Enhancement of land                   

8  Eviction from the land

9  Exclusion from land

10 Exploitation of land

11 Migration from the land

12 Reclamation of land

13 Rights to land

14 Settlement of land 

Land systems 1

Agrarianism

2 Colonialism

3 Environmentalism

4 Ethnicism

4 Land systems 

•Ethnicism  We emerged as a ‘human’ species through a system of ethnoecology, which involved the integration of family groups with seasonal cycles of biological production.  As hunter-gatherers, we first developed ethnic skills to adapt our basic needs to the pace of local ecological production, and its vagaries of climate and terrain.  

•Agrarianism The advent of agriculture transformed our relationships with natural resources.  Nature was equated with ‘land’, which became a focus of possession through settlement, and alteration through cultivation, and the selective breeding of crops and livestock. 

•Colonialism Colonialism has always been a foundation of economic development wherever a settled society could command foreign lands, and, or, their people, to produce raw materials for home consumption.  Land became ‘territory’, and the means of domination were always the same, the fleet, the army, violence and, if necessary cunning and even treachery.  Colonialism, and its ultimate development, through conquest, as imperialism, are as old as history, and have carried world development along in their wake for the past 5000 years.  

•Industrialism Industrialism was brought about by capital investment in factories and machines, fed by large stocks of natural resources, tended by a stable, dense population, with assured routes to consumers who wanted mass produced goods.  The pace of urbanisation was vastly increased by the global spread of industrialism during the last two centuries.  There is no country on earth that has not experienced the flood of rural people into towns and cities, lured by visions of partaking of industrialism’s apparently limitless wealth.  Land upon which towns and cities were built has a uniformity that generated a culture of ‘placelessness’.   Land, which supported industrialised agrarianism, became ‘countryside’.  Town and country have distinct cultures despite modern mass communications, which are sometimes nationally divisive. However, ‘placelessness’ is universal because in both cultures it is common for families not to have any connections with the social and spiritual roots of the land upon which their dwelling is built. 

•Environmentalism One of the most important ethical questions raised in the past few decades has been whether nature has an order, or pattern, that we are bound to understand, respect, and preserve.  This is the question prompting the environmentalist movement.  Those who answer “yes’ also believe that such an order gives an intrinsic value that can exist independently of us; it is not something that we merely bestow. ‘Reactive environmentalism’ sees environmental problems, issues and challenges as mistakes arising from ignorance foolishness or venality, and regards their solution as increased governmental regulation, and application of expertise to industrialism.  ‘Ecological environmentalism’ conceives the problems as being culturally interconnected, and rooted in more fundamental mistakes in the structure of social decision making.  Ecological environmentalists judge that major social changes are necessary to resolve ecological problems that if unchecked will be socially destructive. ‘Moral environmentalism’ seeks justification, through Darwinism, as to how we should live.  Morality evolves into something more than usefulness and expediency.  It becomes a self-transcending sense of mercy, sympathy, and kinship with all animate existence, including Earth itself, and focuses on questions, such as ‘By what right do we elbow aside countless species in our pursuit of resources, and presume to remake nature according to the desires of just one of its life forms?   

•Conquest Involves aggression activated by kinship, political ideology, and emotional responses to the behaviour of other groups and individuals, exemplified by ‘revenge’, ‘fear’, and ‘covetousness’. 

5  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. We can 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 were about the uncertainties of belief brought about by Darwinism.  The diaries of his daughter record the impact of the Second World War on village life.  In these three lives of one family we have a remarkable view of a century of social change.  

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 to land, 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 the tiny fishing community 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 through vast land drainage schemes.   These youthful contacts with dykes and bogs were eventually synthesised 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 crannies 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, his book, ‘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. ConistonJohn Ruskin lived for 23 years in a country house, with its stunning mountain views to the West over Coniston 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:-

“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.”  

“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 Brantwood in the Lake District was a logical decision about the question of where to spend the rest of his life, Switzerland or Cumbria?  Both lands focused his mind on two problems; the geological forces that produce cataclysmic upheavals in Earth’s surface, and the artistic 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 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.  

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.  Across the river to the south is the Suffolk market town of Bungay.  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 a window on his life. 

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’. This question was literally lived out on a boundary commemorating the disputed territory of two Saxon clans; the ‘North’ and ‘South’ folk.  Each tribe claimed descent from the East Anglian ‘kings’ whose Continental ancestors sailed up the shallow estuaries of East Anglia.    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 the 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 associated with natural and political economy.  Through his factual reports, and the characters of his fiction, we may interact with the lives of farm workers, see the machinations of colonial land 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’.  We can see something of his wide ranging mind in the following quotations from his writings. 

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. 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 

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; there his daughters will marry and help to build up some 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″

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 Benacre, 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 Benacre, 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.'”HRH May 31st 1898

 6 Conclusion 

Why did not these lessons of social injustice and the anti-industrialism polemics of influential Victorian writers feed into the education system?  The answer also chimes with the failure of natural economy in the 1980s to replace geography and biology in a national curriculum.  Although at that time the UK education system was in the throes of reform, which actually, and for the first time, did produce a national curriculum, it was part and parcel of the Thatcherite ideology.  The needs for an ecological of the ‘good life’ ran up against values that drove the political economy, which were, as now, the need for maintaining year on year economic growth.  Values for living sustainably have to be adopted politically before the education system will change to support the new ideology.    

The idea that pieces of non-human nature can be owned is so obvious within industrial cultures that it is still 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. We can contrast the specialised subject teaching required by 19th century European Empire builders with the teaching of the native Americans, who were living with no concept of economic growth but in thrall to ecological principles, which will eventually catch up with the West.  The Native Americans recognised 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 recently

“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 its interconnected human values, an appropriate value-based national/international curriculum will never take its place as major subject. 

Schools as institutions only mirror and complement the world within which they operate.  Therefore, natural economy and similar holistic educational innovations will become institutionalized only when culture is not compartmented into the specialities and disciplines deemed necessary to support year on year economic growth. In the meantime, cross-curricular polymath education has a home within the Internet.  For example, the University of East London, ‘virtual schools’ initiative was launched in 2007 to weave the theme of Global Dimension into secondary teacher training to educate for sustainability. Regarding natural economy, this is the central theme for a mind map of cultural ecology (www.culturalecology.info) and is being developed as an e-learning programme for learning about keeping within Earth’s limits.

The future does not exist. There is only the present, but within this present, there is the idea that we have a future. And there are also within this present, the attitudes, behaviour patterns and habits that constitute both our history and institutions. The future is not therefore something to be discovered, like an existing terra incognito. The future is to be created, and before being created, it must be conceived, it must be invented and finally willed. 

Source: Bertstecher, H. (1974) in Hutchison, F. (1996) Educating Beyond Violent Futures, Routledge, London, p. 36.   

Conservation 

A global crisis faces humanity at the dawn of the 21st century, marked by great divisive issues such as increasing poverty in an asymmetrical world, environmental degradation and short-sighted policy-making to combat climate change that is dominated by economic nationalism. Our climate is changing – the global mean surface temperature is rising, regional precipitation patterns are being altered, sea levels rise, floods, droughts and storms occur more often. The task of education is to deal with the urgent question of how to will a future for living sustainably.  Culture is shaped and is determined by the way we learn to see the world. It is concerned with the identities and values that influence the way people live, their responsiveness to educational programmes, and the degree to which they feel involved in building their future. In every society, there is a culturally unique way of thinking about the world which unites the people in their behaviours and attitudes to the environment.  Here the lessons throughout history are that cultural change is associated with humans “adjusting their survival toolkits” in response to new climatic regimes.  An international culture requires a caring and conserving framework to underpin the future of that culture as a planetary system. 

The meaning of ‘conservation’ has changed over the last 150 years.  Foresters have traditionally used it for the wise management of forests to ensure future timber supplies, giving their chief foresters the title conservator. But by the 1960s, conservation had come to mean preserving natural features so that they could be used in the future.  This was the concept of wise husbandry, now called sustainable use. Caring and conservation therefore go together as values and methods central to the act of saving our natural resources through careful setting of monitored targets. This is conservation management where planning means we can use the resources wisely and responsibly. Furthermore, during the last two decades, conservation has increasingly shifted from being goal oriented to understanding sustainability as a learning process.   Indeed, social learning as an approach for the understanding and management of environmental issues has become a prominent interpretative framework in planning for living sustainably. The aim is to bring about the change of attitudes and behaviour needed to ensure peace and sustainable development which, we know, form the only possible way forward for life on planet Earth. Today, that goal is still a long way off.  

The adoption of a caring conservation culture is crucial to commit ourselves to the common planetary good by building a truly global society where the key principle is ‘thinking about forever’.  This new thinking involves cultivating personal qualities which value and promote  behaviours of ‘non-violence’, ‘lamenting’, ‘nurturing’, ‘loving’, ‘connectivity’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘compassion’, ‘moral behaviour’, and ‘sharing’. These qualities are necessary to take a prophetic stance to change behaviour for managing the causes and ecological effects of climate change.  

It is interesting that all the personal qualities of caring required for living sustainably are exemplified by what has been called matri-force, which makes women powerful shapers of society.  Indeed it has been said that the earlier we recognise women’s centrality and give them an official voice, the more likely we are to heal our sick and ailing societies, both in the North and South. Ethical and spiritual messages, or absence thereof in the early period of childhood socialization, are the matrilinear elements that make for a society which offers its people a quality of life which is either harmonious and peaceful or conflict ridden and frenetic. The active role of women and their recognition in this sphere can make the difference between a society characterised by fear, inequity and violence and a society living sustainably, which is characterised by openness, mutual respect and a sense of social responsibility. The story goes that women embodied in nature, producing life with nature, are therefore well placed to take the initiative in the recovery of nature. 

There is no doubt that across the globe, and particularly in tropical regions with high biodiversity, in villages, on farms, in homesteads, forests, common pastures, and fields, it is women who manage the majority of all plant resources that are used by humans. This means that they also hold the majority of all local plant knowledge and are those who are mainly responsible for the in situ conservation and management of useful plants, whether they are domesticated or wild. The simple explanation for this is that, throughout history, women’s daily work has required more of this knowledge. Globally, it is women who predominate as wild plant gatherers, homegardeners and plant domesticators, herbalists, and seed custodians. In several world regions and among many cultural groups, they also predominate as plant breeders and farmers. This must not be seen as gender structuring humanity’s care for the environment.   Rather it emphasises the ways in which changing environmental conditions bring into existence categories of social difference including gender. In other words, gender itself is re-inscribed in and through practices, policies and responses associated with shifting environments and natural resource management.  Through repeated acts of conservation caring about the planet comes to appear as natural and fixed.  

Organising values and ideas for action 

The big question is how individuals of either sex, who wish to live by these qualities, organise themselves for action.  This calls for the construction of a “self-aware society” in which the notion of citizenship needs “to encompass transcendence of the human spirit into a common bond for a self-sustaining humanity on a life-supporting planet.” We are influenced by who communicates information, and our responses are shaped by biases and shortcuts picked up from those around us are already engaged.  Basically, we ‘go with the cultural flow of pre-set options.  In these contexts, it is quite possible that religion could be one of the important factors of scaling-up for living sustainably. On paper at least it promotes ‘thinking about forever’ and has the power to motivate people in ways nothing else can do.  It also has a crucial advantage as an agent of change – faith works itself out in families and communities. Believers aren’t usually solitary animals, but come attached to networks and interest groups. If the world’s major religions started taking climate change seriously at the grassroots level of the local church, mosque or synagogue, sharing with other faiths and supporting each other within the pre-existing communities around them, we could see a groundswell of positive action on sustainable living.   

However, increasingly we must expect that people will not look to gods or supernatural forces or the afterlife or the spirit world for these values and their maintenance.  In post-religious societies we have to obtain an understanding of sustainability in the world itself. Also we have to seek support from each other as individuals. One reason that education for living sustainability poses such an intrinsically difficult challenge is that it requires developing personal and group strategies that embrace four distinct humanisistic views to understand and manage day to day and long-term relationships with natural resources.  These are the non-religious materialistic ‘isms’ for thought and action known as existentialism, rationalism , naturalism and humanism and these have to be biased towards supporting a caring society.  

In simple terms, existentialism is a mode of living concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. Personal choices become unique without the necessity of an objective form of truth. An existentialist believes that a person should be forced to choose and act responsibly without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions. 

Rationalism is the methodology of extentialism and based on reason and evidence. Rationalism encourages ethical and philosophical ideas that can be tested by experience and rejects authority that cannot be proved by experience.  Naturalism firms up rationalism as the doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations. 

Humanism brings together those people who subscribe to existentialism and rationalism and naturalism as being appropriate ways of creating a world view of life.  It is not just atheism, but a positive alternative to religion. In other words, humanism fulfils much the same function as a religion does for its believers.  Humanists recognise that it is simply human nature to have moral values but that when we make particular judgements we need to interpret those widely shared values by the use of knowledge, reason and experience. Faced with a difficult decision, humanists consider and assess the available evidence and the likely outcomes of alternative actions. They do not refer to any dogma, sacred text or unsubstantiated theory. Humanists are therefore atheists or agnostics – but humanism is a philosophy in its own right, not just a negative response to religion.  Humanists find the best available explanations of life and the universe in the provisional answers provided by scientific enquiry and the use of reason. 

 Whether guided by matripower, religion or humanism, new working relationships between culture and ecology involve the application of universal ecological principles. In the early 1950s, anthropologists, led by Julian H. Steward, began to develop ecology as an approach to the study of human culture, asserting that it is the intermediary between humans and their environments what makes humanity a unique life form.  In particular, he emphasized the role that culture has in explaining the nature of human societies, considering that this is dictated by much more than the immediate physical environment and its non-human life forms. In this connection, his theory of “multilinear”, cultural evolution examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment by exploring the way in which national and local levels of society are related to one another. He questioned the possibility of creating a social theory that encompassed the entire evolution of humanity; yet, he also argued that anthropologists are not limited to description of specific, existing cultures. The decisive factors determining the development of a given culture, he decided, were technology and economics, but noted that there are secondary factors, such as political systems, ideologies, and religions. In the present context of a relatively rapid change in global climate, these factors push the evolution of a given society in several directions at the same time.  The focusing of a multilinear approach on the need for behavioural change to cope with new local climates, is the basis of a caring framework for the concept of conservation as an adaptation to climate change.  This is the context of ‘thinking about forever’ as a global response to the ever-increasing impact of industrialisation on our planet.  In this educational context, pedagogies for the planet require cross-subject approaches that are grounded in learning about social and environmental justice and equality within holistic understandings of the complex relationships between humans and their dynamic cultural ecology.   

Virtually every activity we engage in presumes some future continuation in time. Whenever we have aims, ambitions, make plans or take precautions, speculate or make commitments, we are concerned with the future. Without some sense of the future we could not even begin to articulate our hopes and dreams, let alone realise them. Thus, thinking and planning for the future is an essential and constant ingredient in all human endeavour. In contrast to the notion of social learning in general, learning for living sustainably focuses on the process of generating and applying a specific type of content of what is learned. In particular, learning for living sustainably means learning to develop the capacity to manage options for the adaptation of human societies to the limits and changing conditions that are imposed by their own social-ecological systems. It entails becoming increasingly aware of the limits and of the unintended negative consequences of collective action upon life-support systems and being capable of anticipating and managing those effects.  New educational frameworks are needed that present such futures and provide opportunities to build critical, creative, ‘out of the box’ thinking about cultural ecology.   This should involve learners in understanding the root causes of environmental problems; and being challenged from a variety of new cross-curricular starting points to think about possible and impossible/ unimaginable futures.   

Cultural ecology

 

 This was the idea behind ‘cultural ecology’ which emerged as the idea for a new academic subject from student/staff discussions during a zoology field course on the Welsh National Nature Reserve of Skomer Island in 1971.  These discussions originated within a group of students who were dissatisfied with the narrow view of world development taken by single honours science subjects.  Surprisingly, the idea it was enthusiastically taken up by staff in the pure and applied science faculties as the philosophical thread for an honours course in Environmental Studies organised in the University College of Wales, Cardiff, during the 1970s.  This course integrated the inputs from eleven departments, from archaeology, through metallurgy, to zoology. 

Late in the decade this course was evaluated by a group of school teachers under the auspices of the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate (UCCLES), and emerged as the subject ‘natural economy‘ (the organisation of people for production).  Natural economy was launched by UCCLES to fulfil their need for a cross-discipline arena to support world development education. This project was initiated by the Duke of Edinburgh, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, as a much-needed contribution to world development education. 

It was also disseminated throughout Europe as part of the EC’s Schools Olympus Broadcasting Association (SOBA) for distance learning.  Through a partnership between the University of Wales, the UK Government’s Overseas Development Administration and the World Wide Fund for Nature,  it was published as a central component of a cultural ecology model of Nepal with the help of a sponsorship from British Petroleum. 

During the 1980s, an interoperable version of natural economy for computer-assisted learning was produced in the Department of Zoology, Cardiff University, with a grant from DG11 of the EC.  This work was transferred to the Natural Economy Research Unit (NERU) set up in the National Museum of Wales towards the end of the decade.  

In the 1990s NERU obtained a series of grants to integrate natural economy into a broader cultural framework.  For example, an  EC LIFE Environment programme with the aim of producing and testing a conservation management system for industries and their community neighbourhoods, used cultural ecology as the holistic framework.   The R&D was carried out in partnership with the UK Conservation Management System Partnership (CMSP), the University of Ulster and British industry. The aim was to provide a web resource for education/training in conservation management in schools and communities. 

This site (www.culturalecology.info) is currently maintained and developed by the ‘Going Green Directorate (GGD) as a free web-based educational resource 

The GGD grew from a 1994 gathering of school teachers and academics in Wales. The meeting was sponsored by the Countryside Council for Wales, Dyfed County Council, and the local Texaco oil refinery. This partnership was based in the St Clears Teacher’s Resource Centre. From here, a successful award- winning pilot was led by Pembrokeshire schools to create and evaluate a system of neighbourhood environmental appraisals, and network the local findings from school to school.

The scheme adopted the acronym SCAN (schools and Communities Agenda 21 Network). SCAN’s aim was to help teachers create bilingual systems of appraisal within the National Curriculum to evaluate ‘place’ (historical, geographical, biological, and notional). The practical objective was to address environmental issues which emerged from the appraisals in the context of their community’s Local Authority Agenda 21. You can reach SCAN in the National Museum of Wales at http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/scan The objective of the GGD is therefore to promote practical conservation management through environmental appraisal and the long-term management of neighbourhood historical assets, green spaces and community services to promulgate a sense of place, improve quality of life and enhance biodiversity.Three collaborative wikis are associated with this site.

Cultural ecology (Wikipedia)

Cultural ecology (Wikispaces)

Conservation managementApplied ecology  

Living sustainably

 Cultural ecology is now being developed as an educational wiki about sustainable development produced by a group of UK academics and teachers.  It incorporates the cultural ecology mindmap, now being assembled in the form of a series of ICOPER concept maps, integrated with the caring behaviours necessary for living sustainably.  The caring behaviours are presented below in the form of a ‘conservation charter’ to adapt to, and mitigate against, climate change.  These behaviours fall into six categories of ‘living together’, ‘using nature’, ‘gaining livelihoods’, ‘participatory government’, ‘core values’ and ‘reliable information’.

  (www.livingsustainably.wikispaces.com).  

The main proposition is that living sustainably is an educational framework for adopting caring conservation behaviours to apply ideas about our place in nature for managing natural resources to improve livelihoods, ensure their sustainability and manage consumerism to reduce social inequalities.    

A caring conservation charter

  1 Caring about how we live together . . .… by for example:   

1.1 Ensuring access to safe water, food, housing and fuel for all at affordable costs  

1.2 Valuing (and respecting) the roles and contributions of women and girls to society as much as those of men and boys 

1.3 Caring for the young, the elderly, those with physical disabilities, and other less powerful or marginalised groups in society 

1.4 Treasuring the cultural heritage and well-being of aboriginal peoples 

1.5 Valuing and respecting cultural diversity of all types 

1.6 Strengthening local distinctiveness and identity within a mosaic of national and global cross-cultural connections 

1.7 Protecting human health and quality of life through safe, clean and healthy environments 

1.8 Emphasising primary health care and disease prevention as well as cure 

1.9 Maximising everyone’s access to education so that all can develop the skills and knowledge to play a full part in living sustainably 

1.10 Making towns and cities ‘human’ in scale and form 

1.11 Settling disputes through discussion, negotiation and other peaceful means.  

2  Caring about how we use nature . . .… by for example:   

2.1 Valuing and protecting the diversity of nature  

2.2 Caring for and respecting the life of all species of plants, birds and animals in non-human nature 

2.3 Using energy, water, forest, soil and other natural resources efficiently and with care 

2.4 Minimising waste, then recovering and reusing it through recycling, composting or energy recovery, and carefully disposing of what is left 

2.5 Limiting pollution to levels that do not damage natural systems or human health 

2.6 Maintaining and restoring ecosystem health 

2.7 Promoting compact cities and towns and the use of public transport 

2.8 Managing domestic life to minimised our ecological footprint.  

3 Caring about how we gain our livelihoods . . .… by for example:   

3.1 Creating a vibrant local economy that gives opportunities to meaningful and rewarding work for all  

3.2 Ensuring that the fundamental human needs of all are met 

3.3 Valuing unpaid and voluntary work in the home and community 

3.4 Supporting policies that assign actual social and ecological costs and benefits to goods and services 

3.5 Recognising that the standard of living of a community is related to the contributions of people in neighbouring areas, elsewhere in the country and in other countries 

3.6 Encouraging the production and consumption of goods and services that do not degrade the natural environment locally or globally or undermine the quality of life of other people, especially those in the South 

3.7 Promoting corporate responsibility and accountability of business to local communities.   

4  Caring about how we are governed . . .… by for example:   

4.1 Developing and promoting democratic institutions and processes for decision-making  

4.2 Decentralising decision making to appropriate local levels of government 

4.3 Promoting government responsibility and accountability to local communities 

4.4 Empowering all sectors of the community to participate in decision-making at local, regional and national levels 

4.5 Developing the capacity building of Non-Government Organisation (NGOs), neighbourhood and professional associations and other elements of a vibrant civil society 4.6 Eradicating corruption in government and business.  

5  Caring about where our core values come from . . .. . . by for example:  

5.1 Being open-minded regarding the systems of beliefs, attitudes customs and institutions of other cultures. 

5.2 Acknowledging the mysteries of the cosmos and honouring the divine expression in all people. 

5.3 Not expecting that everyone should have all the truth but accepting that everyone has something useful to offer. 

5.4 Acknowledging that education is as much about building character as it is about equipping students with specific skills. 

5.5 Accepting that values-based education can strengthen students’ self-esteem, optimism and commitment to personal fulfilment; and help them to exercise ethical judgement and social responsibility. 

5.6 Recognising that parents have a responsibility to help their children to understand and develop personal and social responsibilities  

6 Caring about getting reliable information for action. . .. . . by for example:  

6.1 Getting unbiased information on environmental issues including ozone depletion, global warming, solid waste, water quality, pesticides, forestry practices, and wildlife management.  

6.2 Developing age-appropriate environmental education materials for classroom teachers 

6.3 Evaluating the effectiveness of the methodology for environmental education. 

6.4 Receiving up to date information on the renewable technologies that are now available to power and heat homes and buildings from natural renewable resources. 

6.5 Accessing information about how people can earn money from government for generating their own energy. 

6.6 Detailing the grants and funding available for sustainability measures and projects regarding the home, business or community. 

6.7 Communicating know-how and practical achievements between communities to help conserve and improve biodiversity and highlight ways to become involved in making greener safer communities.  

6.8 Networking ideas and achievements between communities

The Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh, a follower of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist tradition, has coined the term interbeing to express the reality of mutual interdependence in human relationship, both in the sense of relating one to another and in the wider sense of humanity’s relationship to the natural world as a whole. Hanh’s presentation of “interbeing” is rooted in the philosophical foundation of Zen Buddhism.

The ancient religious traditions of India (Theravada and Jainism) have been characterised by an unusual sensitivity to living beings. The Buddhist codes of ethics are similar to the Jaina ethics of Hinduism, with much emphasis placed on self-control, abstinence, patience, contentment, purity, truthfulness and right attitudes. The treatment of animals and plants in accordance with these principles finds ample references in Buddhist texts, from the earliest monastic codes to the development of Ch’an or Zen Buddhism in China, Korea and Japan. Monks of these traditions are strictly forbidden from harming any life form, including even the smallest insects and plants. One of the basic ideas behind the Buddha’s teaching of mutual interdependence is that ultimately there is no demarcation between what appears to be an individual creature and its environment. Harming the environment is thus, in a major sense, harming oneself. This philosophical position lies at the heart of modern-day deep ecology and some representatives of this movement have shown that Buddhist philosophy provides a rational basis for deep ecological thinking. Deep ecology is a contemporary ecological philosophy that claims to recognize the inherent worth of other beings aside from their utility. The philosophy emphasizes the interdependent nature of human and non-human life as well as the importance of the ecosystem and natural processes. It provides a foundation for the environmental, ecology and green movements and has fostered a new system of environmental ethics.

The Buddha based his teachings on the premise that there is suffering in the human condition and our relationships with the environment. The appropriate moral response is to minimize human suffering and pain as best as one can by understanding the causes and by alleviating the suffering of all forms of life. This ethic covers human behaviour in relation to all living beings and it underpins certain basic virtues, particularly compassion, love, kindness, sympathy, empathy, equanimity and joy in the other’s happiness. Only recently the Dalai Lama has stressed that human beings are capable of an infinite amount of compassion, generosity and gratitude, and that all creatures, great and small, should be the subject of our moral sensibility to improve the welfare of all sentient beings.  Nature in relation to human needs is regarded as capable of making a contribution towards overcoming suffering and the final spiritual end, which human beings strive toward. The Buddha’s teachings include tales of acts of generosity on the part of animals towards human beings, and the reciprocal compassion which humans are advised to direct towards other life forms. Buddhist societies evolved with this moral self-consciousness at all levels of society, which places non-theistic spiritual values at the centre of cultural ecology to support technological development with a corresponding inner development. This inner spiritual world is expressed in poetry, which explicitly bears an intellectual and spiritual message.  Scientific logic and poetry complement each other and point to realities, which encompass both of them.  

Non-theistic spirituality 

If evidence of declining attendance is accepted, people may not want church, but they do appear to question a purely materialistic view of life. They want to believe in something more, even if they do not know-or want to know – what that something is.  This missing ‘something’ is spirituality, which is related to:  

·         a connection to what many refer to as the ‘Life-force’, ‘God’, a ‘higher power or purpose’, ‘Great Mystery’, or ‘Buddha Nature’;

·         a sense of wholeness, healing, and the interconnectedness of all things;

·         meaning-making;

·         the ongoing development of one’s identity (including one’s cultural identity) moving toward greater authenticity;

·         how people construct knowledge through largely unconscious and symbolic processes manifested through image, symbol, and music, which are often cultural.  In all these aspects spirituality is related to culture. 

Culture is the common set of beliefs, values, language, images, symbols, and behaviours shared by a particular social group. Nearly all human knowledge and experience, including spiritual experience, will be shared and given expression through culture–in language, in music, in art, or in symbol making. Indeed, people construct knowledge and make meaning in powerful and unconscious ways through symbol, music, art, metaphor, and ritual referred to as “symbolic” and “unconscious structuring processes”. These aspects of knowledge production and ways of knowing are at the heart of the way spiritual knowing is often expressed. But such manifestations of knowing through symbolic and unconscious processes are also deeply cultural. 

In addition, spirituality is different from, but for some people, related to religion. Generally, the term “religiousness” is used to mean adherence to the beliefs and practices of an organized church or religious institution. However, in the present context, “spirituality” is used to refer to a unique, personally meaningful experience. A spiritual response to life is possible without supernatural elements and entities. A spiritual life can be based on the combined objectivity of science and the emotional subjective responses to shapes, sounds and colours in the natural world. Part of this spirituality is the wonder and awe that can exist without science, but which science amplifies. This non-theistic spirituality provides a sense of humility and exuberance, and a reverence for a mysterious, magnificent Universe.   

Although spirituality may include various forms of religiousness, spirituality does not necessarily involve religiousness. Paul F Knitter in his book ‘Without Buddha I could not be a Christian’ writes of how, as a priest, he had to rethink the idea of God as a transcendent “Other” – a supernatural Being who exists apart from us in a heavenly realm. Most people envision God as an external Man-In-The-Sky, separate from other finite beings, who can be petitioned by prayer to intervene supernaturally in human history. This is the theistic God.  Knitter tends to think of god non-theistically as “The Ground of Being”, an inherent product of human socialisation emanating from and connecting all humanity.   He said the Ground of Being is a: 

“personal creative, sustaining vitality that “persuades and influences us all, calling us to relationships of knowing and loving each other, energizing us when such relationships get rough, filling us with the deepest of happiness when we are emptying ourselves and finding ourselves in others.”   

Thich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese Zen teacher, has defined this unifying social mindfulness as the concept of “Interbeing.”  Being mindful is the most important precept of all in Buddhism.  This state of super-awareness is to is to know what is going on…to be aware of what we do, what we are, minute by minute.  The spiritual significance of interbeing is the realization that there is no independant self –  that the perception of self, of “me”, of “mine” is an illusion.  As an example of interbeing he establishes that a sheet of paper is everything in the world: the cloud, the rain, the sun and earth that fuel the tree; the logger who cuts it down; the mill; the hand that touches it, writes on it, reads from it…. All is one. What we do to one person, we do to ourselves.”.  This is why all art, even all objects made by humankind, holds the imaginative keys to mindful awareness.  

When we are truly mindful, we recognize that nothing in life is any more permanent or secure than an ocean wave. We are always riding the crest of a wave. To try to hold on to anything is to pursue an impossible illusion of security. When we accept the truth of this impermanence, we realize that all boundaries are human constructs imposed by the imagination on the unpredictable, and therefore uncontrollable, process of reality. So, when we are in the grip of interbeing, we make no effort to control or impose ourselves on others. We simply respond to the demand of the moment, without expecting to control the future. Nhat Hanh applies the same lesson to the newest expression of non-violence, which is non-violence against nature. He suggests that interbeing offers the most powerful basis for living sustainably.  He would say that just as every person is within me, bound to me in interbeing, so is all of nature. Nature is our “larger self.” All our environmental problems stem from the illusion that there is a basic difference between the human self and nature. Once we see through this illusion, we extend our compassion to every other living being.  We respond immediately, in the present moment, to suffering anywhere in nature. But we understand that suffering anywhere is our own suffering. So we must also take care of nature to ease our own suffering. We need the right kind of natural environment to get personal harmony, and we need personal harmony to have the right kind of natural environment. “The best way to take care of the environment in this two way interaction is to take care of the environmentalist.”   

The best way to take care of the environmentalist is to grow in non-violence, in mindful awareness of the truth of interbeing.   The proposition from Nhat Hanh’s teachings is that it is vital to promote mindful awareness to produce the state of interbeing for living sustainably.  This does not mean we have to become Buddhists to practice interbeing.  For example, Friedrich Schumacher, the Western secular economist, best known for his book ‘Small is Beautiful’, recognised many of the present day dysfunctionalities of classical economics in his essay, Buddhist Economics.  This work is taken as a precedent in an attempt to ask what our socio-economic, cultural and political institutions would look like, if they were modeled on Buddhist interbeing principles.  It is an attempt to move back from a state of collective disembodiment, to one of a mindful recognition of, and re-embodiment in, our natural world.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his The Fourteen Precepts from Interbeing, (2003) listed the following principles of interbeing that could be taken up by theists and atheists alike, along with environmentalism.

“1. Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology
2. Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth
3. Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views
4. Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering
5. Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry
6. Do not maintain anger or hatred
7. Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings
8. Do not utter words that can create discord and cause the community to break
9. Do not say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people
10. Do not use the community for personal gain or profit
11. Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature
12. Do not kill, do not let others kill
13. Possess nothing that should belong to others
14. Do not mistreat your body, learn to handle it with respect” 

The connection between spirituality and cultural ecology is to do with our inner sense of connection with something larger than ourselves and with our relationship with what we see as sacred.  This can give our lives a sense of meaning and purpose beyond material success and those special moments where we feel that a deeper connection with all sentient beings can provide an important source of strength in difficult times. 

If we see ourselves as part of the ‘Tree of Life’ – the web of beings linked through food chains and evolution,  then a Deep Ecological approach to spirituality might emphasise our relationship with this larger whole. We may look at life itself as being sacred, and see the possibility of the larger force of life acting through us in our work for earth recovery. This ‘life-centred spirituality’ can be an important source of inspiration to face and respond to environmental problems at the interface between culture and ecology.  

Open commensality 

Centuries of secularism have failed to transfer the ecological principle of ‘eating’ into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated as a cultural pillar with mindful reverence. A meal is still a rite – the last “natural sacrament” of family and friendship, symbolic of life that is more than “eating” and “drinking”. To eat is still something beyond maintaining bodily function. People may not understand what that “something” is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.  To know what where, how, when and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society.  Jesus of Galilee kept an open table and practiced what Father John Dominic Crossan has called ‘open commensality’.  Christ constantly expressed his love of beings and life in feasts.  The Gospels tell how Jesus was accused of eating with tax collectors, sinners and whores, which was the shorthand of the Jewish priesthood for him embracing untouchables, widows, the poor, the maimed and the marginalized. This was an important part of his determination through his radical egalitarianism to reverse all the precedents of contemporary Jewish society, which was ordered by a purity system of irrational ‘do nots’.  The simple, non-revolutionary, quietist commensalism of Jesus established a network of compassion through his band of misfits and outcasts, which welcomed non-Jews and slaves to their ‘tables of companionship’. 

A non-theistic social form of commensalism has always been evident in human society.  For instance, the human market place has always functioned in this mode when the establishment of one business gives rise to other, adjacent ones that take nothing from the first. In post industrial cities there were ‘quarters’ for butchers, tailors and metalworkers.   Perhaps the best non-theistic modern example is concessionaires at sports and entertainment events.  

Also, if some big firm opens a business in a neighbourhood, other, smaller, firms often start up around it. Nothing is taken from the larger firm in the process.  This commensal economic relationship may be an alternative to what many see as the allegedly zero sum relationship of capitalism, whereby the gain of one must involve a loss to others. Indeed, a great many people see the market place as a kind of boxing ring so that for one to win another must lose. In fact, the market place is much more akin to an endless marathon race.   There is a long time span of often changing positions, with some even attaching themselves “commensally,” so as to follow the right pace at which to proceed or to shield oneself from head wind. 

Commensalism is fundamentally a biological principle.  Many animals and plants live in what is called a “commensal” fashion. This is to say that some of them feed or otherwise gain benefits from the activities of others without depriving these other beings of anything at all. This distinguishes commensalism from parasitism, whereby some animals feed off the bodies of others, depriving these others of something valuable.  

Commensalism may well operate on a global scale through the Gaian System. The Gaia Theory asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. Some scientists believe that this “Gaian system” self-regulates global temperature, atmospheric chemistry, ocean salinity, and other factors in an “automatic” manner. It is their explanation of how the Earth’s greater living system appears to keep conditions on our planet just right for life to persist!  Gaia is thought of by many people to be the ultimate organism, made up of all living things on the planet. However, most scientists consider Gaia to be an emergent property of the biosphere acting upon the lithosphere, which just happens to keep the planet habitable in the long-term. The Gaia hypothesis emphasizes that cooperation is far more important for stability of the biosphere than is competition. In this light, Gaia can properly be thought of as a commensal meta-organism that is composed of a biochemical network of all other organisms. 

Therefore, Christian open commensalism that has come down to us from the early church may be taken as an example of interbeing based on the ecological unity of all beings through the sharing of food chains.  The other feature of this unifying ecological network is light.  For Jesus, the entire creation and all the beings at every level in it were linked to humanity through a vast sea of the ‘light of the world’.  As the evangelist Thomas tells us in his Gospel, Jesus is identified with human light consciousness that symbolizes universal bonding of people through mindfulness that truth and love are the unifiers of humanity with all other beings.   

“ It is I who am the light which is above them all.  It is I who am the all.  From me did the all come forth.  Split a piece of wood and I am there.  Lift up the stone and you will find me there”.  

Imagination in place 

In 1806, John Forster in a series of letters to a friend warned of the dangerous essence of the romantic meditative movement, with its emphasis on the interpretation of environment through imagination rather than logic. 

“Imagination may be indulged till it usurp an entire ascendancy over the mind, and then every subject presented to that mind will excite imagination instead of understanding to work; imagination will throw its colours where the intellectual faculty ought to draw its lines; imagination will accumulate metaphors where reason ought to deduce arguments; images will take the place of thoughts and scenes of disquisitions. The whole mind may become at length something like a hemisphere of cloud scenery, filled with an ever-moving train of changing melting forms, of every colour, mingled with rainbows, meteors and an occasional gleam of pure sunlight, all vanishing away, the mental like this natural imagery, when its hour is up, without leaving anything behind but the wish to recover the vision.  And yet, . . . this series of visions, may be mistaken for operations of thought, and each cloudy image be admitted in the place of a proposition, or a reason; and it may even be mistaken for something sublimer than thinking.” 

Cultures are built on an invented set of agreements, rules of conduct by which everyone must live. But because the individuals of a particular culture lack a personally validated knowledge of the most essential aspects of their lives and existence, they crave understanding, and in places where they can’t find any, they use their imagination to invent a story to fill the void. Forster’s fears of the predominance of imagination over judgement in the evaluation of place were not a problem to later writers. Charles Kingsley’s fictional character Alton Locke, the Chartist poet of the Victorian urban fringe, discovers the work of Tennyson and is overwhelmed by the pleasure of imaginative recognition. …

“he has learned to see that in all Nature, in the hedgerow and the sandbank, as well as in the alp-peak and the ocean-waste, is a world of true sublimity – a minute infinite – an ever fertile garden of poetic images, the roots of which are in the unfathomable and the eternal, as truly as any  !….. phenomenon, which astonishes and awes the eye. The description of the desolate pools and creeks where the dying Swan floated, the hint of the silvery marsh mosses by Mariana’s moat, came to me like revelations. I always knew there was something beautiful, wonderful, sublime, in those flowery dykes of Battersea Fields; in the long gravely sweeps of that lone tidal shore; and here was a man who had put them in   words for me. This is what I call democratic art – the revelation of the poetry, which lies in common things. And surely all the age is tending in that direction; in Landseer and his dogs – in Copley Fielding and his downs, with a host of noble artists – and in all authors who have really seized the nation’s mind from Crabbe and Burns and Wordsworth to Hood and Dickens, the great tide sets ever outward, towards that which is common to many, not that which is exclusive to the few . . .” 

In the character of Alton Locke, Charles Kingsley was beginning to articulate dissatisfaction with urbanisation and the loss of the joys and dangers of belonging to a semi-natural countryside, which, for millennia had been the daily discourse of humankind. One of the key figures in shaping a modern educational movement to end this lonely, often desperate, isolation of Homo sapiens from other species was the American Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1971). “We are all in this together,” he concluded in 1949, not long after he finished writing a biography of Henry Thoreau, one of the first American environmentalists.  Once a rather melancholic humanist, Krutch now became a kind of pantheist or ethical mystic, caught up in the joy of belonging to “something greater than one’s self.” 

Thoreau again and again was partly responsible for the radical change in Krutch’s outlook. The other chief stimulus was a self- education in ecological principles. “Every day,” he observed, “the science of ecology is making clearer the factual aspect as it demonstrates those more and more remote inter- dependencies which, no matter how remote they are crucial even for us.” Krutch’s self-tutoring in science confirmed him in an organismic sensibility, partly pragmatic, but more fundamentally ethical. 

It is now widely accepted scientifically that we must be a part not only of the human community, but also of the whole ecological community.  We must acknowledge some sort of biochemical oneness not only with our neighbours, our countrymen and our civilization, but also have some respect for the natural as well as the man- made community. Ours is not only “one world” in the sense usually implied by that term. It is also “one earth.” It is abundantly clear that our species requires behavioural adaptations for long-term survival, based on the political and economic interdependency of nations and communities. It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless we share planet Earth with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.  This behavioural change will involve making conservation management central to economic development. 

Science has led directly to a moral awakening: a new sense of biological relatedness and communalism. However, Krutch perceived that ecology, “without reverence or love,” could become naught but “a shrewder exploitation of what it would be better to admire, to enjoy, and to share in.” His own approach to the embryonic science of ecology helped turn him from the pursuit of self toward a “sense of the community of living things.” Spirituality makes the connection.  

The fact that Krutch equated reverence with love is particularly interesting in that the development of Christianity placed love alongside the Greek virtue of justice as a supreme ordering feature of human life.  The centrality of love to Christian ethics was stressed by St Augustine who pronounced that the quality of any society could be measured by the honour and dignity of common objects that humans love.  Thus, the view of a heron standing patiently beside a pond and the warmth of a pair of gloves are meditative contributors to human wellbeing, which when they are encountered remind us that continuous economic growth is not the fundamental source of human happiness.   

Human capabilities for living sustainably 

Nature religions are not attempts to control nature but systems to help put individuals in accord with ecosystems.  Ake Hultkrantz affirmed this position emphasizing the ecological integration of religious thinking and practice among indigenous native populations.  He declares that there is a “cosmotheistic interpretation of nature,” which is operative among these traditions through meditation on natural features. As a consequence, the Great Mystery, the sacred, is manifest throughout the natural world. For traditional cultures, there is, accordingly, a sacred unity of nature and humanity that requires the moral acknowledgement of wild nature through contemplating landscape, by walking through it, or making/viewing pictures of it. The result of these beliefs is that the spiritual values of nature are fully integrated into all aspects of social, cultural, and environmental activity.  Manifest nature is of definitive significance in traditional spiritual practice, which assigns special conservation status to local rocks, streams and mountains.  For example, drawing on many of the themes associated with sacred mountains around the world, The Mountain Institute’s (TMI) Sacred Mountains Program has been working with the US National Park Service since 1998, developing innovative interpretive and educational materials and activities that highlight the evocative spiritual and cultural meanings of natural features of mountain environments.  These places range from peaks and their dependent rivers to forests and wildlife, in American, Native American, Native Hawaiian, and other cultures around the world.   

This is only to say that as sacred expressions of some deeper reality, mountains have become associated with the deepest and highest values and aspirations of cultures and traditions. The remote Himalayan peak of Mount Kailas directs the minds of millions of Hindus and Buddhists toward the utmost attainments of their spiritual traditions. Mount Sinai occupies a special place in the Bible as the seminal site where Moses received the Ten Commandments, the basis of law and ethics in Western civilization. The picturesque cone of Mount Fuji has come to represent the quest for beauty and simplicity that lies at the heart of Japanese culture. Mount Everest stands out, even in the modern, secular world, as an inspiring symbol of the ultimate human challenge of self against nature. Therefore, the mountains, as the highest and most impressive features of the landscape, have an unusual power to awaken a meditative sense of the sacred. Their soaring summits, the clouds and thunder that swirl about their peaks, the life-giving waters that flow from their heights, these and other characteristics imbue them with an aura of mystery and sanctity. In that aura, people of diverse backgrounds, both traditional and modern, experience a deeper reality that gives meaning and vitality to their lives. Drawing on many of the powerful educative themes associated with sacred mountains around the world, the TMI has developed innovative educational activities that highlight general spiritual and cultural meanings of natural features. The purpose of the project is to connect a broad range of visitors with nature back home in order to enrich their local experiences, and give them deep-seated, reasons for meditating on sustainable livelihoods at the neighbourhood level and adopting the behavioural changes necessary to mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Fig 1 The sustainable livelihoods framework for adapting to climate change 

www.poverty-wellbeing.net 

A livelihood comprises the local capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base.  In fact, being sustainable is not only increasingly necessary, but judging from the success of the TMI programmes can also be a fulfilling, enjoyable and enriching experience.   

A prevalent view of society undergoing behaviour change is to develop the communal setting as the outcome of a contract between independent individuals who seek to promote their individual interests.  Individuals first exist as distinct persons, and they then form relationships and engage in co-operative arrangements with one another, for the sake of the greater individual advantage.  In that framework, the communal setting is seen as a set of individuals who have no links together except a binding common advantage.  That particular vision of seeing the world composed of individual selves is known as ‘methodological individualism’. This is a widely used term in the social sciences. Its advocates see it as a philosophical method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals. The term was originally coined by Joseph Schumpeter in 1908 according to which all social phenomena must be accounted for in terms of what individuals think and choose and do.  This is the basis of Brad McManus integral framework for living sustainably, which stresses that behaviour change has to come about through an holistic combination of science and technology, with an individual mindset that brings to bear individual wisdom and morality to work with nature and not against it.  This is set out in the following map of the necessary behaviours expressing human capabilities in relation to self, others and the objective world.  The idea is for individuals to become part of a sustainable livelihoods framework to facilitate them to pursue their own goals rather than being perceived as victims or simply beneficiaries from top-down organizational prescriptions. 

Inner subjectivity of the individual self 

Practice meditation.Undertake some personal development.

Articulate your personal vision and values.

Experience fully what you are doing in the moment.

Be more observant of your senses and surroundings.

Reassess what is and is not important in your life.

Rediscover what motivates you and makes you happy.

Strive for personal freedom and do the things you enjoy.

Learn how our emotional state affects you and others.

Express your creativity in music painting or dance. 

Inner subjectivity of the collective self 

Learn what currently shapes and limits your worldview.

Be less judgemental and more tolerant of others.

Understand that cross-cultural differences do exist.

Practice random acts of kindness towards others.

Participate in a social activity or event.

Spend time with your family and friends.

Volunteer to assist a local group or association.

Rather than email someone talk to them.

Share your skills and knowledge with others.

Introduce yourself to neighbours. 

Exterior objectivity of the individual self  

Read or study to expand your knowledge.

Restore balance between work and personal life.

Calculate food miles when buying groceries.

Read food labelling and select carefully.

Reassess your consumption patterns.

Exercise regularly and have a medical check up.

Grow some of your own fruit and vegetables.

Improve you personal self-sufficiency.

Choose durable and reusable goods.

Assume personal responsibility for your life choices. 

External objectivity of the collective self 

Apply principles of living sustainably at home and work.

Reduce electricity consumption.

Design energy efficient homes and workspaces.

Reduce consumption of unnecessary goods and services.

Harvest rainwater and use water more frugally.

Distribute surplus donate unwanted goods to a charity.

Reduce your level of financial debt.

Use technology but do not depend on it.

Reuse and recycle waste where practical and safe.

Use public transport instead of driving a car. 

The concept of sustainable livelihoods is an important approach in development studies, and has mainly been utilized for poverty reduction. According to the concept, poverty must be understood in terms of capability deprivation. Livelihood contexts are dynamic and vary widely, as they are specific and based on the level of development of the targeted country or region, allowing for a more holistic view of poverty. The typical situation of these populations that are commonly referred to as ‘deprived’, ‘marginalized’ or ‘urban poor’ is the following: 

“All, in one tragic sense, are on the margins, not just of economy, but of society. As workers, they are poorly paid for long hours of work, often in impermanent, hard labour, dirty and dangerous occupations that do not make them eligible for whatever meager social security benefits exist. Residentially, they live in one or another kind of inadequate housing: old slums, new tenements, and shantytowns. As consumers, they lack the purchasing power to purchase the goods and services enjoyed by the rest of society. Socially, their status is that of the ‘insulted and injured’; culturally, they lack formal education, sometimes even the ability to speak the national language.” 

There are special factors to be addressed at the margins of society in order to achieve a situation of sustainable livelihoods.  The target group must receive support that enables it to increase income and well-being. Typical examples are just and equitable pay for work, gender equality, decent housing, higher food security, sustainable use of the natural resources base and a reduction in vulnerability to sudden changes or shocks.   Achievements have to be analysed against the background of the policy and institutional framework in the respective countries. In order to define interventions accordingly, there must be a proper understanding of how livelihoods can be sustainable in the particular environmental context. For a person living in a city, natural capital is less important, for example, than for a person that lives in the countryside and makes a living from agriculture. 

Frameworks of sustainable livelihoods approaches (Fig 1) have been developed by numerous organizations engaged in the field of international development, among them the World Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), Department for International Development (DFID) and many others. Sustainable Livelihoods Frameworks are: 

·         Flexible and can be adapted by organizations and teams to meet their specific needs, by, for example focusing on specific aspects than others without losing sight of the wider picture 

·         Are people centred and thus favour participatory and multidisciplinary approaches and multilevel development interactions.  In this way, SLFs provide useful tools to incorporate asset limitations into other thematic foci 

·         Focus on people’s own strategies to enhance their capabilities and assets as a basis for better and more sustainable livelihood outcomes 

·         Enable a multi dimensional approach to factor analysis and reduction and can be used to illustrate how interventions that tackle the non material dimensions of poverty, can contribute to strengthening a household’s asset portfolio, enhancing their livelihood options and enhancing heir well-being 

·         Allow a focus on who is specifically vulnerable to shocks and stresses because of limited assets and capabilities thus identifying those likely to drop our of the system 

·         Acknowledge the diversity of asset combinations both tangible and intangible and how people interact with dynamic contextual factors to develop a wide range of livelihood strategies 

·         Support the development of people’s capabilities (understood as human outcomes of the quality of peoples lives including leading a life free of avoidable morbidity, being informed and education and being well nourished), which are both a prerequisite for, and result of empowerment.  This illustrates that SLFs go well beyond material asset creation of income generation 

·         Are focused on mirco level outcomes for the individual or household but encourage analysis to consider how context might influence specific outcomes and how policies and institutional processes and structures might affect different groups of people categorized by their assed limitations.  

Moral naturalism 

Among moral prescriptions common opinion would include the sixth, seventh, and eighth of the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, and thou shalt not steal, have usually been regarded as important moral laws. An orthodox Christian or an orthodox Jew can sincerely and consistently inculcate these laws because he believes them to be the laws of God. They are right because God has commanded them. And they are laws because God imposes penalties for their transgression. Thus moral education can consistently be grounded on Biblical religion.  

Humanism, materialism, naturalism, or atheism obviously do not have this ground for morality, nor do these positions uniformly accept these laws.  Experience itself has accumulated in human memory and culture, gradually producing the methods of intelligence called reason and science.  Naturalism is usually defined as the philosophical conclusion that the only reality is nature, as gradually discovered by our intelligence using the tools of experience, reason, and science.  Naturalism is a worldview that relies upon experience, reason, and science to develop its understanding of reality and humanity’s place within reality. Human experience is the ultimate source and justification for all knowledge.  However, a paradox exists in Western society in that a majority of people within it believe in God but take issue with organised Christianity as expressed in its churches.  They are convinced of the superiority of the scientific method for addressing practical questions of health and affluence in the public forum, but fall back on Christianity as a traditional means of making ethical decisions in the private sphere. 

The hope that nature will show humanity the way to sound moral values is part of Krutch’s faith, and certainly that of the ‘Age of Ecology’. But this view has long been a beacon for Anglo-American culture, at least since the eighteenth century. Indeed, few ideas have been recycled as often as the belief that the factual “Is” of nature must become the moral “Ought” of man. Many have contended that a pronounced pattern or observed direction in nature provides man with all the guidance he needs for “should-ness.” If nature is found to be a world of interdependence, then human beings are obliged to consider that characteristic a moral dictum.   

But if we have to first to meditate on, and follow, nature, which road do we take? Whose map do we use?  How can we keep to the road?  The perennial hope has been that science will show the way. In the case of the ecological ethic, its proponents picked out their values first and only afterward came to science for its stamp of approval. What is really required is a deeper sense of integration between humankind and nature, a more than-economic relatedness and to let all the appended scientific arguments go. “Ought” might then be its own justification, its own defence, its own persuasion, regardless of what “is.” 

With the decline of religion and its moral tradition in our own time, science has become the universal standard, and for many, it maintains an aura of absolute sanctity. It is seen as an oracle of objective truth, located well above the shaky ground of moral choice, and therefore a perfectly trustworthy source not only of knowledge but also of value. Others, noting how often scientists reflect their cultural milieu, are more sceptical of science’s claim to detachment; the quality of trust is strained. But even the sceptics look to science for the validation of certain truths. If science cannot, by itself, save society, neither can society be saved without it. The moral values inherent in scientific models cannot be accepted without examination, but the guidance such models provides is indispensable. To judge which of these attitudes is the most valid requires presenting them within an educational framework where “Is” and “Ought” are distinct and unique concepts, but which demonstrates that any attempt to rigidly separate them is probably misguided. 

The idea of truth or fact outside the moral context has no meaning for the human mind. Whether imperialist, Arcadian, organismic, or something else, values have always been woven into the fabric of science. So much so that when scientists most firmly insist that they have screened out everything but demonstrable fact, the rest of us should nevertheless anticipate moral consequences.  

In his meditations about his homeland of Concord, Thoreau was beginning to assemble a guide to attaching moral values to our various uses of the environment.  Another key thinker in this area is Albert Schweitzer with his central ethical concept of  “Reverence for Life”. He sees this as stemming from a fundamental will-to-life inherent in all living things that, in self-conscious beings such as ourselves, establishes a drive towards both self-realization and empathy with other living things. Unlike Nietzsche’s will-to-power, it is not egoistic or individualistic. As living beings we are not only concerned for our own lives and development but also for the lives of other living beings and the environments in which we live.  Along with the inclination towards self- perfection that this direction for meditation on nature gives rise to a nature-centred spirituality and to a form of ethical idealism. Rather than obeying moral rules, which are conceived of as external impositions, the soul of the ethical life for Schweitzer is the drive towards fulfilment and authenticity. Insofar as we are a will to live, such authenticity will be felt as a need to show reverence for life in all its forms. The virtues that this gives rise to, which include compassion, gratitude, justice, hope, and the pursuit of peace, will be understood not as norms or principles to be followed, but as ideals and values in the light of which particular decisions must be made creatively and sincerely.  

The nature-centred spirituality which was central to Schweitzer’s thought, replaced the Lutheran Christianity in which he was brought up and constitutes a kind of pantheistic faith, which led him to be a precursor of some strands of contemporary environmental philosophy.  Such a philosophy values nature not just as a necessary resource for human flourishing or even as a repository of beauty and revitalization, but as the very ground of our being and source of motivation. Such ideas also led Schweitzer to an interest in Eastern religions with their stress on compassion for all living things.  So it is through connecting with the East that Christianity meets up with Buddhist thought.  Attention to the following Jewish prayer demonstrates that a more Buddhist verse could not have been uncovered. 

A man’s origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust, at risk of his life he earns his read; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust and a fleeting dream. 

Although naturalism is most often associated with its Western philosophical and scientific tradition, Taoism has often been understood as a naturalistic philosophy, since the ultimate power of the Tao is still part of nature. Several important varieties of Buddhism have no beliefs about the afterlife or anything supernatural. The Carvaka school of Hindu philosophy, notable for its defiant materialism and atheism. Thus over 2,600 years, religions in the major centres of civilization have been matched by a powerful alternative that looks to nature alone. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term the ‘axial age’ to describe this period from 800 BCE to 200 BCE, during which, according to Jaspers, similar revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India and the Occident. 

Like Buddhism, Hinduism is a way of life as well as a religion.  Both are free from any dogmatic affirmations concerning the nature of God and the core of religion is never felt to depend on the existence or non-existence of one God or many.  It is perfectly possible to be a good Hindu or Buddhist whether one’s personal views incline towards monism, monotheism, polytheism or atheism.  The spiritual process directed at oneness of nature is also the basis of Hinduism. Hindu religion’s reverence for the sea, soil, forests, rivers, mountains, plants, birds, and animals stems from its broader view of divinity. 

Unlike many other religions, Hindus believe that all things and beings in the world are various manifestations of the Ultimate Reality (Brahman), and nothing exists apart from it. The whole emphasis of Hindu scriptures is that human beings cannot separate themselves from nature.  Thousands of years ago, Hindu sages realized that preservation of the environment and ecological balance were necessary for the survival of mankind. To create an awareness among the common people for preservation of the environment, the priests taught that earth has the same relationship with man as a mother with her child. In the Vedic literature, the earth is addressed as Mother Earth and personified as goddesses. Five thousand years later the world’s scientific experts addressed earth as Mother Earth for the first time at the Global Conference in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.  

In Hinduism each human being, regardless of religion, geographic region, gender, colour or creed is in reality pure and divine (atman) clothed in a physical body. Since atman is inherently pure and divine, every human being is potentially divine. The Hindu view is that a man is not born a sinner, but becomes a victim of ignorance under the influence of cosmic ignorance, called Maya. Just as darkness quickly disappears upon the appearance of light, an individual’s delusion vanishes when he gains self-knowledge. Hinduism explains that the atman (the Innermost Self) is eternally yearning for perfect, unlimited and everlasting happiness.  But the atman is mistakenly searching for this happiness in the magic world where one finds only transitory pleasure followed by disappointments. 

Human life alone gives us a chance to know our true identity, which has its basis in the one true thing called Brahman. All else has a dependent reality because nothing except Brahman can exist on its own. To the Hindu priest, compassionate love is the highest vehicle to union with creation. In pursuing creation in this way one becomes more god-like, and from this inner source comes an outward manifestation of selfless love for all creation.  

The persistence of the above kinds of moral undercurrents in ecology from a variety of cultures as an increasingly quantified ecological body of knowledge means, for one thing, that mid- twentieth-century ecology belongs to the lay mind, to the amateur naturalist, the conservationist and ‘the man in the street’, as much as to the scientific establishment. Like Thoreau, the neighbourhood naturalist, in his time, it is important that collectively we do not wholly surrender the underlying science to academic experts. Ecology has always been unusual among the sciences in its accessibility to the ordinary student of nature.  Throughout its short history it has been shaped by and responsive to the everyday life of all sorts of people: farmers, gamekeepers, foresters, bird watchers, travellers. More than this, it has consistently appealed to many who are otherwise hostile to scientific explanations:  As long as ecology has a lay input, it can continue to teach the gospel of the organic community of interbeings, whether or not this is subject to empirical validation.  In practice this means endorsing conservation and its values as one side of the coin of cultural ecology, the other side being political economy. The problem is that a culture that tends towards conservation management of its natural resources could be a dying culture if others around it do not adopt the same constraints on consumption.  At the heart of this problem is the paradox of two antagonistic realities that have governed human development over the last two million years, the need for a stable food supply and the search for a secure homeland..  

The Indian poet and Nobel Prize Winner, Rabindranath Tagore, close to the end of his life, wrote in 1941 about the paradox of these two realities of human ecology.  He symbolised them poetically as the dance of human life and the constant shocks and injuries to that dance.  In the following poem he resolved the paradox by associating the former with the cohesive work of ordinary people through the ages and the latter with the nationalistic greed of rulers, states and power.  In the short run the latter destroys interbeing, but in the long run it is ultimately irrelevant. 

But the earth when I look at it

Makes me aware

Of the hubbub of a huge concourse

Of ordinary people

Led along many paths and in various groups

By man’s common urges,

From age to age, through life and death

They go on pulling at oars,

Guiding the rudder

Sowing seeds in the fields. 

Cutting ripe paddy

They work-In the cities and in fields. 

Imperial canopies collapse,

Battle-drums stop,

Victory pillars, like idiots,

Forget what their own words mean;

Live on only in children’s stories,

But their menace veiled.