Cultural Ecology

This is a kind of coda to my previous blog and was prompted by a visit to the Welsh fairy tale castle called Castell Coch (the Red Castle), recreated by the celebrated High Victorian architect, William Burgess for the fabulously wealthy third marquess of Bute, John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, in pursuit of their vision of the Middle Ages.  
 
I had been reading David Lewis Williams book, The Mind in the Cave, which had opened up ideas about prehistoric cave art being an ecological mind map.   That is to say the paintings of herbivores and their predators, produced by Stone Age communities in dark caverns tens of thousands of years ago, were part of a survival toolkit to make sense of their tribe’s dependence on a wild and uncertain food chain dominated by bloody carnivory and cross-clan rivalry.   I was therefore primed to see the rooms of Castell Coch, stuffed full of colourful beings of land, water and air in cosmic harmony, as a Victorian expression of animals as symbols of human frailties and dependencies.   This is very evident in the iconography of the vaulted drawing room.  At the apex is a starburst of butterflies, which move in a procession down the ribs through the realm of stars to the Earth’s biosphere filled with birds in flight.  The whole symbolises Nature’s rich fertility and its inherent transience. 
 
The Welsh pictures are creations of anonymous craftsmen working in the spirit of Catholic Medievalism and therefore comparable to the fresh spiritual world of the Upper Palaeolithic, where scientists and artists were one and the same person.  They remained so until the Renaissance.  Only then did ‘art’ begin to break free of mysticism and emerge as highly personalised expressions of individual freedom of thought and action. 
 
This comparison across many millennia also highlights the persistence of worship as a mystery to be participated in.  Our Palaeolithic ancestors gave their hearts and minds seamlessly to pictorial expressions of their being at one with the cosmos.  We, their descendants, give our hearts to the love, awe and beauty we have for ‘the other beings’ of Nature around us, and we bend our minds to understanding how to tap into Nature in order to secure for ‘ourselves’ an ever more comfortable life. Our divided modern personality at its extremes envisages art and science as separate poles of human endeavour, whereas in the Stone Age, being religious was as natural as wanting to find out how to hit a piece of flint to make an effective arrow head.  With the passage of thirty millennia, splitting flint led inevitably to the mechanics of splitting atoms.  In our atomic age, for those who care to look, the universe can be explained without the need for divine intervention. In looking for a supernatural force, one would predict aberrations from natural laws. But despite the evidence we might hope to find, the net balance of energy in the cosmos appears to be near zero. Scientists have yet to detect any input at the point of origin or anywhere else. There is no clear fingerprint of God. The Big Bang is entirely within the realm of natural possibility. Life on Earth is a marvellous cosmic circumstance.  Although a rarity perhaps in such a vast universe, many rarities would be expected to occur.
 
Making art is on a par with making a spiritual life.  Both are natural behaviours aimed at reinforcing the realm of human consciousness, which is the major evolutionary distinctiveness of primate evolution.  In this respect, things of the mind have not really changed for humankind since the Upper Palaeolithic.  People cannot be argued into or out of a belief in spiritual mysteries.  D.H. Lawrence encompassed this truism in his poem, Terra Incognita written at the height of a human commitment to industrial development powered by coal.
 
There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of,
Vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
We know nothing of, within us.
 
Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
Of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices,
There is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty,
And fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life;
And me, and you, and other men and women,
And grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight,
And ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft,
Softer than the space between the stars.
 
And all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
Alternately palpitate,
When at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
Of Know-Thyself, knowing we can never know,
We can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort,
And dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
As the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
Of purple after so much putting forth
And slow mounting marvel of a little tree.
 
We 21^st century beings are not in a different relationship with Nature.  There is ineffable subjective mystery and there is objective scientific inevitability.  But, facing a potentially disastrous collision with the global outcome of an ever-expanding carbon economy, we have to concede there is really no cosmic separation between being and not being.   Gods cannot mediate in the human food chain, of which mind, soul and spirit are an ungodly expression of the steady state of human metabolism.  We burn like a candle flame.  We drink of mother’s milk.  Materials are added and the human flame burns more brightly.  Then the balance between addition and subtraction wavers until the flame goes out.  Mind, body and environment throughout are one.
 
Glen A. Love, in his essay on ecocriticism, defined the untenable separation of mind and body as:
 
“a dualism in which the mind, soul, or spirit retains an august autonomy derived from God or some sort of numinous stand-in, and entailing an immaculate conception in which the mind (as a “blank slate”) was assumed not to have been violated by anything so gross as a body-or as Richard Dawkins has termed it, a “survival machine.”
 
He goes on to say that in reality, there is not and never has been such a thing as “the environment” separate from ‘mind’.   Nothing special “surrounds” human consciousness. Our substance cannot be distinguished from its “surroundings.” There is only one earthly entity and it comprises day-to-day chemical flows into and out of the biosphere as part of an integrated planetary system that includes everything from the degradation of a rock particle and the growth and reproduction of a microbe to Albert Einstein creating the theory of relativity.
 
Castell Coch
http://www.castellcoch.info/
 
Ecocriticism
http://www.logosjournal.com/fromm.htm

Supertanker planet Earth
 
Parsifal is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. It is loosely based on a 13th century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his quest for the Holy Grail.  An important episode occurs when Gurnemanz and Parsifal enter the mighty hall of the castle of the Grail. Gurnemanz is a kind of father-figure to young Parsifal, who stands by the door as if bewitched.  Gurnemanz says:
 
“Now observe well, and let me observe,
if you are a fool and innocent,
what knowledge may be divulged to you”.
 
The world has never been in greater need of ‘witless fools’, that is to say of people so described by the holders of conventional wisdom because they are promoting knowledge that runs against the grain of commonly held ideas.  Only by taking a stand against conventional thought will it be possible to discover the holy grail of sustainable development.  The goal is to be able to retain our 20th century comforts whilst releasing our grasp on the combustion of fossil carbon, and yet continue to hold our hard-won joy, admiration and one-ness in Nature. James Lovelock is one such lateral thinker who has likened us as a species to the crew of a supertanker, where the helmsman has gone to sleep and awoke to find his vessel heading straight for a rocky coast ten miles away.  The only solution is for us to scramble into a lifeboat and hope for a good landing.  There is no doubt that our international consumer civilisation is on a collision course with the physics of global warming and we have gone too far to reverse engines. Lovelock’s solution is to switch from carbon fuels to nuclear power.  The hope is this will lessen the impact of climate change and that Nature will show us the way to sound moral values when we are protected from her ills by harnessing atomic energy, the renewable cosmic mother of the universe.
 
Running up against global warming if we stick relentlessly with a carbon economy will not be the end of planet Earth, but it will be the termination of human civilisation based on burning carbon to maintain our energy supply.  Long before the next millennium, according to current socio-climatic models, Southern Europe will be a desert and the offshore islands of the United Kingdom will become a haven for economic migrants driven westwards to partake of the declining Atlantic rainfall. The Sahara Desert is marching northwards and has already reached Spain and Portugal. 
 
Return of the dry jungle
 
It is important to appreciate the fear of the unknown that dominated our species in its direct day-to-day conflict with the environment until coal-driven industrialisation began to spread Nature’s bounty in the 19th century.  This long held human fear of environment is encapsulated in the term ‘jungle’ with its many disturbing meanings, such as a land densely overgrown with tropical vegetation, an impenetrable thicket, a dense confused mass, a jumble made up of many confused elements, a bewildering complex or maze, a place or milieu characterized by intense, often ruthless competitive struggle for survival.  It is the survival of the fittest in the dry jungles of politics and multinational corporations that come nearest to what many people imagine will dominate international relations if we have to return to our pre-industrial fight with raw Nature.   An impoverished environmental arena for this contest is already in the making.
 
The first official warning to the European helmsmen of the international community came from the United Nations in 2003.  It drew attention to the fact that drought and deforestation had emerged as two of the major causes of desertification in Europe. Perennial trees or crops and seasonal ones, help maintain vegetation cover on the land throughout the year so as to prevent wind and water erosion. The vegetation helps keep the moisture level on the ground as well as under-ground, thus decreasing aridity. Conversely, forest fires and droughts contribute to erosion, land degradation and eventually desertification. The 2003 warning is encapsulated in the following statement from the UN.
 
“The heatwave scorching Europe and the ensuing forest fires will put the affected regions into greater vulnerability to desertification. According to a report by Radio Free Europe yesterday, forest fires in Croatia, Portugal and Spain alone have swept more than 250,000 hectares of land during the recent heat wave in Europe
 
In Portugal, this adds to a total of 215,000 hectares of land devastated by fires so far this year, or 7% of Portugal’s total 3.3 million hectares of woodland. Already more than one third of its land is at risk of desertification. In Spain, 31 percent of its land is under serious threat of desertification. Eighty-seven percent of the territory in Italy responded positively to vulnerability to desertification.
 
Agricultural productivity due to prolonged drought and heat among Europe Union member states is already expected to lower output by about six percent from last year.   With forest fires and land degradation, however, agricultural productivity is expected to drop further, if left unchecked.
 
Nevertheless, these trends are not expected to abate soon, as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) predicted that extreme weather conditions might increase in the future”.
 
In fact, the first international warning had been sounded a decade earlier from the distant eastern borderlands of Eastern Europe.  In 1993, President Ilyumzhinov of the Kalmyk Republic declared a state of emergency in response to a major deterioration in the local environment. The crisis resulted from intensive land degradation and a shortage of water, together with the increasing human load on the natural environment.  It coinciding with a decline in the health of the population and falls in both life expectancy and the quality of life. These, in turn were perceived to threaten the gene pool of the Kalmyk people – and dramatically the new phrase ‘ecological ethnocide’ was invented to highlight the situation.  Kalmykia now contains Europe’s first desert.
 
In the light of these recent accelerated trends towards desertification, Europe will share the fate of North Africa.  Here, since prehistoric times, human factors have had a dominant role in desertification, with over-grazing, over-farming, misuse of irrigation and the unsustainable demands of a growing population all contributing to environmental degradation.   Abandonment of marginal agricultural lands is an important contribution to desertification.  In Europe this socio-economic process started during the 1950s due to the industrialization of the countries involved along with an increase in the cost of cultivation, a decrease of profits and the changes in the trade regulations. There have also been social incentives, which encouraged the farmers to move to urban centres more attractive to them. By 1990 between 10 and 20 percent of agricultural land in the Mediterranean countries was abandoned.  Whether an abandoned agricultural land will move towards recovery or desertification depends on the state of the land at the time of its abandonment and on what follows afterwards.  Some kind of environmental management is essential.
 
By 2005 the United Nations University International Network on Water, Environment and Health, warned that more needed to be done by the international community to combat desertification. Drylands, which range from “dry sub-humid” to “hyper-arid” regions, make up more than 40 percent of the world’s land surface and are home to two billion people. The largest area stretches from Saharan Africa across the Middle East and Central Asia into parts of China.  Most of Australia is also classified as drylands, along with much of the western U.S., parts of southern Africa, and patches of desert in South America.
 
The report concluded that that up to 20 percent of those areas had already suffered some loss of plant life or economic use as a consequence of desertification.  It said that global warming was likely to exacerbate the problem, causing more droughts, heat waves and floods.  Desertification has also been linked to health problems caused by dust storms, poverty and a drop in farm production, with infant mortality in drylands double the rate elsewhere in developing nations.  The problem causes dangerous changes to the environment on a global scale, the report warned, with dust storms in the Gobi and Sahara deserts blamed for respiratory problems in North America and damage to coral reefs in the Caribbean.  Scientists estimate that a billion tons of dust from the Sahara is lifted into the atmosphere each year.  This is the return of the dry jungle where the fight to stave off uncaged Nature is renewed.
 
The human mindset behind the unstoppable momentum of ‘Supertanker Earth’ is encapsulated in the words of the economist George Reisman: 
 
“Thirty years ago, the land under the house I live in, in Southern California, was empty desert. Had I wanted to sleep in the same location that my bedroom now stands on, I would have had to bring a sleeping bag, take precautions against rattlesnakes, scorpions, and coyotes, and hope I could find a place for my sleeping bag such that I wouldn’t have rocks pressing into my body. If it rained, I would get wet. If it was cold, I would be cold. If it was hot, I would be hot. Going to the bathroom would be a chore. Washing up would be difficult or impossible.
 
How incomparably better is the environment provided by my house and my bedroom. I sleep on a bed with an innerspring mattress. I don’t have to worry about snakes, scorpions, or coyotes. I’m protected from the rain, the cold, and the heat, by a well constructed house with central heating and air conditioning. I have running water, hot and cold, a flush toilet, a sink, a shower, and a bathtub, in fact more than one of each of these things, and I have electricity and most of the conveniences it makes possible, such as a refrigerator, a television set, a VCR, and CD and DVD players”
 
In other words, the human brain is hard-wired to take the easiest options for a more comfortable life.  Reisman was actually responding to the environmentalists who encaspulate the problem of world development in terms of the loss of diverse wildlife habitats, which they say should be sacrosanct, irrespective of human wants, because of their intrinsic value.  He goes further in his condemnation of their policies to combat global warming:
 
“All advice, all policy recommendations emanating from the environmentalist movement must be summarily rejected unless and until they can be validated on the basis of a pro-man, pro-wealth, pro-capitalist standard of value. Such a standard will never imply such a thing as the destruction of the energy base of industrial civilization as the means of addressing global warming.
 
The environmental movement is the philosophic enemy of the human race. It should be treated as such. If we value the material well-being and, indeed, the very lives of billions of our children and grandchildren, we must treat it as such. We must treat environmentalism as our mortal enemy”.
 
Environmentalism is being posed as the destroyer of civilisation.
 
Caging the savage
 
On August 8th, 2006 the following message was posted by ‘Prodigal Son’ to the oildrum.com forum discussing the question as to whether nuclear power is a viable option for our future energy needs.
 
“Civilization is a good thing. It makes this forum we’re posting on possible. The fact neither you nor your mother died when you were born is another pretty good aspect. Lights, books, and readily available food are also quite nice.
 
Can civilization be made better? Yes. Is ‘American’ civilization flawed? Yes. Is ‘turning’ to some romantic notion of being ‘one’ with the Earth by embracing fantasy notions of how ‘primitives’ lived a solution to our problems? No.
 
Mother Nature is a cruel bitch that has inflicted misery and death on mass numbers of people. I’m glad she’s in chains. Mother Nature is like a cow. You lock it up so it doesn’t shit all over the barnyard, but you don’t keep it so chained up and stressed that it produces bad milk.
My point? A happy medium can be established”. 
 
The fierce aboriginal bottleneck through which the U.S.A. was birthed is forcibly described by Captain John Smith in his first-hand chronicle of the 17th century expedition that established the British settlement of Jamestown: no romantic he!  His was an art-free, beleaguered community.  Art came with the romanticising that followed successful harvests and extermination of native opposition to the invaders. 
 
In time, the European exposure to the jungle’s lethal secrets moved to Africa.   Joseph Conrad in his novella ‘Heart of Darkness’, based on his experiences in command of a steamer on the Congo River, describes the uncomfortable contact of Europeans with an unmapped tropical Africa.  He also explores the theme of darkness lurking beneath the uncharted surface of even “civilized” persons.  A similar message had been painted by Hieronymus Bosch and created by Goya, in his engraving ‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’.
 
“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were Kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, think, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances”.
 
Conrad was aware that aboriginal cultures are not pervaded by harmony and spiritual interconnectedness with environment.  This is a superficial New Age image of tribal societies.  The paradise myth was reinforced by the discovery of painted animals of hunter gathering societies expressed as cave art, and was given as an explanation of the mysterious Adena serpent mounds in North America.  In contrast, the reality of humanity’s wrestling match with Nature was expressed in the Mythic art of the settled cultures of ancient Egypt, where cultivated land was called the gift of the great Nile   Hellas was known as woman and mother.  In Russia, the homeland was called it the mother-provider. Losing soil fertility was equivalent to a national disaster.
 
Art and environmental well-being
 
Ever since one of the sub-groups of the apes became human, our social evolution as Homo sapiens has gone hand in hand with inventions to improve human well-being.  Artistic endeavour was one of the first attempts to understand the pressing environment by giving it order in the mind.  Arguments still rage around the precise meanings of Upper Palaeolithic art, but there is general agreement that it was symbolic of the need to understand and codify conflict in the ecological setting of the Stone Age, where feeding a family involved participating in the surrounding violence of predation and tribal conflict.  The creation of a spirit world was a key step in social adaptation.  This world of the mind encompassed the large mammals of the Palaeolithic environment as artistic metaphors for the survival strategy of small bands of hunters dependent on carnivory.  The current unifying concept is that cave art is the outcome of trance-induced, supernatural journeys of shamans whose goal was to look into the life of things and reveal how their adherents should behave to survive. Painting a damp rock surface in the flickering light of a tallow flame was not an expression of joy in Nature.  The making of pictorial mindmaps of humankind’s relationships with the environment was then a vital part of the Homo sapiens survival toolkit produced in response to synesthetic experiences heightened by sensory deprivation in narrow rock passages and black cavernous chambers.  The view is gaining ground that synesthesia-phenomena are the basis of artistic creativity.  There is a spectrum of its expression, from a norm scattered among the mass of the population to rare persons with hallucinatory powers, such as Bosch and Goya.  Most works of art are created at the ‘normal’ end of the scale.  In contrast, Munch’s description of his state of mind that gave birth to ‘The Scream’, a pictorial metaphor of primeval fear, points to hallucination as the source of his imagery.
 
“I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through Nature.”
 
The ultimate expression of social evolution is the inventions of science, which provides us with space and time to integrate with Nature. Also, just as the roof and walls of a house shelter us from the deadlier moods of the elements, the scientific classifications of Nature shield us from our fears of a wilder kingdom: the chaos of the unknown.  Prehistoric art is bound up with the psychological meaning of homeland as a symbol of the unconscious. Its pictured bulls, bears and big cats represent dreams about untamed primitive instincts. Horses symbolise the gentler side of their ecosystem.  The caging of Nature by European artists only emerged a few centuries ago in Medieval art, where plants and animals, real and imagined, where used as symbols and illustrations of Nature’s potential fertility, beauty and its transience.
 
Thirty millennia after the first rock paintings were made art is still the province of human dreamers.  The French painter Henri Rousseau, a confirmed urbanite, captured the wonderful mystery of the beings with which we share planet Earth by caging them in dream paintings such as La Charmeuse de Serpents 1907.
 
Gregory Tozian when reviewing the paintings of the contemporary environmentalist artist Alexis Rockman recently took a more prosaic view of musing on Nature:
 
“Humans drift off to sleep better each night knowing that their species, alone, has been dubbed the crown of creation. There’s some comfort in the notion that the cockroaches will disappear from Eden-or at least from beneath the kitchen sink-with a few strategically placed squirts from the right aerosol can”.
 
Rockman’s work, like science and cave art, is concerned with ordering Nature, but with a disturbing message for the future of humankind.  Through his tapestries of hybrid, warring and mutated species he ultimately ask us what really is our relationship to Nature, to the plants and animals we are eradicating at breakneck speed.  He says his artworks are information-rich depictions of how our 21st century culture perceives and interacts with plants and animals.  They are commentaries on the feedback between new cultures and the future direction of natural history.
 
His painting ‘The Farm’ depicts the explosive advances in genetic engineering within the history of animal breeding. The image is a wide-angle view of a cultivated soybean field constructed to be read from left to right. The image begins with the ancestral versions of the narrow range of animals, the cow, pig, and chicken that make modern life possible.  The story pans across to an informed speculation about how these creatures might look in the future. Also included are geometrically transformed vegetables and familiar images relating to the history of genetics. Rockman says he is:
 
“interested in how the present and the future look of things are influenced by a broad range of pressures- human consumption, aesthetics, domestication, and medical applications among them. The flora and fauna of the farm are easily recognizable; they are, at the same time, in danger of losing their ancestral identities”. 
 
Many would admit that they have already lost their connection with this ‘growing to kill’ aspect of the domestic human food chain, which was a frequent bloody experience for the ancestors of most people only a few generations ago.
 
Rockman’s work is an expression of moral naturalism, which takes the view that moral systems are explained in terms of the social or biological properties of humans interacting with many living beings in Nature. Cave painting tells us that making art is a fundamental biological characteristic of being human.  In this evolutionary sense art has a purpose and serves a human need.  The expression of a personal view of Nature in the form of a work of art satisfies a human need by generating awareness that we are part of Nature in everything we do, from planting grain to painting a house.  Art therefore serves the preservation and survival of our consciousness.   In this respect, art is something next to religion or science, representing an order of behavioural values in the mind of the artist.  In the words of the naturalist Thoreau the big test of a philosophy is whether it helps us to solve the riddle of everyday living: “How to live, How to get the most life”.  For this test it is more important to discover the real facts of an artist’s life than peruse any of his works of art.  In this context, no artist has been more scrutinised for environmental credentials than Gauguin.
 
“Art is an abstraction,” Gauguin wrote, “as you dream amid Nature, extrapolate art from it.” Gauguin sought to re-enchant the world through his visions of the biodiversity of tropical islands.  In ‘Matamoe (Death, or Landscape with Peacock 1892) he creates an exotic Garden of Eden.  Verdant shades of greenery rise layer upon layer from the foreground up the sky.  A fruit-bearing palm tree crowns the scene and a lush, impenetrable forest growth surges in from the left. Earthy yellows and oranges break up the verdure, like almost living lava flows. In the middle ground, a vision of a toiling native appears to be chopping twisting, serpentine-shaped tree limbs. Behind the figure a nearby fire sends up a thick white cloud of smoke. Further up and back, two figures walk past a thatched native hut. The image is oddly still, yet pregnant with invisible South Sea heat.  A pair of peacocks strut in the foreground. The painting has also been called ‘Sleeping Eyes’, possibly weaving a connection between the male peacock’s tail feathers and the symbolic presence of death. The image states many of the contradictory and enigmatic tendencies in Gauguin’s art: the rich, complex colour palettes, the blending of “savage” (non-European native) and Christian symbolism (jungle as garden of Eden) in visual rhythms.  They express a pictorial idealization of happiness-noble, self-unaware, sexually self-possessed natives. Gauguin did not identify himself as a “savage,” neither at home in metropolitan Paris or in the relatively un-Europeanised native settlements of the South Pacific.  He painted dreamscapes, seeking less to find than to create a vision of earthly paradise.
 
In contrast, Henri Rousseau  (1844-1910), another dreamer and contemporary of Gauguin, was as a city bureaucratic, reflected in his nickname, “the customs official”. An employee in the Paris customs bureau he never left Paris.  Yet he worked his way into a position among the Parisian artists who were renewing the European art world at the turn of the century. It was a difficult journey. For years the art world derided his untaught icon-like figures, simple landscapes and, in his late phase, exotic jungle scenes inspired by picture books. However his “naive” compositions became an emblem that piqued the interest of the avant-garde. Rousseau’s jungle paintings consisted of ornamental variations of plant leaves, among which he set brilliantly coloured predators, natives and naked beauties. In so doing, he defined the intuitive principles of design and composition, which subsequent avant-garde artists had to work out for themselves with great effort. Ultimately winning recognition as an uncompromising modernist, Rousseau inspired comparison with Derain, Cezanne, Matisse and Gauguin. He became acquainted with Apollinaire, Delaunay, Picabia, Brancusi and other influential figures in the Parisian art world; in 1908, Picasso held a legendary banquet in his honour. Today, ‘Rousseau’s myth’, a fascinating mixture of primitive idyll and parallel universe of the mind, holds a secure place in an urban dreamland.
 
Environmental art and future humankind
 
After the Palaeolithic, the beings of land, water and air have always inhabited the dreaming human brain.  Initially they were bound up with the myths of gods who had to be placated to keep the sun in the sky, such as the bloodthirsty plumed serpent of the Aztecs.  Other legends were comforting and sometimes humorous, such as Arachne the Greek spiderwoman, who was punished because she tried to rival the gods.  Now, via the film character of Tarzan, who could speak to animals, pictures of Nature have become urban wallpaper through countless television programmes.  Post-tribal artists have entered the global market in domestic pictures.
 
By-passing the images of popularist environmentalism, in the 1960s, new direct connections between art and Nature developed and became among the characteristics of contemporary art. This is referred to as ‘Earth art’, a movement of artists with wide ranging goals, but all employing such materials as stones, mud, and leaves. Many earthworks, some constructed on a vast scale, are intended to help us to better understand Nature. Some often point out artists’ desires to understand, conquer, and control natural processes. Through this movement the distinction between art and Nature became increasingly blurred.
 
A good example of earth art is the project Art of the Desert – Holy Cartography and Land-Art.  It is a creation of Mauricio P. Bedoya a Colombian architect.  This regionally acclaimed UNEP approved project can be classed as a latter day romantic approach towards the aesthetic, spiritual and environmental enhancement of the daily lives of the Wayuu, a global aboriginal ethnic group in northern Colombia. This tribe has come off badly in its encounter with multinational investment in the search for natural resources.
 
Bedoya’s artistic endeavour is nevertheless considered a benchmark or point of initiation in studying the impact of deserts and desertification on other aboriginal communities elsewhere in Latin America and rest of the world.  Based on extensive interaction with the Wayuu it may be taken as a general model pointing out that people have used art to emphasise their dependence on other beings of land, water and air since time immemorial.  It can be taken as the art of unsustainability.
 
Following close on Earth art, as part of the search for sustainable development, came the conjoint rise of environmental ethics in the 1970s and discussions began about Nature as an independent source of moral values, rather than a mere stage for moral life which derived its value from relations among humans. A view was taken that Nature might have independent moral value; much like persons are thought to have such value, and that Nature can be an active participant in a morally virtuous life.  But for this to happen all great philosophers in history have believed that no spiritual progress could be won in the midst of the distracting corrupting pursuit of material comforts.  Even today, economic simplicity is thought to be crucial for people to tap into pagan animism in an age of social fragmentation.  However, all national governments are committed to on-going economic development powered by a mix of renewable energy, including nuclear power, and fossil fuel, providing it is coupled technically with the fixation of the carbon emissions.  The role for environmental art is, as stated in the manifesto of greenmuseum.org, to advance creative efforts to improve our relationship with the natural world.  The goal is to inform, inspire and connect people through environmental art whilst encouraging the creation of new work that serves both communities and ecosystems.  To achieve this goal, art comes in line with other human behaviours that aid the preservation and survival of our consciousness in the coming age of sustainability. This equivalence of behaviours was perceived by Daniel Conrad writing on the topic of aesthetics in science and art: 
 
“Consider again things that invoke feelings of beauty (music, poetry, painting, Nature, mathematics, cosmology). They all have at least this in common:
 
·         a structure (including texture and detail) that provokes and challenges specific parts of the mind:
·         the parts that perceive and interpret, that make sense, that draw out meaning and pattern from initially random input, that creatively organize and make sense out of a chaotic universe.
 
And this provocation occurs through an implied or explicit transformation, even if it is just a simple transformation of paint into an image, or a metaphor in a poem, or a melody from a sequence of sounds”.
 
Transferring Nature from the imagination to a rectangular two-dimensional canvas cage fulfils Daniel Conrad’s critieria to make sense out of our place in a chaotic universe.  In the 21st century it can fulfil a fundamental need is to bring our private economy close to Nature’s economy.  Thoreau described the response in this way:
 
“I derive real vigor from the scent of the gale wafted over the naked ground, as from strong meats, and realize again how man is the pensioner of Nature.  We are always conciliated and cheered when we are fed (such) an influence, and our needs are felt to be part of the domestic economy of Nature.”
 
For most people, a picture in the style of a Gauguin reverie, a Rousseau jungle or a medieval tapestry serves the same purpose.  They satisfy a human need for a mystical experience in our global pro-man, pro-wealth, pro-capitalist culture that from the Enlightenment has been built to protect us from Nature by the application of rational beliefs and actions.
 
 
James Lovelock:Nuclear power is the only green solution:
(http://www.ecolo.org/media/articles/articles.in.english/love-indep-24-05-04.htm)
 
Settlement of Jamestown:
(http://www.nationalcenter.org/SettlementofJamestown.html)
 
Kalmykia in transition:
http://casestudies.lead.org/index.php?csp=17
 
Ecoart:
http://www.greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=263
 
Contemporary jungle art:
http://www.davidmillerart.co.uk/jungle_art_prints.htm
 
The Wayuu:
(http://www.geocities.com/jayuir/wayuu_en.html)
 
Tarzan: Images of engulfment:
http://www.transparencynow.com/engulf.htm
 
Earth honouring paintings by Susan Cohen Thompson:
http://www.creativecreek.com/art/index.html
 
Paintings of Alexis Rockman:
http://www.organicanews.com/news/article.cfm?story_id=102
 
George Reisman’s Blog on Economics, Politics, Society, and Culture:
http://georgereisman.com/blog/2006/11/standards-of-environmental-good-and_16.html
 
Jungle’s lethal secrets:
http://www.tierramerica.net/2001/0422/iarticulo.shtml
 
The jungle art of Conrad and Rousseau:
http://mural.uv.es/rosegar/HEART%20OF%20DARKNESS.html
 
Vision on the rocks:
http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arch/10_5_96/bob2.htm
 
Art and synesthesia:
http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/
 
 

In order correctly to define art it is necessary, first of all, to dismiss it as simply a source of pleasure and beauty and to consider it as a primary condition of human biology.  To be artistic involves the use of skill and imagination in the creation of objects, environments, or experiences, that when they are perceived by others, create social bonds by linking people together in the same feelings.   A work of art then, is any human production which causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with its maker and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same emotional response from it.  It is an infection of feelings.
 
Leo Tolstoy was the first person to define art in this way as a universal feature of human behaviour.  In What is art? first published in 1896, he defined art as any human activity that a person selects from the babble of day-to-day living because it transmits an emotion that inspired the person producing it to creativity.
 
“We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind – from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance”.
 
In other words, artistic activity is an expression of selfhood that evolved for bonding in groups, and through the ages has been an indispensable feature of human existence for the well-being of individuals and society.  The vehicle for transmission is anything deliberately created with the intention to affect the feelings and thoughts of others with the aims of changing their mood, challenging their understanding, inspiring them to be creative or giving a visual identity to their environment. 
 
Turning environment into art was the role of the traditional genre of landscape painting.  The idea that gardens were an art form came from Alexander Pope, who, in 1734, suggested that “all gardening is landscape painting. Just like a landscape hung up”.  This idea was claimed by artists in the 1960s when many stopped merely representing the land on canvas and made their mark directly in the environment.  This was a human instrumental attitude to nature exemplified by the monumental approach of artists like Michael Heizer and James Turrell.  Their bulldozers were the chisels of Eco art sending a message about  the scale of human engineering of the land.   By contrast, the work created by people who call themselves environmental artists demonstrates a weaker instrumental attitude that may be called human-centred. Some reclaim and remediate damaged environments, restoring nature in artistic and often aesthetic ways.
 
Contemporary environmental artists such as Lynne Hull, interpret nature to inform us about its processes, or about environmental problems we face.  They interact with habitat forces, creating artworks affected or powered by wind, water, lightning, even earthquakes.  Their message is educational. We should re-envision our relationship to nature by adopting new ways to dwell in harmony with ecosystems.  Dwelling, in this context, means living with a set of complex interactions between ideas, people, nature and structures.  This is a form of earth art whereby artists can have the same complexities of encounter with space as the people who make gardens.    Mental constructs they hold in common chime with spiritual and creative impulses emanating from Eastern philosophies, which are physically rooted in the chaitya of Buddhism.   They all imagine a fresh stream of inflowing ideas will ‘condition the dwelling places of man and his mode of life and expression’, ‘which will supersede the old and build the “new house” in which humanity will live; cycle after cycle and civilization after civilization’.  When Siddhartha Gautama, the prince who was to become Buddha Shakyamuni, came across the region of Uruvela he was struck by its beauty and peaceful setting…the pure clear waters of the Nairanjana River flowing gently between beautiful banks, verdant woods, and its seclusion and distance from turmoil. Seeing all this, Siddhartha’s mind became exceedingly calm and it became his dwelling place to attain enlightenment. What the Buddha was to see and do here were the first scriptural guidelines for the siting and design of Buddhist monasteries, temples and gardens.  
 
In Buddhism, a chaitya is any sacred place (tree, spring, lake etc.) within which a burial place is sited.  The term stupa was originally applied to a burial place but many stupas do not contain relics and the term is now used for any Buddhist shrine with a circular mound form. Stupas are frequently placed on hills and the upward journey to reach them symbolises the journey to heaven. One of the greatest stupas is at Barabudur in Java.  It is situated in a long, fertile valley, on top of a small hill, nestling against a protective backdrop of mountains. The whole valley is thus perceived as a community art form.  Its fields are the nave of the chaitya; the hill the stupa’s pedestal; and heaven lies above its arched ceiling. Pilgrims moving through the chaitya to climb the hill, position themselves in the wider world and through their religion they negotiate their relationship with the cosmos.  The Buddhist term vihara originally meant the pleasure garden of a monastic precinct.  It later came to denote the monastic dormitory and hall, but the connection between cultivating and dwelling was crucial.  Barabudur is nothing less than a symbolic representation of ‘humanity in the Universe’, applying knowledge that evolved to cultivate crops for survival to create pleasure gardens for religious contemplation.  
 
The Buddhist monastic garden was probably the origin of the ‘stroll gardens’ in India, where walking around a temple symbolizes circling the spiritual centre of the universe. India’s stroll gardens were adapted by the Chinese, who decorated their gardens with symbols of the Buddhist universe, purifying the mind with each encounter. The history of garden making in Japan goes back to the 6th century, when hill and pond gardens were introduced from China and Korea, where aristocrats gathered to enjoy poetry and games alongside a stream. Japanese Zen monks further developed gardens into a highly intellectual art over hundreds of years of temple gardening. They emptied their minds of worldly distractions and came to know themselves by dwelling in their gardens sparsely ornamented with nothing more than rocks and fragile, sinuous marks in sand. 
 
So, from early times gardening became the production of a representation of a dwelling place in a strongly spiritual sense; a temporary changing aesthetic, where plants came under partial control amongst a range of symbolic objects to communicate a new sense of being.  A garden represents these connections in the same way that paintings and photographs can produce ephemeral moments of intimacy and enlargement of our lives.  Growing things for pleasure produces a dynamic sacred dwelling place created in a combination of love, care and imagination.  As the plants grow, a garden becomes a symbol of our being part of the planet in a very intimate way.  With the passing of the seasons a garden produces a realisation of self as nature changes alongside fixed material objects, which is expressed in poetic ideas and imaginative play.  This defines gardening for pleasure as a fundamental aspect of human behaviour.  Biologically, we are at one with the bower bird, which, depending on the species, produces a space ranging from a circle of cleared earth with a small pile of twigs in the center, to a complex and highly decorated structure of sticks and leaves, into and around which are placed a variety of objects he has collected. The bird will spend hours carefully sorting and arranging his collection, with each thing in a specific place. If an object is moved while the bowerbird is away he will put it back in its place.  A biological nuance, and a concession to the evolution of human consciousness, is that the bird bower is built to attract mates, whereas, we produce our ‘garden bowers’ to express selfhood and also to bond mentally with humanity and dwell in a wider context of cultural ecology.
 
At the end of a day in the garden a new arrangement of nature has been made, which speaks of personal effort and struggle with the depth and limitations of cultivation.  The outcome is a creative expression of personality and individuality through caring for nature yet making sure it does not subvert our planned process of creativity. For most people, gardening is making sense of what is available in terms of space, greenery and opportunities to make compatible material creations.  The aim is to compile images in arrangements that are not views, but loose groupings, artistically composed.   Gardening is an emotional encounter with the land, involving touch amongst other senses.  The final ownership of what has been produced is sensual.  It is a temporary encounter with our planetary home to organise a small portion of its surface and grasp the freedom to grow for pleasure in a dynamic encounter with the limitations and opportunities of the local habitat.  We fill a space with meaning in our own way, always changing it as we explore it with memories, ideas, accumulated experiences and practice.  This is how a garden, alive with secret vibrations, becomes both a work of art and a dwelling.
 

We have come a long way in a very short time from a point in human evolution where ecology and culture were as one. Looking back less than a century we see fading images of native peoples with lives that revolved around the circling year. Their demands were made on a regional ecosystem in which they moved from site to site according to the richness of place and season. At the extreme, whole communities migrated to find maximum abundance through minimum work.   Having alternatives and choosing only the resources that were plentiful meant that no single species became over-used.  These were societies at one with ecological patchiness. Biodiversity meant abundance, stability, and a regular supply of the things that kept them alive.  Management of resources meant the management in families of hunting and collecting.  The key elements of culture were flexibility of resources and the mobility to find them. All education was environmental education, which was needed to instil the practical skills necessary to apply biology of human inclusivity to local ecosystems.  Place names tell where plants could be gathered, shellfish collected, mammals found, fish caught or reeds harvested.  Then, agrarian fixity replaced native mobility, and this separated people from ecology through ideas of property, wealth and, above all, fences. Education to exploit nature instilled the practical skills necessary to sustain permanent settlements, maximise productivity, and transport commodities for profit.  As world development gathered momentum, demands for resources met through applied science replaced requests for deities to support family and community.
 
Nature has always seeded values in society because it comprises the outcomes of creation in which we know we are an integral part of a unique cosmic wholeness.  This is why nature has to be taken seriously as a third partner in the business of development along with labour and monetary capital, because human history and natural history are part of the same comprehensive cosmic process.  It is therefore an important task for educationalists to develop a new biology of qualities and inclusivity.  This stands in sharp contrast to the old biology of exploitation that emphasises competition, selfishness and survival, and is encapsulated in the myth of the selfish-gene.  Its applications are to realise the five points of the Berne Draft Resolution about ‘rights of nature’, which is really an educational manifesto for non-violence towards the environment.

 
·        Nature-animate or inanimate- has a right to existence i.e. to preservation and development.
·        Nature has a right to the protection of its ecosystems and of the network of species and populations.
·        Animate nature has a right to the preservation and development of its genetic inheritance.
·        Living beings have a right to life in accordance with their species, including procreation, in the ecosystems appropriate to them.
·        Interventions in nature need to be justified….
 
Local consumption now has global implications and in 1974 the United Nations called upon all interested bodies to promote ‘learning for living‘ so that people and business could become communities of stakeholders in local plans for sustainable development.  Learning for living means growing up in a community where learning is a neighbourhood participatory process dedicated to families and individuals taking responsibility for the quality of their own environment.  Their roles are as families, employers, employees, producers, consumers, and taxpayers, functioning as one community whilst sharing ideas and experiences among the millions populating the earth.   The local management of sustainable development requires everybody taking up their rights to understand fully the necessity of the economy of which they are a part.  This means that learning should be targeted towards a personal body of knowledge focused on gaining an awareness of environmental obligations to others, and to the natural world.  The culture of a community is a dynamic association of livelihoods, skills and environment. Participatory involvement requires a broad understanding of how environment, economy and community are integrated.  In particular, information is required about who benefits from the fruits of work, who benefits from what is bought and sold, and the degree to which consumerism enhances or degrades the local environmental inheritance. This neighbourhood knowledge system is then applied to support a local culture of ecological collaboration in conservation management systems for sustainable development.  These target the environmental impact of the circulation of goods, people, raw materials, messages and money.
 
In 1977, the UK Department of Education and Science suggested that reasonable expectations of such a knowledge system were that citizens should:
·        view their neighbourhood with an eye both appreciative and critical;
·        understand something of the processes of their physical world;
·        have a basic knowledge of their local biodiversity;
·        understand something of the local economy, technological planning and political process, which affect community livelihoods and use of the environment;
·        have a degree of insight into environments of other communities, livelihoods, lifestyles and predicaments;
·        understand something of the interdependence of communities and the nature of their resource bases;
·        develop attitudes of concern towards their neighbourhood and the neighbourhoods of others;
·        have a basis on which to participate in decisions affecting their neighbourhood environment and view their actions as part of the cultural history of the community;
·        know about the policies of local non-government agencies;
·        participate in grass-roots input to national decision-making. 
 
Unfortunately, the adoption of a UK national curriculum dedicated to passing examinations set within traditional subject divisions, has obscured the fact that traditional subjects are inadequate navigational aids to support the 1977 expectations for a citizen’s curriculum. It was an opportunity missed.  
 
Another disadvantage of the old subject divisions is that they are barriers to holistic systems thinking.  Industrial exploitation of natural resources involves many production lines, blending and separating in multipinnate schemes, often of great complexity, which eventually converge as goods and services.  Consumption in a supermarket economy, which is alienated from neighbourhood, is represented by diverging connections from far distant producing agencies that converge on collections of households. 
 
One of the first examples of the need for the educational system to produce a mind-set and confidence for crossing traditional academic boundaries were the practical problems of establishing the Weija Reservoir in Ghana. This water storage project, created in 1977 on the Densu River, is approximately 116 km long.   The objective of this massive scheme was to provide a water supply for more than two million inhabitants of the rapidly growing city of Accra.  To obtain a practical body of knowledge applicable to evaluate the impact of this enterprise required assembling an information database encompassing the following topics:
 
·        National Debt;
·        population growth;
·        migration;
·        sacred land;
·        agrochemical runoff;
·        soil erosion;
·        eutrophication;
·        flooding;
·        extinction of indigenous communities;
·        bilharzias disease;
·        flooding;
·        population growth;
·        urbanisation;
·        water-borne waste disposal;
·        costs of water treatment;
·        donor politics.
 
This list shows the diversity of specialised information required for learning about local interactions between communities and their ecology.  Only this broad approach can produce an understanding of how people position themselves in the landscape in order to obtain a steady input of natural resources.  In a pre-industrial setting, stability of sedentary communities was maintained through a flow of information and skills between generations to turn these resources into goods and produce an economic surplus.  This ecological view of society invokes the notion of ‘carrying capacity” defined as the maximum number of people that can be supported in a specific environment for a given mode of production.  Major limitations occur when a population increases, either through immigration or indigenous reproduction, beyond the limits imposed by the local economic carrying capacity.  This type of cultural crisis is exemplified by the fate of the Easter Islanders.  For modern urbanised societies, crises occur when the flow of resources is no longer adequate to provide jobs for the existing population.  The concept of a cultural trajectory describes these contemporary economic upheavals in terms of a rise and fall of regional cultures based on changes in the market for locally produced goods.  The local economy fails either because the resources are eventually exhausted, or customers are lost to competing communities offering cheaper and/or better products.  The U.K. communities of Lowestoft, South Wales and the Isle of Bute exemplify cultural trajectories experienced during the last one hundred years.  The end of the industrial mass netting of fish by Lowestoft’s fleet of trawlers came in August 2002.  It marked the demise of the British fishing industry that at one time was the greatest in the world.  Similarly, the South Wales coal mines, for a brief period at the turn of the 19th century, supplied most of the world’s energy needs.  Now only one pit remains out of scores that supported hundreds of thousands of miners in the coal valleys.  The Isle of Bute was once the annual holiday centre for tens of thousands of families of Clyde ship builders.  They were transported in their masses by train and steam-powered paddleboats to every point on Bute’s east coast that could support a pier head.   This profitable tourist trade collapsed with the advent of cheap mass air transport to Mediterranean resorts, a trip that guaranteed a reliable combination of sun, sea and sand for less than the cost of a traditional British seaside holiday.
 
These examples illustrate general principles of rapid economic change, which leave local communities having to attract new sources of income against a legacy of social deprivation.  The next phase of economic development requires global flows of capital to the cheap labour market.  The first post-coal business cycle in South Wales was large-scale Japanese investment to manufacture electronic goods.  Now these businesses are moving to the cheaper labour markets of Eastern Europe.

 
It was a recognition that new holistic curricula with economic case histories were needed for coping with living on a crowded planet that led, in the early 1980s, to the creation of the subject of natural economy for the Cambridge International General Certificate in Secondary Education.  A team of academics and schoolteachers invented the new subject to encompass all of the diverse interdisciplinary and cross-cultural traffic of information required for education about the dynamics and issues of world development.  Natural economy was defined as the organisation of resources for production and envisage as being complementary to the well-established subject of political economy that deals with the organisation of people for production.   To create a syllabus, the group took a systems thinking approach to humanity’s position in the evolution of life.  It started with the concept of nature “as including systems behind the existence and arrangement of matter, forces and events, that are not controlled by man, but of which man is a part”.  Natural systems are complex and unpredictable.  They include all environments in which plants, animals and microbes interact with local rocks, soil and climate.  Physical laws govern the orderly interplay between the various parts and these interactions define our planet’s economies of materials and energy.  They involve the heat energy of its core; the kinetic energy of its rotation; the thermal energy of climate; and the food energy of plant, animal, and microbial life cycles. Natural economy therefore sets the scene for the study of industrialisation as a global account of materials and energy supporting human production.  We are part of three interlocking component economies; the planetary economy, which describes effects of the earth’s energy of heat and motion; the solar economy, which describes effects of solar radiation; and the animate economy, which describes the effects of materials and energy flows on populations of organisms living together in ecosystems. We are part of nature and our existence as a species depends upon drawing a continuous supply of resources from the three global economies. 

 
As the subject of natural economy got underway within the International Baccalaureate, there was a gradual realisation by teachers that the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ owe much to human cultural history, of which mass production technology has occupied a relatively small segment.  To accommodate this, their course materials began to gravitate towards a systems view of the interaction between society and environment.  Also, the teaching of natural economy was influenced by the educational outcomes of the 1992 Rio Environment Summit.  In particular Agenda 21 defined the principles of sustainable development to maintain economic growth of technological societies.  The Local Agenda 21 was placed at the forefront of local planning in communities and it was envisaged that class work in schools serving these communities could help bring these plans to fruition.

 
Humanity has gained much from its invention of urbanised technological societies.  There can be no going back to primitive ways, and education for urban sustainability, in addition to concentrating on ways of using less, has to develop a biology of inclusivity where creative forces and the created world are not separate or distinct from our day-to-day lives.  Rio encouraged education to carry a message that all forms of life have an intrinsic value and meaning in relation to the tapestry of their ecosystems.  In particular, education for sustainability has to be grounded on a science of qualities that emerge from interactions between parts of organisms, and between organisms and environment.  These qualities are also the basis of the sacredness of particular outcomes of evolution in both species and ecosystems, so that we are linked with bonds of sympathy, mutual recognition and respect to the dappled spots on the coat of a deer, the whorls of a sunflower, and the cracked glaze of a raku pot.  These all have a unity as expressions of the principle of emergence from chaos of unpredictable order and beauty of which art is an important expression.
 
Art as culture has always aimed at making sense of our ever changing and fraught relation­ship to the material world.  This was clearly stated by the pioneers of abstract art who had an optimistic belief in a future that would be characterized by the ‘spirituality’ of all relationships in nature. The British abstract sculptor Barbara Hepworth drew her ideas from the random shapes in rocks and pebbles, and the standing stones of prehistoric cultures.  In this respect she said: “I am the landscape” and produced works by which she could affirm her own existence and her own mortality. She was in effect cultivating an awareness of intrinsic values in nature.  This has been highlighted down the centuries as the importance of education through art, from Plato to the influential British art critic, Herbert Read, who in the 1940s restated the ancient idea in his book “Education Through Art’.  The importance of teaching the aesthetics of nature is that it makes people reflect on ideas of what is natural and what parts of the environment we all hold and value in common.  Miriam Rothschild in her book  “Butterfly Cooing Like a Dove” made a very personal effort to carry conservation of the environment with its scientific heritage into the literary sphere.  The following quotation is from Rothschild’s book.  It indicates the grace of literary style that can be combined with carefulness of natural observation.  It expresses the continuity of the natural world, and kindles a desire to celebrate and conserve the commonplace life cycles of plants and animals, which define a sense of place. 

 
“There is something profoundly moving and delightful when, for the first time, a young pigeon spontaneously says its piece word for word and tone perfect, a link in an unbroken chain of gently bubbling sound which has emerged from beneath a canopy of green leaves for thousands of years”.

 
Small dramas unfold in nature without us seeing them.  Water collected in the bole of an old tree stimulated a 10-year-old Lara Mair to write:-

 
“Rainwater,
Collected in the stump of a three-way tree,
Ripples
Like a transparent blanket
Shaken between two people:
Only no dust is blows up.
Tiny fragments of bark falling,
Like melted icicles,

Gently slide into the water”.

 
Her teacher says, “Recognitions are exciting and need articulating”.  Old poems, travel books, and autobiographies can resurrect a vanished perspective of how local water features stimulated literary expression in the past.  Recognising a literary connection with nature may become an expressive moment because the discovery can be promulgated to become common property. The term commons, meaning a shared place shared goods and shared values, among people and between people and the natural world, suggests that local natural settings intersecting with local communities can be a source for respect and compassion.
 
This idea of a commonality of nature was at the centre of an EC LIFE Environment Programme, which, at the end of the 1990s, funded work on the natural economy syllabus by bringing together people and business in order to cooperate in managing the community’s green commons.  This expanded the mind map around a cultural viewpoint that natural values of the environment are imparted by society to define heritage.  The teachers appropriated the name cultural ecology for this new topic tree, for a collection of on-line pages of which natural economy was a part.  Anthropologists to encapsulate the behavioural adaptations of native societies with their environments that made distinctive local cultures had first coined the name in the 1920s. 
 
Culture is a complex clutch of ideas that a particular society has adopted to live by.  Applying these ideas to religion, art and science influences the way society ‘cultivates’ nature.  For example, the intersection of religion with environment produces moral goods, which have been described as ‘sacramental commons’.  There is also a flow of ideas from our uses of nature into society, which influences culture.  This two-way interaction between environment and society is the ideational topic scaffold described as cultural ecology. Cultural ecology is a more comprehensive educational framework for environmental education than natural economy.   It presents exploitative management of natural resources to meet the needs and wants of life coupled with conservation management of natural resources to maintain their flows and protect special places of an evolving biological diversity and beauty that may be called sacred.  Its eight or so topic headings are classroom slots in a mind map that can be customised with local information, to delineate traffic in men, materials, messages, and law that makes a community’s economy grow yet remain self-sustainable through local management of its inputs and outputs.  Conservation management balances the intrinsic values of nature against its instrumental values, and cultural ecology presents preservationism and resourcism as the two interlinked social movements of world development.   Cultures differ with respect to the formal arrangements for decision-making about the environment prevailing within a definite territory and interacting with different kinds of community units.  Community is defined by local cultural practices and a common neighbourhood history.  The roles of people in social units depend on their distribution as workers within resource systems; their organisation as families and individuals through demands on resources, goods and services; their participation as activists in the process of social development; and their belief as individuals with community bonds and some kind of value system of which humanity is at one with nature and history.
 
These four economic categories broadly match the four main conceptual pillars of cultural ecology as an educational concept.  They define a community according to the ways in which it exploits resources through production and demand.  They also define its approach to social development.  Today the latter is bound up with the conservation of resources through applications of science to environmental management, and/or, working through nature as one ‘solar economy’, which includes all living things.  Within this holistic educational scheme, communities may be compared under the four headings of ‘distribution’, ‘organisation’, ‘participation’ and ‘belief’.  Distribution maps the community in relation to resources and jobs; organisation describes the lives of families and individuals; participation covers action for local development; and belief is exemplified by respect for living things and a sense of ‘place’. 
 
Nature conservation is the link between natural economy and political economy.  It is the accounting and management system of biodiversity for communities and governments; a counterbalancing response to economic development and an effort to make markets more harmonious with the dynamics of biophysical economies.   To this end, as living organisms with the rest of nature, we have to audit, protect, and manage the rest of nature upon which we depend.  We have to do this in order to match markets with ecosystems, which provide the natural resources for economic development, and are sources of the non-marketable environmental goods emanating from scenic beauty, and nature study.  There is a need to integrate environmental care and development under the guiding principle of ‘sustainability’. Furthermore, we have to promote the idea that biodiversity is still a vital stock in the human survival kit and make people in all walks of life aware of its vital importance for the future of planet Earth. 

 
Cultural ecology is the only educational framework broad enough with the necessary flexibility to support a quest to find and answer practical and moral questions about the kind of world we want to live in, what kind of environment it should be and what we have to do as individuals, families, communities and nations to maintain a technological society.
 
 

There is something profoundly disturbing in making a random collision with a relative you didn’t know you had.  As an epiphany it is reworking of nature that is culture.  There is an ambiguous legacy of that On the other hand, the mental impact of connecting with a long lost relative gathers up some of the intellectual disorder underpinning one’s personal time-place curriculum, moving it towards a more robust and productive ideal.  Forget the fact that our common ancestor died centuries ago.  Skip over the many generations that had swirled away in an ever-expanding gene pool from the neighbourhood where it had gently rotated since Saxon times.  We have homed to each other, Internet-sure, straight as a missile or a magnet swinging to the pole.  We have known each other forever.  We speak the same language, although we may not yet know the architectures.  This is not a matter of genetics.  The likelihood of us expressing any of the behavioural genes that brought together two young people in an isolated pre-industrial rural community is practically zero. Nevertheless without this lost love sanctified through baptisms in a tiny church, which our ancestors would still recognise, we would not be together. 
 
Their church is our time machine; its navigators are the procession of priests down the ages assiduously recording their parishioner’s rites of passage.   On entry we accept the limits to human perception and language in the otherness of countless unknowns.  Spectres wait on tapes of stone to play endlessly off the walls for those who want to listen.  It is an otherness that sits along the margins of parish books like a whisper.   Nevertheless, today’s bond is a stabilising strut in world far wider than the old closed box of extreme rurality.  It is a cultural matter of focusing a common history of family with a love of place.  As a reworking of nature it is also an ecological matter.  It adds order to a placeless post-industrial environment where day to day we stumble about in an infinite space full of messages circulating freely without fixed destination. Culture and ecology come together with a vein of spirituality because it is about possessing a place through love, a painful process unless you can share a destination on common ground. Love is also the ecological cement of family:-
 
The only way to get out of the pain of possession
and insecurity is moving toward the love of others.
The more love we give the less insecure we will feel.
The more we share the more we love.
 
All of this demonstrates how easy it is to fall into history from a platform of family and kinship.  History lives on through making kinship connections with places where significant family events have happened. Families, not kings and queens, really embody our connection with the past.  This route has a wider perspective than the school subject because it is very strongly and specifically rooted in place, but is also led through love into the weave of a wider cosmos.  According to Freya Mathews the ecological self is an expression of this oneness and interconnectedness.
 
Genealogical research strengthens the self because you have taken responsibility for revealing the development of your family and locked on to its diaspora.  Human development through evolution and social learning is a powerful cross-disciplinary framework of cultural ecology. It is a recurring theme in every realm of knowledge: the universe, planet Earth, life, human technologies and families. This theme is actually the basis of the most recent time-place curriculum in cultural ecology.  Called ‘Voyages Through Time’, it has been produced, for a one-year high school course by the SETI Institute.  It takes a cultural view of the ecological relationships between people and their natural, social and created environments.  The materials, for what is essentially an integrated science course, are presented in six modules; Cosmic Evolution, Planetary Evolution, Origin of Life, Evolution of Life, Hominid Evolution, and Evolution of Technology.   The core lessons for the modules are provided on teacher CD-ROMs, which contain instructional guidelines, science background information, IT resources as well as student handouts.
 
The essential non-scientific family/kinship portion of a time-place curriculum is missing in the SETI syllabus.   To gain an inkling of the importance of adding a kinship agenda we may turn to National Grandparents Day. This also originated in the United States when a West Virginia housewife, Marian McQuade, initiated a campaign in 1970 to set aside a special day to celebrate grandparents.   The first Grandparents Day was proclaimed in 1973 in West Virginia by the state governor.  In 1978, five years after its West Virginia inception and much lobbying, the Congress passed  legislation proclaiming the first Sunday after Labor Day as National Grandparents Day. Jimmy Carter, the homespun president, signed the proclamation.  Now, millions throughout the United States observe this event begun to meet the needs of a few concerned about the dissolution of kinship.  It is one American invention that has not yet become embedded in our calendar.  Yet traditional kinship patterns throughout the West are in dramatic dissolution today, as heterosexual marriage declines, biological and social parenthood become dissociated, and homosexual unions are legalized.
 
Twenty years ago I was involved with a team of curriculum developers who were trying to launch a Great Grandparents Day in Welsh schools.  This was as an initiative to personalise the study of history and locality as part of the time-related cross-subject classroom topics of ‘change’, ‘continuity’ and ‘citizenship’.  This project coincided, in middle age, with my first stumbling efforts to find out where my great grandfather was born.  The starting point to develop this kinship aspect of a time-place curriculum was that, as individuals, our first knowledge of ourselves is that we are alone, and our dream of ourselves is we are alone because we are unique.  Not surprisingly therefore, everyone searches for a place where they belong.  Thinking about human history as a meeting with ancestors inevitably involves attaching the imagination to places; hence I gave the report of my first excursion into the ancestry of my parents the title ‘Meeting Places’.  Its subtitle could have been ‘sharing places’ because mapping and sharing ones roots with family and friends are practical navigational procedures.  Trails we discover or create through ‘drifting’ and playful exploration of genealogical records can also form the basis of personal narratives. In this sense, a kinship narrative is part of the wider cultural environment required for the emergence and stabilisation of self-realisation.  This wider environment itself constitutes a greater self-maintaining cultural system, which we have to customise successfully in order to live and work.
 
In Ben Russell’s Headmap Manifesto, ‘the journey’ is a central idea bringing together human culture and environment. A journey is a fundamental way in which we relate to our notional lifetime achievements and to space.  Notionally, we move upwards according to our projects and achievement targets.  We move laterally in space from one place to another in a more erratic sequence. The idea of the life journey is central to our myths and stories, it is encoded in our architecture and implied in our built environment; the streets outside our houses, the paths through the woods, the networks of roads we travel, the railway tracks through our towns, the airports on the outskirts of cities, the ports distributed along every coast.  Meeting up with kinfolk sharing the family name of either of your parents is an obvious starting point to begin a headmap, but names are an arbitrary and biased beginning.  We each have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, etc. Current technology permits us to link via DNA analysis to only two specific lines. On the Y chromosome, one’s father’s father’s DNA, going back as far as we can locate the genetic material, can be determined with a high degree of certainty. On the female side, mitochondrial DNA can link one’s mother’s mother’s mother going back as far as we can garner the DNA. So, while we have 64 great- great- great-great-grandparents, the technology allows us to locate only two of those 64, if we’re going back six generations.  But what of the other 62?   Those people are equal contributors to our genetic makeup, and we ignore them only because we do not have access to them.  In other words, it’s fine to follow one line of kinship rather than another according to the fruits of the journey.  Twin studies suggest that genes only account for 40- to 60-percent of the variation in human psychological traits.  The influence of genes is probably less because this kind of numerical summary implies a scientific certainty that doesn’t exist because of the interplay between genes and environment.  So what about the influence of non-biological parents who definitely sit in a separate kinship sequence, which governed their descent and alliance.   Fatherhood and motherhood of people not sharing their child’s genes can profoundly influence a child’s personality for better or worse, just as can blood line parenting.  Also, persons cut off traumatically and irreversibly from their genetic roots are known to have stabilised their selfhood by adopting the ancestry of an influential personality by proxy.
 
Apart from kinship, there are at least three other ‘meeting places’ in the context of establishing personal links between environment and history to discover selfhood.  These are localities where we make use of  ‘nature’, deal with ‘conflict’ and search for ‘god’.   Together with places where we can establish kinship, it is these four social pillars of cultural ecology that truly comprise a personal time-place curriculum.  The curriculum can be used to personalise the more technical pillars of cultural ecology, which deal with balancing the utilisation of our planet’s natural resources with their conservation for sustainability.  Overall, self-knowledge about this culturally endorsed cosmology encourages the search for shared values in planet and cosmos to defuse confrontations where self interest, on one side or another, is seen as a supreme virtue.
 
Practically, there is no guarantee that meeting up with a previously unknown blood relative will work out in any way.   We quickly sense how that individual experiences herself. We sense the level of that person’s excitement or the lack of it. Our instant attraction or non-attraction is automatic because our bodies and emotions respond faster than thought can take shape in words.  Each person is a unique being and we discover at this moment what the other person possesses to complement our lives. Hopefully, we sense that a union with such a person can bring new possibilities, which can make our existence richer. This is not to say this newfound person is the only one who can be in the right place at the right time. There may be others. For this reason, it has been concluded that, for each person, more than one other self exists.  Through these persons we acquiesce to love as an attachment to another self and to all worlds.  The poet E. E. Cummings expressed this time and again his poems, which celebrate saying ‘yes’ to love, sex, time and place.
 
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
 
We eventually emerged from our particular shared ‘world of yes’ into the dying day of the winter solstice.  There were thoughts in common about real people of the past who had once upon a time also returned through this very door.  From a state of otherness they emerged to the view we see virtually unchanged today, mentally blinking from the numinous environment of marriages, baptisms and deaths. My immediate connection with the reality of nature is a nearby bush pressing against a small gravestone.  It has  been nourished by the bones of an infant, two hundred years old, with my mother’s name and possibly a small footloose part of my DNA.  The cosmos is represented by a transient splash of the setting sun at the end of its winter traverse; a reminder that rhythms of time affect everybody and whose celebrations were once genuinely communal. 
 
The trinity of bush, bones and sun, remind me that for human beings to flourish requires that we view ourselves within our culture as selves-within-wider-selves. Here I have to go with Freya Mathews. Maybe the feeling we call love is really the faint psychological shadow of an inner spirituality of which our oneness with the cosmos is the external manifestation.  A time-place curriculum within cultural ecology is necessary to provide the personalised ideational scaffold or mindmap to navigate from one to another.
 
Mathews, Freya. The Ecological Self (1991) Routledge
 
Russell, Ben. Headmap Manifesto (1999). Available online at http://www.headmap.org/headmap.pdf
 
SETI http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=181004
 
 

It’s about half past eight in the morning on the shortest day of the year, and I am musing about time, destiny and lifetime achievements.  Through the window I scan the small wood across a road, now busy with the local school-run, waiting for the rising sun to enliven the bark of an old oak and turn its neighbouring yew tree from black to green.  Because the house is higher than the road I have the impression of looking into a wildwood, a primeval scene rich with intertwining branches and fallen boughs, which occupies all of the window space.  Indeed, the twenty or so acres of alders and willows are called ‘the wild gardens’.  It is an unruly portion of a park designed by public-spirited Victorian worthies to preserve a small intractable wetland that was of no use to the Marquis of Bute’s agents as profitable real estate.  Since then it has been left largely to its own devices, the major management task being the occasional resurfacing of footpaths through what is essentially a small swamp.

I am thinking that on this day of the winter solstice, through thousands of millennia, many an anxious glance was cast skywards, particularly towards the east when, like today, the murk looks especially thick and threatening. The particular view I am waiting for, of a veteran tree illuminated at sunrise, may not materialise at all, but this day really does mark the cosmic turning of the year.  Significantly, it is another a notch in my lifetime, but also a symbolic reminder that our personal spiritual universes are profoundly seasonal.  To generate new intellectual thrusts we need autumn and winter as symbols of the great resurrections of spring and summer.  In this sense we are all time-travellers.  Our capacity to find symbolical means of dealing with the fears of being alive is one of the most striking characteristics of humankind. When in need, we seek symbolical expression as well as practical fulfilment of those needs.  Many of the rituals devised by our ancestors arose out of the anxieties that inevitably afflicted human beings living precariously in the wildings of our early biological and social evolution.  With the sense of being an individual came fears that the vegetative forces of regeneration might wear out and the crops fail.  These fears gave rise to the fertility rituals, sacrifices of animals and the first fruits, practiced by human communities all over the world.  Fears that the winter solstice might not mark the end of the sun’s withdrawal over the horizon and the beginning of its return explain the ubiquitous existence of solstice rituals, saturnalia, orgies, and so on.  These represent behavioural inventions in a game against nature.  They are more likely to occur in societies where the prevailing system of beliefs reinforces the propensity to change production methods, which is an indication of the willingness to challenge and to manipulate the physical environment.  This is the context in which the anthropocentric philosophy of Judeo-Christian religion represented an exceptional mental shift in human history when it was taken for granted that God emerged to govern all cosmic forces for the benefit of His people. “And God saw everything that God had made and behold it was very good (Genesis 1.31)”.

Ever since I can remember I have had a powerful timeline in my head.  A person within me hovers and glides to and fro from the relatively short human lifespan, through a patchy ancestral past to an uncharted eternity, searching for symbolic links between past and future. Egypt, of course, had a very sophisticated idea of what happens after death, even though this afterlife was reserved for a select few.  The Jewish Talmud heralds the next phase of immortality for everyone in a ‘World To Come’. The earliest reference in rabbinic literature comes in Avot.  “Rabbi Yaacov said, ‘This world is like a corridor; prepare yourself in the corridor so that you can enter the palace’.  The rabbis and the Muslim theologians avoid going into any greater detail. The ‘Garden of Eden’ is one analogy and “the palace” is another, but with no details specified, this is as far as one gets. The priests are eager to assert the promise of something better but they feel no obligation to say what it is like.  So those like me who prefer a more concrete authority to commit to the concept of eternal life inevitably look within themselves for a lifetime guide to provide an understanding of the only life we will ever have.

Laurens Van der Post, in his mid-70s, actually envisaged this lifetime guide as his boyhood self, who survived on a spiritual frontier in the role of critic and mentor of his adult life.  This imaginary being he called  ‘someone other’.  This is the childhood comparator we all tend to return to for remembrance and affirmation of values that, for one fleeting moment were everything, but then became buried deep with the onward rush of the experiences of growing up. Youth not only comes into focus in later life, but life is compressed so things that happened decades ago appear as fresh as yesterdays.  Also, the most significant factor in the psychology of getting old is that one becomes more that self that never grew up.

Van der Post singled out the Cape of Good Hope as his physical symbol of transition.  Here it was, as he sailed away from his South African homeland for the last time, that he contemplated the Portuguese age of discovery.  To Portuguese sailors the Cape was a landmark and a symbol of nationhood as colonisers of half the world.  Laurens’ mind-set shifted from the technology of ships and marine chronology, which were symbols for charting the old Earth, to space travel as a symbol of hope for the new spiritual challenges of research to conquer the wider cosmos.

Writing about his personal distress on departing Cape Town on the last of the great passenger liners he reflected on what the reality of the Cape meant in the imagination of the first European explorers.

“Some four hundred and fifty years before, the great Camoes had seen the Cape vanish astern of a ship in which he was one of a handful of survivors of the original crew bound for home. He had sailed on from there over the same swinging water to write in his epic Lusiad what that journey and that view of the Cape had done to him. The powerful symbolism of his description, drawn from the kind of intuition of which I was thinking, bore witness to the Pentecostal nature of all art, and shone out as another and greater light than the one just extinguished on my own heaving horizon”.

In contrast to Van der Post, I am trying to grasp a much less dramatic topographic reality, a captive wildwood in the local municipal park, with two external planes or dimensions of the imagination.  One plane is the objective world of science concerned with the flow of solar energy into living beings.  As a post graduate student my objective was prove that cells across the animal kingdom have particles in common that confine them to planets with an atmosphere of oxygen.  It turned out these particles were bacteria accidentally incorporated into a protozoan ancestor at the dawn of time.   The other plane is the dimension that is not yet, and probably never can be, fully described in the objective language of science.  Outside my window, that Yew tree, now turning green with the brightening sky, is part of the ‘It’ of an ecosystem taking in the weak energy of the winter beams to maintain life.  For the ecosystem to become a spiritual model in relation to me, the ‘It’ has also to be a ‘Thou’ in my relationship to it as part of the cosmos, which has a subjectivity answering to my own in that I am getting closer and closer to returning to stardust.

Prehistoric stone observatories tuned into the cosmos are evidence that in northern Bronze Age cultures the universe was addressed by prehistoric people as ‘Thou’.  The uncertain world that faced them on the shortest day was not just a collection of mere objects to their subjectivity.  Their adaptive response was to create a culture entrained to an annual cycle of ceremonies in which the community could align itself with the conjunction of numinous ecological power embedded in the family life of neighbours.  The turning of the year was always a time to be anxious.   It is also a time for rites of passage by which their perceptions of a cosmic ‘Thou’ could be perpetually recreated, and appropriated by the community and the individual.   Magic is expressed in the intuitive inextinguishable hope that inspired them to believe there was a future for family and community.  A solstice came to be anticipated as a ritual moment that is particularly likely to create a personal disclosure or symbolic meaning.   Even when religion had passed into more and more sophisticated phases of expression, important new personal perceptions of religion experienced by seers and prophets often emerged during a particular ritual enshrined in the devotional calendar.

There is a magic of human destiny and group ambition in these prehistoric stone structures, which I suppose I am trying to re-capture at this moment by projecting my thoughts at two ancient botanical beings across the road.  It is through these thoughts that I also connect with those infinitely remote men and women and their uncertainties when everything seemed dying around them in the darkest days of the year.  What they were about touches me today.  I was reassured by the sky brightening from the east although the first shafts of sunlight did not hit my personal woodland targets today.  It actually burst upon my computer screen as I was writing this story in the late afternoon.  The computer is part of my world of objects, one of countless ‘Its’.  I am also a spiritual being who must establish personal relationships with the cosmos.  As an heir to the Bronze Age sun worshippers, my someone other, somehow, gives me the intellectual confidence to say, albeit under my breath, ‘Welcome, thou Sun!’.  Tomorrow’s day will be slightly longer.

What I am really saying is that there is an urgent need for an educational framework that can accommodate both extremes of the tangible and the numinous.  In this context a municipal park is an expression of cultural ecology.  The need for linking culture and ecology and its educational significance to urban dwellers like me was summarised by Frederick Law Olmsted in his plan submitted for the creation of Central Park, New York, in 1857.  This was to be a rugged and natural design which rejected the standard civic pastoral copses and lawns. In Simon Schama’s words, “something of New York’s own original wilderness ought to be preserved” because in Olmsted’s rationale:-

“The whole of the island of New York would… be occupied by buildings and paved streets; that millions upon millions of men were to live their lives upon this island, millions more to go out from it, or its immediate densely populated suburbs, only occasionally and at long intervals, and that its inhabitants would assuredly suffer… according to their occupations and the degree of their confinement to it, from influences engendered by these conditions”.

In other words, at one pole, education for a largely urban population has to accommodate the religiousness of Einstein, who wrote, “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious”.  It also has to place equal emphasis on the theory of evolution and the periodic table of elements.