Cultural Ecology

A will to till one’s own of soil

Is worth a kingly crown,

With bread to feed the belly need,

And wine to wash it down.

So with my neighbour I rejoice

That we are fit and free,

Content to praise with lusty voice

Bread, Wine and Liberty.

(Robert William Service)

(Clee Fields; Google Map (2015):

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

 1 Grass roots and neighbourhoods

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

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

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

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

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

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

2  Symbols of remembrance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But bags and carts claimed every bit

And now they’ve got the land

I used to bring the summer life

To many a butterflye

But in oppressions iron strife

Dead tussocks bow and sigh

I’ve scarce a nook to call my own

For things that creep or flye

The beetle hiding neath a stone

Does well to hurry bye”.

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

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

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

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

3  Old Clee Fields: a case study for cultural conservation

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

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

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

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

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

You ask for a poem.

And so I write you a tragedy about

How a blade of grass

Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older

A blade of grass Becomes more difficult to accept.

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

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

4 The cultural value of grass

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

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

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

The even mead that erst brought sweetly forth

The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover

Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank

Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems

But hateful docks, rough thistles, keksies, burs,

Losing both beauty and utility.

(Shakespeare, Henry V)

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

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

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

Tis haytime and the red-complexioned sun

Was scarcely up ere blackbirds had begun

Along the meadow hedges here and there

To sing loud songs to the sweet-smelling air

Where breath of flowers and grass and happy cow

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

Spirituality of grass is rooted in culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Old Clee residents gathering at Horse’s Fields)

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.hayinart.com/

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

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

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

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

1 Visuality

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

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

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

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

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

* as source of scientific knowledge;

* as creation; * as a human resource;

* or in peril.

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

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

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

2 Conflicts in visuality

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

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

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

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

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

3 Learning from Stonehenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 Facts and conjecture: an Internet evidence base

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://robinheath.info/

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Definition

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

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

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

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

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

2 Management of human consumption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Ecological footprints

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

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

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

4 Thinking ‘Deeply’

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

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

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

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

5 Acting deeply

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

A good working definition of CCB is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Schools and Communities Action Network (SCAN)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Definition

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

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

Table 1 Information arrays for learning

The world of books

· Separate subject-based benchmarked pathways;

The world of computers

· Integrated conceptual mind maps

· Comparative place-based pedagogies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig 2 Wales: Cultural Ecology Map 2: Severnside Levels

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.changingtimes.wikispaces.com

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

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

3  References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 1 Evolution with trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 2  Culture with trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 3 Trees and human conduct

 Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queen of the forest canopy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– See more at:

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

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

Diagram of a nectar point network

1 Valuing urban wildlife

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

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

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

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

2 Objective

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

3 Nectar Point Network

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

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

4 Habitat gardens

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

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

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

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

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

5 Support

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

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

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

6 Web References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://iloveinsects.wordpress.com/

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

http://archive.org/details/concerningthehab033579mbp

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

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

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

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

Humanists and absolutists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The glue of mystery

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

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

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

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

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

•
Lambda (λ) = cosmological constant;

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

•
D = number of spatial dimensions in spacetime.

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

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

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

Concentrating on little things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Inviting the wind to carry

Salt waves of the sea,

The pine tree of Shiogoshi

Trickles all night long

Shiny drops of moonlight’.

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

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

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

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

Fig 1 Mystery as an arbitrator between humanism and absolutism

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

‘The Measure of Things’

David E Cooper

Clarendon Press, 2002

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

Wholesome knowledge

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

Bioscopes: examples of wholesome knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

Fig 1 Courtyard of the Oranges

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

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

Lifelong learning***

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

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

Fig 2 Perspectives on ageing *

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

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

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

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

*Perspectives of Ageing

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

Futurescapes ISBN 978-0-500-51577-8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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