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

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

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

Fig 1 Aspect and essence: a cultural response to ecology

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

1 Natural Economy

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

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

Fig 1 A mindmap of natural economy

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

2 Big history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig 2a Ruskin’s big history

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

Fig 2b Natural economy according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

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

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

3 Lives and lands

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

Kingsley’s Eversley

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

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

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

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

Haggard’s Ditchingham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruskin’s Coniston

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

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

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

Ruskin’s Venice

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

6 Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

1969 Welsh Environment Journal

 

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

 

1971  Natural economy

 

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

 

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

 

 

Late 1980s Distance learning

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

1993 SCAN

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

1994 Going Green Directorate (GGD)

 

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

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

 

1995 Community offices

 

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

  

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

 

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

 

1998 Community conservation management

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

1999-2003 Community conservation management plans

 

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

 

 

2004-08 COSMOS

 

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

  

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

 

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

 

 

2009-12  Participatory governance

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

·         let anybody view and edit it;

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Fig 1 Diagram of a community action cycle

 

 

 

2013 Modular learning

 

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

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

 

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

 Other primary links

 

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

CMSC (www.cmsconsortium.org/)

Natural Economy & COSMOS (www.culturalecology.info)

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

 

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

 1 Background

The ecosystem approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig 2 Adaptive management a  tool for research and management

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

Ecosystem services

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

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

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

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

Fig 3 Biodiversity and ecosystem services (UNEP March 2008)

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

2 Role of local government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Urban ecosystems

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

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

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

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

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

The key messages from the EU are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3  Community ecosystem services plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

4 Cultural shaping of ecosystem services for human well-being

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

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

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

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

* context and character;

* movement;

* public realm;

* built form;

* materials and details.

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

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

 

5 Making management maps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Fig 7 Environmental services as natural assets in the wider environment

 

 

1 The Ecosystem Approach

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

Fig 1

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

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

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

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

Fig 2

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

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

Table 1: The Principles of the Ecosystem Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Management must recognise that change is inevitable.

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

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

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

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

2  Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

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

Fig 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Planning and recording tools

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

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

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

Fig 4

 

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

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

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

1 Irrelevance of GDP

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

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

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

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

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

i: Look at income and consumption rather than production.

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

ii: Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth.

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

iii: Emphasise the household perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

2 Localism

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

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

* health;

* education;

* personal activities including work;

* political voice and governance;

* social connections and relationships;

* environment in relation to present and future conditions;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those were the days when environment did not matter!

http://enmat.wikispaces.com/

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

 

Supreme Being Shiva that continuously dissolves to recreate

in the cyclic process of creation, preservation,

dissolution and recreation of the universe.

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

(Wes Nisker, ‘Buddah’s Nature’)

1 Ethical propriety of living sustainably

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

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

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

Cosmopolitanism

Justice

Spirituality

Education

Equality

Fraternity

Care for environment

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

Thomas Pogge defines cosmopolitanism in terms of three important characteristics:

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

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

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

 Fig1 An image map of ethical propriety for living sustainably.

 

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

2 Oneness with the universe

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

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

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

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

3 Science of the real

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

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

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

4 Metaphysics

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

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

5 The mind/matter maze

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

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

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

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

It led scientists like Albert Einstein to declare:

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

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

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

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

“it has had the smallest element of persecution.”

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

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

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

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

‘Now I am become Death the destroyer of worlds’

The actual section is:

‘If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky

That would be like the splendour of the Mighty one

I am become Death

The shatterer of worlds’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Mixing and matching

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

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

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

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

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

 

Boss in South aisle of ‘Angel Choir’,

Lincoln Cathedral (1256-80)

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

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

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

http://praxeology.net/hindurandu.htp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The advantages of community engagement for local authorities:

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

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

1 The basics of networking

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

An environmental network needs to have the following two features:

·         A system for social networking

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

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

An Internet community consists of:

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

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

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

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

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

2  Social networking

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

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

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

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

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

Some examples of popular social networking technologies include:

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

3  Planning

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

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

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

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

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

4  Planning and recording logic

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

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

2 What is its desirable or favourable state?

3 What has to be done to achieve that state?

4 Who is to do it?

5 What do they need to do it?

6 When is it to be done?

7 How is it to be done?

8 What was actually done?

9 What difference did it make?

10 Who needs to know?

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

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

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

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

5 Planning for a good ‘sense of place’

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

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

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

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

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

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

i Sociability, which includes:

Number of women, children and elderly

Social networks

Volunteerism

Evening use of the neighbourhood

Street life

ii Uses and activities, which includes:

Ownership of local business

Land use patterns

Property values

Rent levels

Shops

iii Comfort and image, which includes

Crime

Sanitation rating

Littering/refuse collection

Condition of buildings

Trees, gardens and grass

Graffiti

Local history/heritage highlights

Signage

Recreation/play areas

Creative arts groups

iv Access and linkages, which includes

Traffic

Public transport

Pedestrian and cycling activity

Condition of roads and pavements

Parking patterns

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

6  Global Copycat

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

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

Some examples of Copycat networking tools are:

http://www.blything.wikispaces.com

www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/lincolncms

www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/cwicnet

www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/rigsby 

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

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

 

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

 

 

1 How many people?

 

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

 

The modern debate was started in 1971 by Paul Ehrlich:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

2 Common pool resources

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

3 Tragedy of the commons

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

4 Lessons from the seashore

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

5 Ecological footprints and ‘fair shares’

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://dieoff.org/page121.htm

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

http://communityfishingheritageuk.wikispaces.com/

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Cultural ecology

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

 

Community action cycle

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

 

 

Fig 1 Ecological framework community action cycle

 

Cultural capital

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

 

Natural capital

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

 

Provisioning services

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

 

Conservation management

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

 

* promoting social justice and equality of opportunity;

 

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

 

Maintenance of biodiversity

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The ecosystem approach

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

The actual principles of the Ecosystem Approach are:

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Management must recognise that change is inevitable.

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

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

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

 

Conservation with social justice

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Welsh government’s ‘natural environment framework’

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

 

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

 

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

 

Bringing environment to home

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig 2 Routes for environmental education in the home

 

 

 

The North Wales landscape model

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

Table 1 River systems and their oastal communities

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Making community action plans

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

On line references

 

http://www.culturalecology.info/

 

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

 

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

 

http://ajust.wikispaces.com

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

http://practicalconservationmanagement.wikispaces.com/

 

http://educationforconservation.wikispaces.com/

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

http://wikispot.org/Create_a_wiki