Holisic thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Energese: towards an energy systems language

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

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

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

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Culture; environment; history.

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

  

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservation curricula

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

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

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

(ii) Group evaluation based on activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Delivery.

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

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

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

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

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

What follows was written as an introduction to natural economy as a distinct body of knowledge, which in the 1980s was the first new school subject introduced into the UK examination system since the Victorian era.  But it never caught on.  The essay was written to raise the question posed above, and to point out that it was actually raised and answered at the very beginnings of industrialism.  The answer then was that we require a value-based national curriculum, which cuts across specialized subject boundaries in order to wean ourselves off the ideology that we should live as if we could liberate ourselves from the bounds of nature.  1 Natural Economy In his book, Land and Market, published in 1991, Charles Sellers describes the America of 1815, on the eve of a postwar boom that would “ignite a generation of conflict over the republic’s destiny. 

” Conflict between east and west, rural and urban, Native- and Euro-American, even farmer and wife, that resulted as “history’s most revolutionary force, the capitalist market, was wresting the American future from history’s most conservative force, the land.” 

 Sellers describes a series of interactions between humans and the land, beginning with the subsistence economy of Native Americans. They were supplanted by Euro-American farmers who, in bringing their own village economy to the hinterlands, created an “intermediate subsistence culture.” In time, that culture fell prey to the wider market, in part because wheat and cotton booms made it profitable for inland farmers to grow and transport surplus crops to expanding urban markets.  The outcome was that, eventually, the subsistence farming culture ran out of the cheap land it needed to maintain a reserve of production in order to sustain the family enterprises from one generation to the next.   

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

Fig 1 A mind map of natural economy 

  

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

2 Land for the few 

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

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

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

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

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

3 Land for everybody 

The Highland Clearances were just one example of the land issues of natural economy that came to a head in the United Kingdom during the 19th century. These issues centre on the proposition that land is in limited supply with respect to everyone who, from planner, to rambler, wishes to partake of it as ‘a good’.   Three outstanding polymaths, whose lives and writings span the rise of the land issue and who commented forcibly upon it in England, are Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, and Henry Rider Haggard.  They were part of a counter movement to the economic forces of industrialism, which is illustrated by their lives and writings,  Kingsley was an urban reformer, very much concerned in his novels, lectures and tracts, with relieving the ills of the urban masses that had migrated from the countryside.  He was a Darwinian and enthusiast of applied science.  Ruskin was a powerful educator who, in his writing on social reform, deplored the crushing influence of industrialism on art, morality, and the natural world. He saw the ‘land question’ as a matter of rapid population growth.  Haggard was a rural reformer, who wrote with personal experience about land conflicts in the colonies, and the drift of people from the land.   His diary of 1898 is a vivid month-by-month account of the life of a progressive farmer involved with the social problems of village, county, and the national scene.  His fiction, about upper-class Englishmen adventuring abroad, reveals the mind-match that is possible between individuals of different lands, usually through a potent atmosphere of intrigue, violence and romance.   

A Victorian knowledge system cannot avoid incorporating spiritual notions that provided the 19th century drive and justification for social change.  In particular, the Victorians found themselves caught within a Biblical worldview of the origins and purposes of human existence.  In this sense, religious belief was at the heart of all environmental problems, issues and controversies.   John Ruskin’s writings are what we would now describe as a cross-curricular attempt to encompass the notional, utilitarian, and academic ideas about how we should value and use natural resources.  His personal synthesis of religion and natural resources exemplifies the unusual breadth and depth needed to clarify and deepen our values and actions to meet today’s challenges of sustainable development.  Ruskin’s standpoint was to interpret God’s plan for humanity, as set out in the Book of Genesis, in terms of the Creator giving Earth substance and form.   God willed functions into natural resources so that they may be used by His people to fulfill their divine destiny. He embedded in nature a divine blueprint for a natural economy, which organises the use of nature for production in conjunction with a local political economy dispensing justice for rich and poor alike.  The necessary materials and energy were provided, as physical and biological resources, through planetary and solar economies. The former produces episodes of mountain building associated with Earth’s molten core; the latter governs weather and climate.  These flows of materials and energy were set in motion following God’s ‘command that the waters should be gathered’, which produced the planet’s land-sea interactions.   At this point Ruskin, envisaged the Creator’s blueprint being realised through the denudation of mountains by rainfall.  Starting from the divine ‘gathering of waters’ the human natural economy was dependent on the God-given ‘frailness of mountains’. 

The first, and the most important, reason for the frailness of mountains is “that successive soils might be supplied to the plains . . . and that men might be furnished with a material for their works of architecture and sculpture, at once soft enough to be subdued, and hard enough to be preserved; the second, that some sense of danger might always be connected with the most precipitous forms, and thus increase their sublimity; and the third, that a subject of perpetual interest might be opened to the human mind in observing the changes of form brought about by time on these monuments of creation”. (6.I34-35)

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

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

Fig 2a Ruskin’s natural economy 

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

 

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

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

Land Processes 

1  Annexation of land  

2  Attachment to land  

3  Conservation of land

4  Depiction of the land

5  Cession of land

6  Conquest of land          

7  Enhancement of land                   

8  Eviction from the land

9  Exclusion from land

10 Exploitation of land

11 Migration from the land

12 Reclamation of land

13 Rights to land

14 Settlement of land 

Land systems 1

Agrarianism

2 Colonialism

3 Environmentalism

4 Ethnicism

4 Land systems 

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

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

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

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

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

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

5  Lives and lands 

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

Eversley

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

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

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

As Kingsley’s own educational model of a river system, his book, ‘Water Babies’, incorporates all these points of view.  Within a compressed industrial landscape the story expresses a biological and moral quest, which is literally carried along in the flow of a river system, from untainted uplands, supplying water power to northern mills, through an urbanised estuary, into a vast imaginary undersea world, as yet unaffected by industrial development. ConistonJohn Ruskin lived for 23 years in a country house, with its stunning mountain views to the West over Coniston Lake, from 1877 to his death in 1900.  In a lecture to the people of Kendal in 1877 he described his attachment to the Lake District as follows:-

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

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

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

Ditchingham

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

The subject of the centre light is the crowned and risen Christ bearing in His hand the world showing eastern hemisphere. On the pallium over his robe are seen the Serpent round the Cross, signifying the Crucifixion, the Keys of Life and Death, Adam and Eve denoting Original Sin and the need of Redemption and the Pelican symbol of Love and Sacrifice.   On the left is St Michael, Angel of the Resurrection holding the Scales of Justice and a Flaming Sward.  On the right is St Raphael, Angel of all Travellers bearing his Staff and girded for a Journey.   Below in the centre is a view of Bungay from the Vineyard Hills.  On the left, the Pyramids and the River Nile, surrounded by the Lotus Flower emblem of Egypt.  On the right, Hilldrop, Sir Rider’s farm in South Africa.  These views he loved and they illustrate three sides of his life, Rural, Creative and Imperial.   

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

Ditchingham and its neighbouring villages are metaphors for the fundamental aspect of the land question, which starts and finishes by way of arbitration of ‘how much belongs to whom’. This question was literally lived out on a boundary commemorating the disputed territory of two Saxon clans; the ‘North’ and ‘South’ folk.  Each tribe claimed descent from the East Anglian ‘kings’ whose Continental ancestors sailed up the shallow estuaries of East Anglia.    Small-scale family feuds are written in the tortuous parish boundaries, which snake off in all directions around the parish church.  From his agrarian base, amidst the flinty fields at the edge of the ice-eroded East Anglian clay plateau, Haggard takes us via a ‘good read’ on real and imaginative excursions into the many facets of human nature associated with natural and political economy.  Through his factual reports, and the characters of his fiction, we may interact with the lives of farm workers, see the machinations of colonial land administrators laid bare, sympathise with the victims of British imperialism, and enter alternative civilisations powered by supernatural forces.  In this context, his life is an extraordinary effort to come to grips with the transiency of civilisations, and the individual lives that produce its cultures.   Like Ruskin, but in his own way, he was using the gift of a powerful imagination to explore the ordering of human nature for a just and prosperous society, against the background of an apparently indifferent Universe.   He proposed practical social reforms to cope with the former, which required political will to enforce.  Till the end he thought the power of imagination might reveal invisible strands of immortality connecting the material cosmos with an infinite spiritual structure.  Individuals, like himself, with this exceptional power, would be the gatekeepers who could, for good or evil, draw aside ‘the curtain of the unseen’.  We can see something of his wide ranging mind in the following quotations from his writings. 

Migration

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

Emigration

“What I do hold a brief for, what I do venture to preach to almost every class, and especially the gentle-bred, is emigration. Why should people continue to be cooped up in this narrow country, living generally upon insufficient means, when yonder their feet might be set in so large a room? Why do they not journey to where families can be brought into the world without the terror that if this happens they will starve or drag their parents down to the dirt; to where the individual may assert himself and find room to develop his own character, instead of being crushed in the mould of custom till, outwardly at any rate, he is as like his fellows as one brick is like to the others in a wall ?” “Here, too, unless he be endowed by nature with great ability, abnormal powers of work, and an iron constitution, or, failing these, with pre-eminent advantages of birth or wealth, the human item has about as much chance of rising as the brick at the bottom has of climbing to the top of the wall, for the weight of the thousands above keep him down, and the conventions of a crowded and ancient country tie his hands and fetter his thought. But in those new homes across the seas it is different, for there he can draw nearer to nature, and, though the advantages of civilisation remain unforfeited, to the happier conditions of the simple uncomplicated man. There, if he be of gentle birth, his sons may go to work among the cattle without losing caste, instead of being called upon to begin where their father left off; there his daughters will marry and help to build up some great empire of the future, instead of dying single in a land where women are too many and marriage is becoming more and more a luxury for the rich. Decidedly emigration, not to our over peopled towns, but to the Antipodes, has its advantages, and if I were young again, I would practice what I preach.  Nov 18″

Exclusion

“Of late years there has been a great outcry about the closing of some of the Norfolk Broads to the public, and the claim advanced by their owners to exclusive sporting rights upon them. Doubtless in some cases it has seemed a hard thing that people should be prevented from doing what they have done for years without active interference on the part of the proprietor. But, on the other hand, it must be remembered that it is only recently the rush of tourists to the Norfolk Broads has begun. It is one thing to allow a few local fishermen or gunners to catch pike or bag an occasional wild fowl, and quite another to have hundreds of people whipping the waters or shooting at every living thing, not excluding the tame ducks and swans. For my part I am glad that the owners have succeeded in many instances, though at the cost of some odium, in keeping the Broads quiet, and especially the smaller ones like Benacre, because if they had failed in this most of the rare birds would be driven away from Norfolk, where they will now remain to be a joy to all lovers of Nature and wild things. These remarks, I admit, however, should scarcely lie in my mouth when speaking of Benacre, since on our return towards the beach, after rambling round the foot of the mere, we found ourselves confronted with sundry placards breathing vengeance upon trespassers, warnings, it would seem, which we had contemptuously ignored. Should these lines ever come under the notice of the tenant of that beautiful place, I trust that he will accept my apologies, and for this once ‘ let me off with a caution.'”HRH May 31st 1898

 6 Conclusion 

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

The idea that pieces of non-human nature can be owned is so obvious within industrial cultures that it is still hard to call into question, yet it has not been so apparent to many other peoples. The Native Americans of New England, for example, had quite different conceptions of property than those of the colonists coming from England. We can contrast the specialised subject teaching required by 19th century European Empire builders with the teaching of the native Americans, who were living with no concept of economic growth but in thrall to ecological principles, which will eventually catch up with the West.  The Native Americans recognised the right to use a place at a specific time. What was “owned”, was only the crops grown or the berries picked. Thus, different groups of people could have different claims on the same tract of land depending on how they used it. Such rights of use did not allow for the sale of property These differences remain to this day. As Buffalo Tiger, a Miccosukee Seminole Indian stated recently

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

 Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee, comments similarly

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

Even if nonhuman nature is regarded as the sort of thing, which can be owned, how can it be owned privately? How can one person take claim to land or other parts of nature? By what right does one person exclude others from parts of the earth? If it was not created by those who claim to own it, how can such a claim be legitimate? Although private ownership of the earth is now a common dogma, it was not at the outset of the capitalistic regime. Then the conception of nature as privately owned required justification. Until institutions change to mirror better the economy of the biosphere and its interconnected human values, an appropriate value-based national/international curriculum will never take its place as major subject. 

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

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

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

Conservation 

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

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

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

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

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

Organising values and ideas for action 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural ecology

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural ecology (Wikipedia)

Cultural ecology (Wikispaces)

Conservation managementApplied ecology  

Living sustainably

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

  (www.livingsustainably.wikispaces.com).  

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

A caring conservation charter

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

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

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

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

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

1.5 Valuing and respecting cultural diversity of all types 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.1 Valuing and protecting the diversity of nature  

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

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

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

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

2.6 Maintaining and restoring ecosystem health 

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

2.8 Managing domestic life to minimised our ecological footprint.  

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

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

3.2 Ensuring that the fundamental human needs of all are met 

3.3 Valuing unpaid and voluntary work in the home and community 

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.2 Decentralising decision making to appropriate local levels of government 

4.3 Promoting government responsibility and accountability to local communities 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6.2 Developing age-appropriate environmental education materials for classroom teachers 

6.3 Evaluating the effectiveness of the methodology for environmental education. 

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

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

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

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

6.8 Networking ideas and achievements between communities

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

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

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

Non-theistic spirituality 

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

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

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

·         meaning-making;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open commensality 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagination in place 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human capabilities for living sustainably 

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

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

Fig 1 The sustainable livelihoods framework for adapting to climate change 

www.poverty-wellbeing.net 

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

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

Inner subjectivity of the individual self 

Practice meditation.Undertake some personal development.

Articulate your personal vision and values.

Experience fully what you are doing in the moment.

Be more observant of your senses and surroundings.

Reassess what is and is not important in your life.

Rediscover what motivates you and makes you happy.

Strive for personal freedom and do the things you enjoy.

Learn how our emotional state affects you and others.

Express your creativity in music painting or dance. 

Inner subjectivity of the collective self 

Learn what currently shapes and limits your worldview.

Be less judgemental and more tolerant of others.

Understand that cross-cultural differences do exist.

Practice random acts of kindness towards others.

Participate in a social activity or event.

Spend time with your family and friends.

Volunteer to assist a local group or association.

Rather than email someone talk to them.

Share your skills and knowledge with others.

Introduce yourself to neighbours. 

Exterior objectivity of the individual self  

Read or study to expand your knowledge.

Restore balance between work and personal life.

Calculate food miles when buying groceries.

Read food labelling and select carefully.

Reassess your consumption patterns.

Exercise regularly and have a medical check up.

Grow some of your own fruit and vegetables.

Improve you personal self-sufficiency.

Choose durable and reusable goods.

Assume personal responsibility for your life choices. 

External objectivity of the collective self 

Apply principles of living sustainably at home and work.

Reduce electricity consumption.

Design energy efficient homes and workspaces.

Reduce consumption of unnecessary goods and services.

Harvest rainwater and use water more frugally.

Distribute surplus donate unwanted goods to a charity.

Reduce your level of financial debt.

Use technology but do not depend on it.

Reuse and recycle waste where practical and safe.

Use public transport instead of driving a car. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral naturalism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the earth when I look at it

Makes me aware

Of the hubbub of a huge concourse

Of ordinary people

Led along many paths and in various groups

By man’s common urges,

From age to age, through life and death

They go on pulling at oars,

Guiding the rudder

Sowing seeds in the fields. 

Cutting ripe paddy

They work-In the cities and in fields. 

Imperial canopies collapse,

Battle-drums stop,

Victory pillars, like idiots,

Forget what their own words mean;

Live on only in children’s stories,

But their menace veiled.

1 Meditation in the environment

 Meditation is a way of learning to pay attention to your surroundings.  It is a process which is not confined to religious practices, but is a fundamental aspect of human behaviour to deal with the things that concern all of us in our everyday lives.  Nowadays, these issues are the problems of living in modern society where every interaction, good and bad, between cultures and between cultures and environment, is instantly transmitted around the world.  In this sense we all lead global lives.   Also, deadlines in our working lives have to be met that seem irrelevant to inner values.  In this connection, mindfulness meditation is a well-trodden path by which an individual can attain security and happiness, and become free from inner burdens of fear, anger, hurt, and sorrow. The environmental aims of mindfulness meditation are to become more aware of local interactions between culture and ecology;  to seek and appreciate the complexity that underlies nature and humankind’s uses of it, but to live with the simplicity of an idea, common to many religions and proved by science, that we are at one with all forms of life..  Each contact with the environment, directly through sights and sounds, or indirectly through words and pictures, is regarded as a spiritual exercise to provide a momentary stay against the stress and confusion of everyday life.  In this way, the process of mindfulness mediation is to keep thoughts circling back to reinforce this idea of cosmic unity.  The outcome of these moments of self-help is total certainty and a complete absence of confusions: a mind that remains unstained, invulnerable and completely unaffected by the ups and downs of life.   In other words, despite being immersed in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, we have no desire to reach after facts and reason to explain them. The poet Keats described this meditative detached state of mind as ‘negative capability’. 

Time spent voluntarily in nature can always be a form of mindfulness meditation.  It takes place when we put our full attention on what is around us – the earth, trees, buildings, flowers, animals, people, fresh air, and water in all its forms.  This meditation can be done while sitting, standing or walking. To intensify the experience, the aim is to allow yourself to pay attention to the sights, sounds and smells without labelling them and becoming mentally involved with them. There will always be a tendency of the mind to name and evaluate everything – “Oh, look at that beautiful bird. What kind is it?  Is it here all winter, or where does it go?”  What we seem to need is the frame of reference, the context, the story that accompanies what we are seeing. When these kinds of thoughts come up, let them go. Simply experience the colours, shape, sounds, movement of the bird or whatever else you are experiencing. Let it be a meeting up with reality without meaning and without reference to any other phenomenon. Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling minute by minute, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with your thoughts and feelings. 

For example, on a sunny day you walk into your well-tended garden.  Happily you notice the beauties and scents, the insects and birds, the growing and dying of plants.  Then you also notice that you should have tidied up the grass and weeded the paths.  Next you find yourself becoming occupied with listing the things you have to do in the garden and start planning a future programme of work.  Now, mindfulness meditation should click in: let the list go and return to your original state of happiness whien being in the garden made you understand that people and nature are, in some way, mysteriously one.  That is to say, there is harmony and a rapport between them, which fuses them together yet does not deprive each of its true individuality and you come to see all things in yourself, and yourself in all things. 

The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, meditating on an image of the environment in his childhood had come to the same understanding.  

“ I still remember the day in my childhood (he writes), when I was made to struggle across my lessons in a first primer, strewn with isolated words smothered under the burden of spelling.  The morning hour appeared to me like a once-illuminated page, grown dusty and faded, discoloured with irrelevant marks, smudges and gaps, wearisome in its moth-eaten meaninglessness.  Suddenly I came to a rhymed sentence of combined words, which may be translated thus- It rains, the leaves tremble’,  At once I came to a world wherein I recovered my full meaning.  My mind touched the creative realm of expression, and at that moment I was no longer a mere student with his mind muffled by spelling lessons, enclosed in a classroom.  The rhythmic picture of the tremulous leaves beaten by the rain opened before my mind the world which does not merely carry information but a harmony with my being.  The unmeaning fragments lost their individual isolation and my mind revelled in the unity of a vision.  In a similar manner, on that morning in the village the facts of my life suddenly appeared to me in a luminous units of truth.  All things that had seemed like vagrant waves were revealed to my mind in relation to a boundless sea.  I felt sure that some Being who comprehended me and my world was seeking his best expression in all my experiences uniting them into an ever-widening individuality which is a spiritual work of art.” 

Four centuries before this, another child, Thomas Treherne, the son of a shoemaker at Hereford in western England, underwent a similar meditative experience that was to change his life for ever. 

“Another time in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in the field, when all things were dead and quiet, a certain want and horror fell upon me, beyond imagination. The unprofitableness and silence of the place dissatisfied me; its wideness terrified me; from the utmost ends of the earth fears surrounded me. How did I know but dangers might suddenly arise from the East, and invade me from the unknown regions beyond the seas? I was a weak and little child, and had forgotten there was a man alive in the earth. Yet something also of hope and expectation comforted me from every border. This taught me that I was concerned in all the world: and that in the remotest borders the causes of peace delight me, and the beauties of the earth when seen were made to entertain me: that I was made to hold a communion with the secrets of Divine Providence in all the world: that a remembrance of all the joys I had from my birth ought always to be with me: that the presence of Cities, Temples, and Kingdoms ought to sustain me, and that to be alone in the world was to be desolate and miserable.” 

Thenceforth, Treherne knew that he must pursue his quest for ever greater enlightenment through the means available to him. He eventually became rector of the village of Credenhill, near Hereford, and subsequently private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Seals of England. His daily adult life became the arena wherein he sought to gain a constant increment of soul-experience, applying his vision of the unity of all beings to a selfless practice of unfailing kindness and understanding in the practical pursuits of his career.   That he did gain insights is clear from the enthusiasm he infused into his writings. 

Going even further back again in time, the pagan Roman philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius had reached a similar equilibrium with the social pressures of his world in the first century BC when he meditated; 

“Whether it’s atoms or nature, the first thing to be said is this: I am part of a world controlled by nature.  Secondly: that I have a relationship with other, similar parts.  And with that in mind I have no right, as a part, to complain about what is assigned me by the whole. Because what benefits the whole can’t harm the parts, and the whole does nothing that doesn’t benefit it.  That’s a trait shared by all natures, but the nature of the world is defined by a second characteristic as well: no outside force can compel it to cause itself harm”. 

Marcus Aurelius also reminds us that we need to meditate on the environment not only to answer the question; How can we protect ourselves against the stresses and pressures of daily life? but also because science alone cannot provide answers to the related questions, Why are we here? How should we live our lives? How can we be sure that what we do is right? How should we deal with pain and misfortune? Meditation on these important questions requires a state of watchful awareness, which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it in great detail. No one can teach you this life skill and the danger of adopting any system that purports to teach you how to be attentive is that you become attentive to the system and that is not the attention needed for meditation. In a broader sense, what you learn by watching nature can be applied to learn about yourself.  Watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy -if you are aware of all that in yourself, without any choice, that is mindful meditation.

From the point of view of education,  the effects of mindfulness training can enhance well-being in a number of ways. If you practice being in the present, you can increase positive feelings by savouring pleasurable on-going experiences. Additionally, calming the mind and observing experiences with a latent curiosity and acceptance not only reduces stress but helps with attention control and emotion regulation- skills which are valuable both inside and outside the classroom. Finally, these skills for meditating on the environment are essential to produce behaviour changes necessary for most people to live sustainably.   In this context, mindfulness is not superficial awareness.  It sees things deep down below the level of opinions and generalisations.  The practical objective of mindfulness meditation is to apply wisdom and understanding to establish new values of caring for ecosystems and applying fairness to cross-cultural economic links, so restoring human connectedness and dependence on the natural order of planet Earth.  This gentling of human interactions with nature is done by forging direct links between intellectual knowledge and moment-to-moment personal and social actions.   

Heightened environmental awareness in this way contributes directly to activities that cause the flourishing of human persons, their communities, and the ecosystems of which they are part.  The path to behaviour change proceeds in stages. Each stage starts with the intention to be open, flexible and kind.  Then there is the intention to move forward tentatively and inquisitively to meet a practical objective. At the end of the activity, whether or not there is a feeling of success or failure in the intention, the act is sealed by thinking of others who are succeeding and failing in similar activities all over the world. Finally, there is a wish that anything learned in the experiment could also benefit them. These stages are close to the ‘noble principles’ of Buddhism, namely to further a completely open heart (attitude) to live a compassionate life in which we love and care about all things.

2 Cultivating ‘interbeing’ 

To live in mindful meditation is the most important precept of all in Buddhism; to know what is going on, to be aware of what we do and what we are, during each minute.  When we are totally mindful, we realize that all phenomena are interdependent and endlessly interwoven. This is the foundation of what the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls the principle of “interbeing. He uses the following metaphor of ‘The cup in your hands’ to explain it. 

“In the United States, I have a close friend named Jim Forest.  When I first met him eight years ago, he was working with the Catholic Peace Fellowship.  Last winter, Jim came to visit.  I usually wash the dishes after we’ve finished the evening meal, before sitting down and drinking tea with everyone else.  One night, Jim asked if he might do the dishes.  I said, “Go ahead, but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them.” Jim replied, “Come on, you think I don’t know how to wash the dishes?” I answered, “There are two ways to wash the dishes.  The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.”  Jim was delighted and said, “I choose the second way… to wash the dishes to wash the dishes”  From then on, Jim knew how to wash the dishes.  I transferred the “responsibility” to him for an entire week. If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.”  What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.  In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink.  If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either because while drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands.  Thus we are sucked away into the future and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”  

The cup is also a metaphor encapsulating the life-giving property of water.  He continues:  

“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.” 

 From this way of holistic thinking came his suggestion that God did not create man in his own image but we have created ‘god’ in the image of humankind in order to give a name to the universal need for a oneness of all being. The starting point for this conjecture is that the world exists independent of our knowledge of it and that human knowledge is not reality but a limited representation of it. Interbeing is the approach, not only to nonviolence but to all of life, and leads to the most important practice in Buddhist meditation of letting go or “washing away.” Wrong perceptions, ideas and notions are at the root of our suffering.  They are the ground of all afflictions. In order for us to touch happiness in the here and now, we need to throw away the ideas and notions that prevent us from learning and growing. In particular, we should jettison our attachment to biased views, extreme behaviour, and rules and rituals that have created fear and hatred in our hearts. 

This sentiment of ‘living now’ is clearly expressed in the thoughts of the naturalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau as he made journeys through his New England neighbourhood . 

“Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. The bird’s philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it not in Plato nor the New Testament. It is a newer testament — the Gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is, is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world — healthiness as of a spring burst forth — a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?” 

Thoreau’s ideas of interbeing, which he called ‘the gospel of the moment’, also came from walking the countryside around his hometown.. 

“But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours — as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise go in search of the springs of life. My vicinity affords many good walks, and though I have walked almost every day for so many years, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absoutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the king of Dahomey.  There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the three-score-years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you”. 

Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking, links walking, thinking and place in a powerful way. 

“When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains”

3 Awareness 

Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose writings on education reflect a confluence of Eastern and Western thinking, answered the question about the meaning of awareness of environment as follows: 

“If you look into your minds, you will see it’s like thousands of butterflies whirling about! You can hardly trace a single idea in this complexity. A way to bring clarity to the mind is to write down your immediate thoughts and feelings in response to the events of the day, and then ponder them. If you emphasize one particular problem in this descriptive writing, it will gradually lead to all others. Awareness implies sensitivity: to be sensitive to nature, to the hills, rivers and the trees around one; to be aware of that poor man walking down the road; to be sensitive to his feelings, his reactions, to his appalling and degrading poverty; to be sensitive to the man who is sitting next to you, or to the nervousness of your friend or sister. Although this sensitivity to things shapes and sounds around you, there is no choice about which things to concentrate on.  Also, there is no judgemental evaluation. For example, you can be sensitive to a cloud about which you can do nothing. Learn to observe sensitively with the senses and to grasp what you see and hear rather than cultivate it”. 

Seeing is a very complex affair. Most people see casually and swiftly pass by.  To meditate with your eyes you must see the details of a leaf, its form and structure, its colours, the variety of greens; to observe a cloud with all the light of the world in it, to follow a stream chattering down the hill; to look at your friend with the sensitivity in which there is no resistance.  This is to see yourself as part of the whole; to see the immensity of the universe; this is meditation through the eyes: to see yourself as you are without the shades of denial or easy acceptance. To meditate through your ears is to be sensitive to the tones, the voice, to the implication of words, to hear without interference, to capture instantly the depth of a sound. Sound plays an extraordinary part in our lives: the sound of thunder, a flute playing in the distance, the unheard sound of the universe; the sound of silence, the sound of one’s own heart beating; the sound of a bird and the noise of a man walking on the pavement; the crashing waterfall. The universe is filled with sound. To be attentive is to hear this unity and move with your thoughts. To meditate is simply to become aware of what enters your thoughts as sights and sounds in their unquestioned detail.  The aim is to begin to distinguish the content of your thoughts from your ability to ‘witness’ your thoughts. 

The process takes place in three parts.  First, registering the features of the environment that at first glance strike you as being significance.   Then single out one or more features.  Reflection to trace any idea is the third phase and may take place at any time thereafter.  This latter follow up with memories is important for drawing conclusions. In summary, to meditate in the outdoors, experience everything with an open awareness, as if you’d never experienced anything like it before. Always, when the mind wanders and becomes caught up in thought about the details of what is heard or seen, simply bring it back to the experience of scanning nature with your ears and eyes.  Meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds or looking at the face of your friend or child.  Mindfulness meditation is one of the greatest arts in life -perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority. 

4 Concentration destroys meditation 

The opposite of meditation is concentration.  Concentration is the process of resistance to being in a meditative state. Every educator knows what it means to concentrate. The educator is concerned with filling the brain with knowledge of various subjects so that the student will pass examinations and get a job. The student also has this in his mind. The educator and the student are encouraging each other in the form of resistance which is concentration on parts of the world that thereby becomes fragmented. So the teacher/student relationship builds the capacity to resist taking a holistic view, to exclude the broad horizon and gradually one becomes isolated in trying to cope with partial detail. According to Krishnamurti the concentration on partial detail is where meditation as taught in the West has gone wrong.  In both the East and the West, there are different schools of meditation, different methods and systems. There are systems which say “Watch the movement of your big toe, watch it, watch it, watch it”; there are other systems which advocate sitting in a certain posture, breathing regularly or practising awareness. All this is utterly mechanical.

Another method gives you a certain word and tells you that if you go on repeating it you will have some extraordinary transcendental experience. This is sheer nonsense to Krishnamurti. It is a form of self-hypnosis. 

“By repeating Amen or Om or Coca-Cola indefinitely you will obviously have a certain experience because by repetition the mind becomes quiet. It is a well known phenomenon which has been practised for thousands of years in India -Mantra Yoga it is called. By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind. You might as well put a piece of stick you have picked up in the garden on the mantelpiece and give it a flower every day. In a month you will be worshipping it and not to put a flower in front of it will become a sin. Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation”. 

Concentration produces fixed notions about ideas and things and results in self importance that hurts us because it confines us to the narrow limitations of conditioned likes and dislikes.  The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says we have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs or we don’t.  Either we accept our fixed versions of reality or we begin to challenge them.  To practice staying open and curious and to practice dissolving our assumptions and beliefs is the best use of our human lives. Mindful-meditation demands an astonishingly alert and flexible mind to understand the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. As soon as there is a fragmentation because of concentration, there is a conflict between incoming thoughts.  The objective is not control of thought to prevent fragmentation but to detached oneself from trying to explain the detail.  In this sense, “detachment” is not indifference or separation, but a process to view all the beauty and crassness in both the inner and outer world with a gently focused observation. 

5 Seeking experience is living in the past 

We all want experiences of some kind -the mystical experience, the religious experience, the sexual experience, the experience of having a great deal of money, power, position, domination. Above all, everything must be aimed at the experience of ‘having fun’.  As we grow older we may have finished with the demands of our physical appetites but then we demand wider, deeper and more significant experiences by taking various kinds of drugs for example. This is an old trick which has existed from time immemorial: chewing a piece of leaf or experimenting with the latest chemical to bring about a temporary alteration in the working of the brain cells, a greater sensitivity and heightened perception which give a semblance of reality. This demand for more and more experiences shows the inward poverty of man. We think that through experiences we can escape from ourselves but these experiences are conditioned by what we are. If the mind is petty, jealous, anxious, it may take the very latest form of drug but it will still see only its own little creation, its own little projections from its own conditioned background. Most of us demand completely satisfying, lasting experiences, which cannot be destroyed by thought. So behind this demand for experience is the desire for satisfaction.   To have some great satisfaction is a great pleasure; the more lasting, deep and wide the experience the more pleasurable it is, so pleasure dictates the form of experience we demand, and pleasure is the measure by which we evaluate the experience. Anything measurable is within the limits of thought and is apt to create illusion. You can have marvellous experiences and yet be completely deluded. You will inevitably see visions according to your conditioning; you will see Christ or Buddha or whoever you happen to believe in, and the greater a believer you are the stronger will be your visions, which are the projections of your own demands and urges. Experience is a bundle of memories responding to a challenge and it can respond only according to its background.  So you have to question not only the experience of another but your own experience. Every experience has already been experienced or you wouldn’t recognise it. You recognise an experience as being good, bad, beautiful, holy and so on according to your conditioning, and therefore the recognition of an experience must inevitably be a past experience of yourself or someone else.  So there is a fundamental truth, which is that a mind that is demanding, seeking, craving, for wider and deeper experience is a very shallow and dull mind because it lives always with its memories and their demands. Demand is born out of duality: “I am unhappy and I must be happy”. In that very demand that I must be happy is unhappiness. When one makes an effort to be good, in that very goodness is its opposite, evil. Everything affirmed contains its own opposite, and effort to overcome strengthens that against which it strives. When you demand an experience of truth or reality, that very demand is born out of your discontent with what is, and therefore the demand creates the opposite. And in the opposite there is what has been. Is it possible then to live in this world without this everlasting comparison? Surely it is? But one bas to find out for oneself and meditation is a useful practical technique. 

6 Pictures and meditation 

When meditating on a scene, we pay attention first because we have become aware of the cultural background of a view, which is followed by an expanded awareness of the attributes of the scene that catch the eye, jog the memory, and arouse emotional feelings.  Burgin, elaborates on this to link taking pictures with a camera to catching a scene with the eyes:

“The intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call ‘photographic discourse,’ but this discourse, like any other, engages discourses beyond itself, the ‘photographic text,’ like any other, is the site of a complex intertextuality, an overlapping series of previous texts ‘taken for granted’ at a particular cultural and historical conjuncture.” 

To take photographs, wrote Henri Cartier-Bresson, 

“is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. …  It is putting one’s head, one’s eyes and one’s heart on the same axis. …  It is a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one’s originality.  It is a way of life.”

 

Barthes in Camera lucida (1984) distinguishes between the two phases of meditating on photographs by distinguishing what he calls studium and punctum.

 Studium, stands for the general, cultured interest one has in photographs. 

“It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally — this connotation is present in studium — that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.” 

Then the other element, the punctum, comes into play — the personal relation, the emotional/spiritual side. It occurs as a meditation when one is deeply touched by a picture. 

“… it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points … A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me — but also bruises me, is poignant to me.” 

These words define photography as an ongoing meditative relationship to the world.  This was clear to Cartier-Bresson, who believed that photography was not merely a profession but a liberating engagement with life itself, the camera not just a machine for recording images but “an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”

This is clearly the motivation that drives Daniel Peebles to photograph quiescent volcanoes; 

“ My landscapes are created through the meditation of being present, having no preconceived ideas about the work at hand. No waiting for the light to be right, because it always is. No waiting for the perfect cloud formation, because they all are. Ground I have tread upon scores of times previously is always new. These pictures are about my inner landscape as much as they are about the exterior, there are no beginnings or endings, only meditations upon the real world”. 

Generally speaking the intuitive meditative wellbeing that comes from viewing the environment and making pictures of it falls under the following six headings. 

●        Wellbeing in the recognition of things represented. This, a large element with children and unsophisticated persons generally, is comparatively unimportant with cultivated adults. 

●        Wellbeing aroused, as a result of previous associations, by the things represented; in short, “subject interest.” This takes innumerable forms. It is enough to mention interest in human or superhuman persons and events and agreeable past associations with landscape. 

●        Wellbeing as sources of information regarding the notional outer and inner life of individuals and peoples, whether near or remote. 

●        Wellbeing in the appreciation a the artist’s skill. 

●        Wellbeing in the recognition of artistic kinship, eg.. of resemblance to other landscapes or the other work of a school or individual.  

●        Wellbeing in the contemplation of beautiful or otherwise captivating form and colour. These meditative routes to wellbeing by making or viewing pictures are not experienced by all persons or by any one person at a single instant. Different persons differ widely in their susceptibility to these different types of emotion. But it all the pleasures enumerated are respectable and all worthy of cultivation to make and view pictures

There is a concern over the place and role of children and youth in society, and disadvantaged youth in particular!

There is rising anxiety over environmental issues nationally and globally!

Young people themselves are voicing concerns over the quality of their lives and their ability to find things to do!  

All this is happening at a time when risk characterises how we perceive much of what we do especially in public space.  Within this context, commentators are advocating enhanced opportunities for an outdoor learning that is more critical, culturally-situated, and locally contextualised.  In other words, it has to connect with people’s own lifestyles, but also potentially alter these lifestyles in favour of more sustainable ones.  Re-focusing outdoor learning on relevant environmental knowledge, understanding, skills and competences, which young people require to be effective citizens, now and in the future, will be a complex task.  It will involve a reconsideration of the relationship between different forms of mediation of outdoor experience in a range of locations with diverse purposes and foci.  In the policy field, there are already moves to adapt and enhance curricula to address specific environmental concerns and to make the world more sustainable.  The conclusion is that an enhanced focus for outdoor learning about environmental issues and sustainability could be more resonant with young people’s values, their identities, and their daily lives. Schools will play a role in this shift in emphasis in environmental for living sustainably, but so too will families, out-of-school provisions, outdoor educators and out of school volunteers. 

The school context

 It is against this background that, in 2007, a commissioned report for Scottish Natural Heritage was published dealing with young people’s interaction with the environment through formal outdoor learning.  This investigation used innovative research methods in a sustained survey of schools and pre-schools using image-based approaches to elicit the views of a wide age-range of young people. It provides a critical baseline measure of practice in terms of provision and experience from young people’s practical perspectives on sustainability.   At a time when environmental problems are giving rise to concern, time spent in nature is sometimes seen as a panacea. Some even see a linear connection between time spent in contact with the natural world and the likelihood of people taking action for the environment. But others do not believe that simply being in nature will lead people to care for it and take action with respect to environmental problems.  It has been shown that experience of wild environments does instill an interest in outdoor activities of all kinds but will not necessarily lead to taking action for the environment or changing one’s lifestyle. In particular, the idea that there is a linear relationship between time spent in contact with nature and behaviour change has been seriously challenged.   Emphasis in adventure type activities, although it does involve learning ‘in’ the environment does not often include learning ‘about’ or ‘for’ the environment. Teachers do not see activities in wildlife areas providing a socially orientated environmental education experience. The focus is almost entirely on the acquisition of practical skills, personal development and working with others. The curriculum framework is ‘ecology’ rather than ‘conservation’.  Generally, outdoor educators name the following as their top three outcomes:  

• group cooperation;
• self-esteem;
• and increased responsibility.

 These are all mainly aspects of personal development, with no practical references to living sustainably. Evidence from the Scottish survey indicates that nature-related foci and ‘advancing a cause’, which might include taking action for the environment or addressing the needs of future generations, were very low on the agenda in adventure type activities. Clearly, residential field course experiences and out-of-school clubs in wild or seminatural areas are a significant learning experiences for those that have them. But, in Scotland, it was only when programmes such as the John Muir Award and Natural Connections, for example, were examined, did young people specifically mention conservation or environmental protection issues. Therefore, time spent in contact with nature, developing environmental understanding and enhancing a relationship with ecosystems is not a sufficient ingredient. Young people were only moved towards action for sustainability where programmes contained strong elements related to environmental concern. Ethical concerns and enhanced relationships with nature only came when dedicated teachers taught them as main themes. This suggests that the environmental competence and environmental literacy needed for young people to be responsible citizens are more likely to come from programmes that address them directly.   A key finding of this research is that provision of formal outdoor education needs to be focused on these aspects, be made more regularly available throughout the year, and be more inclusive for all pupils. Making a once-off trip to a residential centre should be just one component of a more sustained programme required to promote a caring relationship between young people and natural heritage. The programme also needs to be based on what is valued and meaningful for young people with regards sustainability and environmental sensitivity. This would require schools to enhance and alter their provision in terms of its location, focus and type and be to sensitive to the way outdoor experience is focused, mediated and contextualised. In this light, outdoor learning would be a necessary but not sufficient element in a wider programme of education for sustainable development for pupils, staff and the communities of which they are a part. 

To develop a relationship with nature that is deeper than ecology, learners need to make multiple visits to a place, in a diversity of seasons and weathers whilst maintaining the adventure and technical aspects of activities. It is helpful to have an emphasis on locally available or in-school specialists and local support structures. A key finding in the Scottish survey is that young people’s relationship with nature was enhanced by sustained or regular visits to places they came to know well and which could be offered more regularly throughout the year and in a more inclusive manner to all pupils. This prompts the idea is that outdoor environment-related education could be more regularly located in local neighbourhoods where the focus would be on local nature sites, trees in the streets and the grassy environments of parks, school playing fields and roadside verges. This would require a multidisciplinary approach to potentially help to render it more meaningful to the everyday community lives of diverse student groups. Considering how places might be visited more regularly in all seasons through a variety of subject areas would seem to be a worthwhile aim if connections between pupils and environments are to significantly change behaviour.  In this context the emphasis should be on conservation management that could be applied to other local community/home sustainability issues, such as energy use, crime prevention, transport and home insulation.

 This is all part of a required shift in educational perspective towards non-formal project-based learning with its potential for an improved ‘fit’ between young people, their neighbourhood and the well being of their community. Such work requires a long-term management plan so that the project spans the school lives of individual pupils.  Here, there is increased scope for schools to draw on a rich fund of knowledge in their local areas for new types of outdoor learning. The hope is that planners, housing specialists, city traffic managers and policy makers will begin to take on board what psychologists, educators and play specialists now know about the inter-relationships between local environmental issues and the need for adults, young people and children to become involved in their resolution. 

There are broader cultural factors in play too. In some Scandinavian countries, children’s independence, the acquisition of environmental skills, and learning to deal with dangers in the environment are more appreciated. In the UK, as evidence from young people in Scotland testified, there appears to be less opportunity to engage with environments in ways that encouraged independence of this sort. In particular, outdoor learning is also likely to require, if not affect, a different relationship between adult and pupil than that normally experienced inside schools. There is also the question here of what commitments and values parents, outdoor educators, teachers and others bring to bear on the outdoor experiences they so critically mediate for young people. It is argued that the role of teachers and the school community in valuing and supporting children’s relationship with the environment is as important as access to more naturalised unstructured environments. Clearly, these understandings will have to be taken forward with the rhetoric of joined-up thinking between government departments/portfolios and inter-agency working.  In this strategic context, the voices of young people and their parents should be heard in the school. 

http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/commissioned_reports/ReportNo225.pdf 

The extracurricular context

 Shortly after the first global environment summit in 1992, a group of young people gathered together at the UK headquarters of the educational charity Peace Child International. They were funded by the UN to produce a young people’s version of Agenda 21, which was entitled ‘Rescue Mission Planet Earth’. It was published on International Earth Day in 1994.  The aim was to network children as a force to conserve the resources of planet Earth.   In Wales, Rescue Mission stimulated teachers and children in the then County of Dyfed to develop a practical scheme for harnessing the National Curriculum to meet the objectives of the Local Agenda 21. The scheme developed as an all-Wales bilingual programme named SCAN (Schools in Communities Agenda 21 Network).   The UN group put forward the following diagram (Fig 1) to illustrate their manifesto for what they would like to happen as a next step. Their idea was to establish a global democracy of children starting with young people’s groups working through their local school. This did not happen. 

Fig 1 A global network of children for sustainability (1994)  

  The 1994 scheme for setting up a youth network produced by the group of young people who created Rescue Mission is still a good working model for out-of-school networking of ideas and achievements locally and globally. To mark the Johannesburg ‘Rio Plus 10’ Environment Summit (2002) a selection of topics from Rescue Mission was produced by children of Cardiff schools as a guide for children to join with SCAN and produce their own mission in Wales with long-term plans for environmental improvements in home and neighbourhood.  Twenty years on from Rio, an example of what can be achieved now, using commonplace tools of the Internet, is the students led, not-for-profit and non-partisan organization in Uganda, Students for Global Democracy Uganda. This was set up in 2005 to inspire young people, principally students, to adapt to a culture of leadership, good governance and sustainability. The aim is to effectively enable grass roots participation in the democratic process and sustainable development of their country and the outside world. The Ugandan initiative is part of a global network of students for democracy with the goals of:  –

• encouraging solidarity with, and giving to support to, those across the globe, especially students, who struggle against dictatorship. This entails holding demonstrations of solidarity, providing financial support, and facilitating the training of democratic movements when necessary.
• educating the national and international communities on the problems created by authoritarian governments and the solutions that worldwide democracy brings. This entails running awareness campaigns via speaking events, panel discussions, letters to the editor, and other innovative events that further inform the publics of the world.
• lobbying governments to make democracy promotion the primary focus of their foreign policies, and working against those governmental policies that harm democratisation. This entails running petition campaigns, letter-writing campaigns, and protests when necessary.
• bringing together all sides of the political spectrum in the fight for democracy. This means we do not pay lip service to the concept of non-partisanship, but truly seek it by listening to all sides of the political spectrum.

The network is based on the following beliefs:- 

• That the desire for and ability to maintain freedom are innate characteristics held by all humans, regardless of race, religion, or creed.
• That worldwide democracy will lead to eventual end of interstate conflict and a drastic decrease in starvation, as democratic countries do not war with one another nor has one ever experienced a famine.
• That dictators are often the leading cause of terrorism as they oppress their people and deny them peaceful means of expression.
• That the governments of the world’s entrenched democracies must make the promotion of freedom the primary focus of their foreign policies.
• That the transition to democracy should be accomplished whenever possible by non-violent methods and in a open-minded non-partisan manner.
• That the economic integration of a country’s people and isolation solely of the dictator and his cadre is much more effective in achieving a freer state than blind embargos.

A similar network, with a student arm, that is more attuned to the goals of sustainability is the Earth Charter Initiative.  Here the aim is to promote the transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society.  The initiative is founded on a shared ethical framework that includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. The idea of the Earth Charter originated in 1987, when the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development called for a new charter to guide the transition to sustainable development. In 1992, the need for a charter was urged by then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, but the time for such a declaration was not believed to be right. The Rio Declaration became the statement of the achievable consensus at that time. In 1994, Maurice Strong (Chairman of the Earth Summit) and Mikhail Gorbachev, working through organizations they each founded (the Earth Council and Green Cross International respectively), restarted the Earth Charter as a civil society initiative, with the help of the government of the Netherlands. There is now an organised Earth Charter Youth Group, which list the benefits of joining the Earth Charter youth network as follows: 

Association with a bold and dynamic movement that asserts that ethical sustainable development is not just a good idea, but an imperative for humanity’s and the Earth’s survival;Listing of your organizational profile on the official Earth Charter website that currently receives nearly 100,000 distinct visitors each month and to http://ecyg.wikispaces.com/. 

The Earth Charter is being used in education for all ages and within formal and non-formalcontexts. It has proved to be an especially valuable teaching instrument in the evolving field ofenvironmental education, and its principles are in accord with UNESCO’s early definitions ofenvironmental education found in the Belgrade Charter (1975) and the Tbilisi Declaration (1977).  It has been utilized in human rights and peace education and has been taken up in new educational endeavors aimed at sustainability designated variously as education for sustainable development, education for sustainability, and, even, environmental education for sustainable development. In these various arenas, the Earth Charter is contributing to the ongoing critical conceptualization of education processes that aim to develop understanding of and promote justice, sustainability and peace. 

Fig 2 Model for using the Earth Charter to turn knowledge into action

  The Earth Charter  

Use of the Earth Charter in Education

 

A knowledge system for adding environmental values

 to places where we live

 

‘The Century of Invention’; 2000 seen from 1851

1  The Lowestoft model

 Cultures appear when people share the following three humanising structures of time. 

• Looking to the past for our origins (e.g. gods in heaven);

• Stabilising human relationships in the present (e.g.’men’ as a collection of people and their natural resources);

• Coming to terms with human death in the future (spiritual life after death).

 A culture emerges when these three fundamental human concepts are the basis of a harmonised blend of belief, education, work and leisure.  The culture is one of reassuring stability bonded to place through the continuity of customs, institutions and behaviour.  When any one of the humanising structures of time changes irreversibly through economic progress or decline so does the culture. 

The educational proposition is that the East Anglian community of Lowestoft is currently bound to ‘place’ by events which brought about widespread cultural behavioural change in the second half of the 19th century.  It is focused on the life of Samuel Peto, a master builder at the dawn of British civil engineering, whose ambition was to capitalise on geographical possibilities for the economic development of Lowestoft and Kirkley, its neighbouring village, then both relatively small fishing communities confined at the extreme eastern edge the British Isles. 

 Lowestoft’s pre-Peto sense of culture was evident nationally in its porcelain factory, which was in production from c.1757-1801. The first English porcelain manufactories were established in the 1740s and 50s and the Lowestoft factory is of particular importance as it was the only one to be set up in East Anglia. Lowestoft also holds an important position in the story of British ceramics as no other factory produced so many dated and inscribed pieces. This means that we have an exceptionally clear picture of who was commissioning which individual items at what date, providing an unparalleled profile of the customer base of a factory of this kind. In addition Lowestoft is also the only factory known to have made birth tablets, painted discs made to commemorate the birth of a child. The porcelain has further significance as a valuable record of Lowestoft in the late eighteenth century when it was becoming established as a popular holiday resort: many of the factory produced objects, decorated with transfer printing, were intended as souvenirs. Pieces feature local scenes such as the church, beach, lighthouses and there is one of the earliest depictions of a bathing machine. Bernard Watney has observed: ‘no other English china evokes quite the same sense of belonging to a particular place’. Equally we also know that much of the factory’s output was exported to Europe, a significant example of Lowestoft’s close links with the Continent, which were to be intensified by Peto for a broader maritime trade. 

By the time Peto arrived in Lowestoft porcelain had not been produced for almost a  generation.   He was attracted to the town by the obvious capacity of an expanded railway network to increase both the supply of marketed commodities and labour, and the demand for marketed-products.  In this context he was a national investor whose personal energies and money triggered sudden “changes in taste” for Lowestoft’s fresh fish and Kirkley’s long sandy beach for people wanting seaside holidays.  These are local examples of the resultant behaviour changes brought about by mass transport on railways, whereby Lowestoft became a major player in the combined growth of the British fishing industry and what is now called the ‘holiday hospitality industry’.  Peto’s model was Lowestoft’s neighbour, Yarmouth, a few miles up the coast, which had been developed for these purposes by his uncle.  The coming of Peto’s railway to Lowestoft transformed the relationship between space, culture, society and history. In particular, it provoked transnational flows of people, capital and ideas into the town with profound impacts on urbanisation and social dynamics that shaped the identity of migrants and their affiliation with a capitalist economy.  

Peto’s projects were duplicated nationally by other Victorian inventors, entrepreneurs and developers and brought about a widespread reallocation of family labour from goods and services for direct consumption, to marketed commodities. The national outcomes were the appearance of proto- industrial production, the intensification of work, the extensive use of female and child labour and the commodification of leisure time.  A few decades later this aggregation of traits would be used to portray the industrialised economy in Britain and recommend its material values to the rest of the world.  In the period 1750-1900 industrialization has knit the world together -not just in having wrought profound technological change, but also in the consequences, both economic and social, of that change. Industrialization allowed for the mechanization of Euro-American societies and the mass production of commodities and finished goods. At the same time, industrialization facilitated the destruction of local environments all over the world with pollution and resource depletion. Signs that Lowestoft’s fishing industry was playing a role in the destruction of North Sea fish stocks had appeared by 1900. 

Industrialization also provided the means by which Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese dominated cultures and societies around the globe through both formal and informal imperialism. As a result, the “progress” of the nineteenth century should be viewed globally, with truly global consequences that by the mid 20^th century were challenging the entire planet and its peoples.  By the 1970s it was becoming clear that the world would have to face up to a global crisis of resource utilisation and some educationalists were becoming dissatisfied with the inadequacies of single subject syllabuses to tackle the problems of world development as a multidisciplinary system.  It was in this vein that Jack Walmsley, Headmaster of Kirkley High School, launched an initiative in the 1980s to involve his teachers in the evaluation of a new multidisciplinary subject dealing with world development entitled Natural Economy.  The syllabus had been devised by the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate for their International GCSE.  Subsequently this was assembled as the on-line educational framework of cultural ecology (http://www.culturalecology.info) by Denis Bellamy, Professor Emeritus of the University of Wales.  The evaluation process incorporated teaching materials on the social history of Kirkley and Loweststoft provided by David Butcher of Kirkley High School, David Peachey, education officer of the Lowestoft government fisheries research institute, Trevor Westgate, a Lowestoft journalist and Ruth Downing a Suffolk local historian.   

This Lowestoft model of the cultural ecology of ‘place’ is currently being assembled, as an element of a teaching resource entitled ‘Living Sustainably’, with the C-MapTools knowledge modelling kit (Fig 1), created by the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition (a university affiliated research institute: http://cmap.ihamc.us).   It will be presented in the ICOPER Internet Discourse Space as part of a mindmap abouit living sustainably  (http://www.icoper.net:8080/rid=1HNMBKN3X-1HC1WH8-1QP/living_sustainably.cmap).  The host site is dedicated to educational  issues related to concepts and standards.  The overarching mindmap of ‘living sustainably’ showing the position of the concept of ‘historical heritage’ is set out in Fig 2. 

 The online resources will be interactive in that each object is hyperlinked to websites, images and files that amplify its meaning.  The aim is to provide templates for the local assembly of knowledge about cultural heritage as part of a community toolkit for adapting to behaviour change (environmental re-socialisation).  Urban space never stands still: the process of long-term economic development has produced today’s historic environment, and the pressure for change is today more intense than ever. The historic environment has the potential to contribute to the future success of our towns and cities, for it provides people with a sense of belonging to somewhere distinctive and special.  

It is an essential component of place making, for identity derives largely from history, and especially from its material evidence. Understanding of the historic environment is, therefore, crucial to our lives: it tells us what is important and why, it explains how our towns and cities have evolved, and it helps people to define, protect, care for and appreciate the special qualities of the places where they live.  

Fig 1 The Lowestoft cmap of cultural heritage

Fig 2 Mindmap of the knowledge framework for ‘living sustainably’

  

2 Cultural heritage: the wider perspective

 “Our Landscape Characterisation work has identified distinct landscape types and areas. The smooth, rolling, purple heather moors in the north give views to the granite massif of Dartmoor and to the mountains of the Brecon Beacons across the Bristol Channel. The coastal heaths top the spectacular hogs-back cliffs with a blaze of magenta and yellow in summer; while the gently folding uniformity of the central grass moors gives a feeling of wildness, space and tranquillity, especially in winter. The open, heathy hills of the southern moors provide a contrast to the surrounding landscape patterned with small beech-hedged fields; like a series of wilder stepping stones amid the more heavily managed farmland, The Brendon heaths stand out as breathing spaces, within the surrounding conifer plantations and act as reminders of the once extensive moorlands in this area”. ( Exmoor National Park Moorland Landscape Partnership; (2007)).  

Human generated climate change has finally put an end to the old ‘pristine myth’ of the existence of natural environments unaffected by human activity.  A scenic view of an area of land anywhere in the world is now unequivocally an ecological unit of spatial human economic development.  At the same time, gradual acceptance of the concept of landscape as a carrier of spiritual messages is also putting an end to the division of the world into a rationally progressive West and an irrationally traditional non-West.  The adoption of the latter attitude has been the driver for all post-colonial development efforts. However, in all parts of the world, a spiritual sense of place may be strongly enhanced by the landscape being written about by poets, novelists and historians, or portrayed in art or music, and more recently, through modes of codification aimed at protecting, preserving and enhancing places felt to be of value  (such as the ‘World Heritage Site’ designations used around the world, the  ‘English Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ and the American  ‘National Historic  Landmark’ designation).  However, these modes of highlighting environments, which are special to certain individuals or organisations, devalue environments that are not selected in this way. In this respect, it is not uncommon to find an intensification of the impulse to select a certain feature of an otherwise unremarkable vernacular landscape, which generates an indefinable unanalysable emotion. 

Nevertheless, a blending of material and spiritual values in landscape is becoming a unifying thread in landscape management plans visualised by conservationists who set the level of their ambitions to better provide environmental goods and services. Leitão and Ahern (2002) placed these management objectives within four principle currents of planning; namely physical planning, economic planning, social planning and integrated planning.   Paul Opdam developed these currents conceptually with the goal of providing planners with criteria, indicators and tools for effective conservation management as follows.  

1) The ecophysical landscape is visualised as a mosaic of ecosystems composed of a non-living component and a living component. Humans and other animals are actors and their actions may have an impact on the ecological functioning of the landscape. This is the landscape of spatial ecologists, of eco-hydrologists and physical geographers. 

2) The social landscape is visualised with its historical narratives and emotions.  It is the notional landscape used by tourists to promote their well-being.   It is the domain of environmental psychologists, of social and medical sciences, of cultural studies and anthropology. 

3) The economic landscape is visualised as a system providing goods and services of economic value.  These include the effect of increased health on labourproductivity and the economic value of tourism.  This is the landscape of environmentaleconomists. 

4) The decision-making landscape is the unit of integrated planning and design. It is the landscape of spatial planners, landscape architects, and politiciansand conservation planners.

Opdam’s model of the four dimensions of landscape and their interrelations is set out in Fig 3.  It is a conceptual area matrix (CAM), which, for any geographical unit, can be expanded in the form of a mindmap of conceptual propositions based on the strategic and operational objectives of the management plan.  The aim of a CAM is to identify, link and quantify the interrelations between all landscape constructs.  A particular advantage of conceptualising a landscape as a set of spatial perspectives is being able to conceptualise historical events from these multiple perspectives and to evaluate and relate historical data within these to current management objectives. 

Figure 3. Opdam’s model of the four dimensions of the landscape, with their interrelations  

A concept map is a way of representing relationships between ideas, images or words, in the same way that a sentence diagram represents the grammar of a sentence, a road map represents the locations of highways and towns, and a circuit diagram represents the workings of an electrical appliance. In a concept map, each word or phrase is connected to another to make a proposition and linked back to the original idea, word or phrase. Concept maps are a way to develop logical thinking and study skills, by revealing connections and helping students see how individual ideas form a larger whole  The concept map of cultural ecology brings the CAM into a generally applicable educational framework of environmental management that begins with the following proposition: 

‘Cultural ecology is exemplified by places, where a special combination of ideas, environment and people has led to human advancement through wealth,  freedom of thought, and well-being; thereby, the environment may be valued for its material resources, beauty or spirituality and used for monetary profit, recreation, leisure, health and education: most are working communities and some are defined as heritage sites.

 Fig 4. Mindmap of cultural ecology of place 

The proposition can be applied by a national park committee or a neighbourhood community group, and is the basis for environmental protection by organizations, free spirits, dreamers and pioneers. It is presented as a mindmap in Fig 4.  As the basis for a ‘do it yourself’ guide to participatory citizenship it prompts a structured response to the questions.  What was our neighbourhood like before human settlement? Which individual or group made plans for human advancement? What are the valuable heritage features that remain as indicators of this human endeavour? 

3  Sense of place

Areas said to have a powerful  “sense of place” have a strong identity and character that is deeply felt by local inhabitants and by many visitors. Sense of place is a social phenomenon that exists independently of any one individual’s perceptions and experiences, yet, paradoxically, is dependent on individual human engagement for its existence. Such an affinity may be derived from the natural environment, but is more often made up of a mix of natural and cultural features in the landscape, and generally includes the people who occupy, or have occupied, the place.

At an individual level, deep down we all want to know how we fit into a greater scheme of things, and this type of question motivates us to try to understand the neighbourhood where we live.  Some may take a spiritual viewpoint, others require a scientific, political or celebrity explanation.  Underneath it all is our innate curiosity about our surroundings. We all quickly develop a mental sense of place wherever we may be.  More than ‘environment’, ‘place’ exists only after people have imagined it. These imaginative structures create a feeling of belonging and unify land and its peoples in powerful ways. Sense of place is linked to meaning and permanence because places have a way of claiming people within the context of notions associated with them.  This is the essence of conservation, because people come to value the biophysical elements of town and country scenery as visual triggers to relive the past.  Historical connection with the streets we walk is thus a significant way to social action to protect our neighbourhood. Thinking historically about our surroundings in this way also allows us to embrace the connection with each other.  Also, it has been said that engagement with history answers all the great questions of life. Like faith it explains everything.

Many early studies on the relationship between culture and ecology were focused on indigenous peoples, and the links between culture and environment defined as ‘culture areas.’  The two universally dominant ideas are that culture determines environment, and environment determines culture.  The latter viewpoint says that the natural environment sets certain possibilities for establishing a life style from which cultures, conditioned by their history and particular customs, may choose in order to move forward.

Environmental possibilism marks in many ways an important shift towards an interactive view of the survival relationships between cultures and their environment, which is central to cultural ecology.  A cultural core of subsistence patterns is seen as having developed largely in response to particular local natural resources.  Furthermore, this cultural topographic core may shape other cultural features of social organization.  Therefore an ‘ecological cultural core’ plays an interactive role for both environment and society, to shape cultural adaptive behavioural change for a different future.  In this sense, the combined study of culture and ecology is orientated towards an understanding of the processes or causes of the ‘evolution’ of culture.  This occurs by explaining the choices made by cultures, which are presented to them by their history as well as by their environment, and the way in which these interactions may produce different and unpredictable paths of economic development. Sense of place is thus a binding thread for community members, and also signposts the future.  When a place claims very diverse kinds of people, then those people must eventually adapt to live with each other; they must learn how to reconcile their different views of space.  History is riddled with examples of cultural extinctions produced by dispassionate Europeans in the name of acquiring living space.

All these links between culture and place may be regarded as behavioural features of survival value to individuals, families and their communities.  They are essential for the question ‘Where do you come from?’ to mean something.  These days people live everywhere, which is the same as living nowhere. Like a vitamin deficiency, a contact deficiency with local history weakens the body, the mind, and the spirit.  The great challenge of our times is to rebuild connections into our self-conscious lives, by reaching out to others and by being part of something larger than ourselves. Connectedness has to be the key to living a full and rounded life and an ability to cope with rapid economic change. The problem is much larger than family history, which essentially involves chasing a Y chromosome, which reinforces a kind of divisive non-adaptive tribablism.  We need genealogical models designed to capture human unity in a more realistic way. One thing we can learn from family history is that our ancestors did not follow a random mating model.   In this respect, family trees illustrate the tendency of individuals to choose mates from the same social group, and the relative isolation of geographically separated groups.  Recent genetical research into this system of non-random mating indicates that the genealogies of all living humans overlap in remarkable ways in the recent past.  While we may not all be brothers, these models suggest we are all hundredth cousins or so with everyone else on planet earth.

Three vital ties to place that give our days meaning, focus on places in the present where we can make connections with our ancestors, and fit these people in the wider context of global history and the cosmos.  For example, there are:-

·         Places of landing.

We are by nature a migrant species, and we should mark and celebrate our places of arrival and departure.

·         Places of settlement.

There are some places in every country that have a particular significance for particular groups of people, because they are where their ancestors have built kinship networks. Places of settlement are where we meet up with nature by destroying ecosystems and displacing or exterminating wildlife 

·         Places of interaction between peoples

So many of our places of historical encounter are hidden in the landscape, with little more than a sign to point to them. Many of these are places of conflict, telling stories that we need to know to understand grievances that have been handed down from generation to generation, but there are others that symbolise cooperation, productivity and friendship.   

·         Places of spiritual significance

Sacred or holy places are found in different cultures, past and present, all over the world.  Such places are frequently marked or embellished by architectural structures and art. In most cases, it can be shown that the sacredness of a place is linked in some way to natural objects, and features such as trees, stones, water, mountains, caves and forms in the landscape. It can further be shown that these natural objects and forms lie at the root of the forms and shapes employed to mark or embellish a sacred site.  The development of modern science has made incredible much of the content of traditional belief of religions based on a supernatural god.  Sacredness and spiritualism without God means that the quest for transcendent living, which is satisfied in nothing else but genetic demand for inner and outer order, has evolved the concepts of  ‘intelligence‘, ‘love‘ and ‘free being’. Silence and contemplation are not just for monks and nuns, they are natural functions of human biology.  Places become special where there is space for silence and contemplation of the land; when ‘two plus two equals five’ and there is no longer a deep suspicion of thoughtfulness. 

4  Sense of culture

 Culture, according to Vijay Sathe is, 

“the set of important understandings (often unstated) that members of a community share in common.”  

These shared understandings consist of a community’s, values, attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles.  The understandings and the ideas we live by are always mediated through things we make.  Therefore the things we make are perhaps the most tangible manifestation of a sense of culture.  There are numerous expressions of making: such as tools; clothing and jewellery; costumes and props for festivals and performing arts; storage containers, objects used for storage, transport and shelter; decorative art and ritual objects; musical instruments and household utensils, and toys, both for amusement and education. Many of these objects are only intended to be used for a short time, such as those created for festival rites, others may become heirlooms that are passed from generation to generation; most are expendable and and become neglected when out of fashion. 

Until the invention of mass production, objects were of necessity all hand-made and the term art referred to the skills necessary for any kind of making process. Art as a special object had no separate reality. This inclusive definition existed until the fifteenth century when art and craft were not yet considered to be separate entities. The idea that “art” is a revered product of creative inspiration, while “craft” is the production of useful items had no meaning. In the 1470s, the Confraternity of St Luke in Florence listed 42 members, 32 of whom specialised in figurative painting.  There were 54 workshops specialising in marble and stone decoration and 44 gold- or silversmiths, 30 painters, 22 sculptors and 14 masters of perspective. The number of individuals serving daily material needs is revealing.  For instance, that there were some 70 butchers and 66 spice merchants operating in Florence at that time. This kind of information suggests that, unlike in our own society, where art objects are luxury goods produced by named individuals directed to satisfy a small and expensive market, the demand for a more anonymous art in fifteenth-century Florence, and, presumably, in Italy as a whole, was almost as great as the demands for basic everyday commodities. 

The skills involved in creating objects are as varied as the items themselves and range from delicate, detailed work such as producing paper votives to robust, rugged tasks like creating a sturdy basket or thick blanket.  In 15^th century Florence, which was growing rich on banking and a European-wide trade in luxury goods, people began to select the objects that they like to live with. They began the intensive cultivation of their family domain to package themselves with their belongings.  It has been said that all objects are “packaged” to deliver certain meanings. And desire packages everything. When we dress, we package our bodies. In fact, every thing has a skin through which it speaks. We have personal feelings about these ‘mantelpiece objects’.  We project into them, and communicate through them. There is a ritual relationship to these domestic collections that occurs on a daily basis. 

Now, in our advanced industrial Western society, mass-produced objects are found on consoles, on tables, on countertops. These counters and tables are vehicles of presentation; they are also functional objects, but they also have cultural skins and histories. It was desire, fuelled by personal wealth that made people tap into a limited supply of well-crafted objects, which were elevated to the status of ‘art’.  Along with this ‘object inflation’, the methods and materials used to educate craftsmen changed considerably during the Renaissance. Throughout the period, most received their early training as apprentices. However, during the 1400s, learning about a growing art theory centred on making pictures, gradually became as important as mastering practical skills. By the 1600s, making art objects had evolved from a craft into an academic framework of values and critics.  In a wider contemporary context it is the making of things that shapes the way we encounter the world. Thus the concept of a culture and the design of objects it uses are intertwined.  Cultural evolution in turn, reflects and determines developments in design.  

Contemporary design not only satisfies the needs of our material life, but also increasingly considers the needs of our spiritual life. It provides people with many kinds of enjoyment in practice, in emotion and in mentality, and it attaches more and more importance to the added-value product. When this is overdone the products are classified as kitsch Though its precise etymology is uncertain, it is widely held that the word kitsch originated in the Munich art markets of the 1860s and 70s, used to describe cheap, hotly marketable pictures or sketches. Designers take great efforts to infuse the crafting value, culture value and aesthetic value into the creation of a whole organic entitiy.  From this point of view the public have come to understand that art may apear in commonplace mass produced objects without an artistic intention.  Such objects emerge in the market for antiques and collectables and are valued according to the rarity that comes from chance survival. 

John Ruskin was the first to move attention away from a “disinterested” contemplation of an artwork, and toward a broader examination of the society from which the work arises.  The connection of art with the tastes of popular culture was not part of a definite cultural movement until pop art appeared in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States^.  Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist’s use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art.  Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, including kitsch, for contemplation.  Regarding kitsch, makers were able to maintain legitimacy by saying they were quoting imagery to make conceptual points about the culture that prouced it, usually with the appropriation being ironic. This is the common ground where art meets the Antiques Roadshow. 

5  Conclusions

 Commonplace historical heritage is found when values are placed on objects that we wish to keep it – perhaps after their useful life. These may be aesthetic, social, scientific or historical.  We may value something for the story it has to tell about the past, or because it was associated with events or people. Something may have an intense personal value, or it may hold memories for us as individuals or as communities. The heritage organizations, large and small, look after those social assets, whether through protecting buildings, funding projects, opening sites and displaying objects and information to the public.  The word ‘liveability’ has been invented to sum up how people interact with where they live and how that influences their whole attitude to their surroundings. This is one of the routes to sustainability because sustainable communities are only sustainable if they command the loyalty and passion of the people who live there. It is widely accepted that there is no more effective way of engaging people in new or renewed communities and neighbourhoods than by engaging with their own history, which through made objects focuses aesthetic value (beauty, harmony); spiritual value (understanding, enlightenment, insight); social value (connection with others, a sense of identity); historical value (connection with the past); symbolic value (objects or sites as repositories or conveyors of meaning); authenticity value (integrity, uniqueness).  These values derive from a broadly cultural discourse about the significance of art and culture in human affairs. 

Lowestoft porcelain inkstand, circa 1795

“How strange it is that a bird, under the form of a woodpecker, should have been created to prey on insects on the ground; that upland geese, which never or rarely swim, should have been created with webbed feet; that a thrush should have been created to dive and feed on sub-aquatic insects; and that a petrel should have been created with habits and structure fitting it for the life of an auk or grebe! and so on in endless other cases. But on the view of each species constantly trying to increase in number, with natural selection always ready to adapt the slowly varying descendants of each to any unoccupied or ill-occupied place in nature, these facts cease to be strange, or perhaps might even have been anticipated.”Charles Darwin (1859), ‘On the Origin of Species’  

As an educational proposition, cultural ecology deals with the relationships between people, ecology and place.  It encompasses the comprehensive interlocking role of ecology in human life and culture, which brings together people with nature to manage our interactions with the man-made environment.  The aim of cultural ecology is to generate respect for both the natural and the built environment so that people act in a way that conserves environmental resources and their cultural and aesthetic values. In particular there is a comprehensive role for arts and architecture as material and spiritual expressions of the cultural values of a society and the need to preserve these expressions for the benefit of future generations.  

Three practical routes to achieve this end are the management of consumerism to reduce social inequalities; management of resources to improve livelihoods; and management of resources for environmental sustainability .   These routes may be expressed at all levels of landscape: the natural landscape, which is not always as “natural” as it appears; the built landscape, which humans have modified to fulfill their physical needs or desires; and the designed landscape, which is the result of conscious effort to produce meaning. Meaning in all categories of landscape ranges from the divine to the humble and practical.  

Meaning and value are created together in our material and spiritual experiences of landscape, not in the landscape itself.  They derive from the ways people perceive environment, not only real-world landscapes but depictions of landscapes in writing, painting, maps, photography, and other forms of art.  These experiences combine the physical aspects of architecture and land use of the everyday environment here and now with individual memories, shared meanings, lived history, and expectations of the how it will or should be in the future. 

Culture and niche 

Darwin’s idea of the evolution of life proceeding from adaptations to environment by natural selection rests on each species being defined by a specific position in nature.  The term niche expresses the idea that this ‘place’ is the sum total of adaptations to the environment possessed by the species in question.  Niche was first used by the naturalist Joseph Grinnell in 1917, in his ornithological paper “The niche relationships of the California Thrasher.”.  A niche refers to the way in which an organism fits into an ecological community or ecosystem.  It is the evolutionary outcome of the sum total of morphological physiological, and behavioural adaptations by which a species genetically adapts to its surroundings. The word “niche” is derived from the Middle French word nicher, meaning to nest. However, it was not until 1927 that Charles Elton gave the first working definition of the niche concept. He is credited with saying: “When an ecologist says ‘there goes a badger,’ he should include in his thoughts some definite idea of the animal’s place in the community to which it belongs, just as if he had said, ‘there goes the vicar.’ The ecological niche has also been termed by G.E. Hutchinson a “hypervolume.” This term defines the multi-dimensional space of resources (e.g., light, nutrients, structure, etc.) available to, and specifically used by, each species.  

It has long been known that many animals extensively modify their immediate surroundings. Numerous ‘animals without hands’ manufacture nests, burrows, holes, webs and pupal cases; plants and micro organisms change levels of atmospheric gases and modify nutrient cycles. The defining characteristic of niche construction is not organism-driven modification of the environment, but rather the specific modification of the relationship between an organism and its environment.  Hence niche construction involves habitat selection, dispersal and migration. Advocates of the niche-construction perspective within evolutionary biology stress the active role that organisms play in driving evolutionary and coevolutionary events. They seek to explain the adaptive complementarity of organism and environment.  This is done in terms of dynamic, reciprocal interactions between the processes of natural selection and niche construction. Evolution thus entails networks of causation and feedback in which previously selected organisms drive environmental changes. Organism-modified environments subsequently select for changes in organisms.  Thus, niche construction is the very general dynamic process whereby species, including humans, modify their own and/or each others’ niches, through their metabolism, their activities, and their behavioural choices. This trend is carried to its extreme in humans, for whom culture has, in fact, become its niche. 

It seems this perspective of cultural ecology emerged in the mind of the American entrepreneur anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan at the time when Darwin was gathering his intellectual strength to publish the Origin of Species.  Morgan was researching the development of human social evolution from savagery to civilisation. He believed the drivers were ideas, passions and aspirations that ran parallel with the idea of ‘property and office’, which over millennia ‘was slowly formed in the human mind’.  Property and office are both the essence of social hierarchy.  Morgan’s full list of cultural processes, which determine the social human niche, is as follows: 1 Subsistence2 Government3 Language4 The Family5 Religion6 House Life and Architecture7 Property Cross discipline research, spanning anthropology and biology is now converging on the view that human evolution has been shaped by dynamic on-going gene/culture/ecology interactions. Theoretical biologists have used population genetic models to demonstrate that social processes that characterise the habitability of space can have a profound effect on human evolution, and anthropologists are investigating cultural practices that modify current selection.  Architectural design is central to habitability. 

Environments of happiness 

‘House architecture, which connects itself with the form of the family and the plan of domestic life, affords a tolerably complete illustration of progress from savagery to civilization.  Its growth can be traced from the hut of the savage, through the communal houses of the barbarians to the house of the single family of civilized nations, with all the successive links by which one extreme is connected with the other’ Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) ‘Ancient Society’ 

In 1725, in the small Suffolk village of Theberton,  James Kemp died prematurely, aged 38.  In his will he described himself as a carpenter architect.  The Kemp family are recorded as builders and timber merchants in the villages around Theberton for about three centuries, where they have been connected with new timber-framed houses and farmsteads. James Kemp’s death was a century after the word architect began to be applied to a particular person.  First used on the title-page of a book by John Shute of 1563, it next appears on the tombstone of Robert Smythson in 1614 and in the register of the death of Robert Lyminge at Blickling in 1628, where he is described as ‘the architect and builder of Blickling Hall (1616).  Lyminge is also recorded as the carpenter architect of Hatfield House begun in 1607.   Smythson began his working life as a mason and became joint head mason with Alan Maynard on Sir John Thynne’s project to rebuild Longleat House after a disastrous fire in the 1660s. He had also designed Woolaton Hall for Sir Francis Willoughby, which was begun in 1580. 

From the lives of Kemp, Smythson and Lyminge it appears that the turn of the 16th century marked the separation of craft from design. Named architects entered history!  Robert Smythson had also been in charge of the conversion of Wardour Castle for Sir Mathew Arundell, Sir Francis Willoughby’s brother-in-law.  Old Wardour Castle is an unusual stone tower house, built in a single-phase from 1393, when King Richard II granted the 5th Lord Lovel a licence to fortify his house at Wardour. The four storey hexagonal tower with its central courtyard that contains a well is actually only lightly fortified with two square towers flanking the entrance.  In the 1570s, Sir Matthew Arundell employed Robert Smythson to decoratively remodel the castle, by then his luxurious home.  He also rebuilt the embattled curtain wall of the huge hexagonal outer court. In May 1643 during the Civil War, the castle was attacked by the Parliamentarian Sir Edward Hungerford and after a short siege the castle was surrendered to him. In December, Henry, 3rd Baron Arundell led a Royalist counter-siege, which lasted until March 1644 when the garrison once again surrendered. Badly damaged by mining and cannon fire, the castle ceased to be occupied. It was replaced by New Wardour Castle in 1776, when the bailey of the old castle was laid out as a landscaped pleasure garden, a peacetime leisure ajunct to the new house. The ruined tower and curtain wall of the outer bailey survives at Old Wardour together with the remains of 17th century stables, an elaborate grotto, a miniature stone circle and a summerhouse. Smythson’s episode at Old Wardour is an illustration of the hold of the past on the imagination of sixteenth-century English landowners.

Architecturally this preoccupation with the past is not only manifest in certain features of new houses built at this time, but in the ways in which existing houses of earlier date, dismantled abbeys and abandoned castles were adapted and altered. Conversion and conservation were almost as great passions of the age as the designing of new houses. Sir William Sharington’s work at the Augustinian nunnery of Lacock is an outstanding instance of the sixteenth-century conversion of a major medieval building. He bought the intact property for £750 at the dissolution of the monastic estate in 1540.  At the same time, as the new lord of the village, he appropriated the north-east chapel in the parish church, where his fine monument, a richly decorated tomb-chest, instantly catches the eye. His character showed the disquieting duality of that of so many men of his century. His undeniable feeling for architecture was allied to a deplorable lack of scruple. Sir William was Vice-Treasurer of the Bristol Mint and he took advantage of his office to finance his activities at Lacock from the State coinage. He was found out and deprived of his property in 1549. His wife managed to obtain his release and buy back the estate in the following year and work at Lacock was immediately resumed. Like several of his contemporaries and like some remarkable landowners of succeeding ages Sir William was himself responsible for the plan and the picturesque aspect of the converted abbey. He kept the entire cloister of the medieval structure with its lierne vault and lively bosses, together with the chapter-house and warming-room which lead off from it, none of which provided practical living space but were simply conversation pieces of antiquarian interest.  In the east range he introduced a gallery with Italianate pilasters. He skilfully harmonized the fifteenth-century gatehouse with an outer courtyard built of stone but with half-timbered dormers and a pretty half-timbered clock turret and cupola, and concentrated his modernising interest in classical form on the south front of his house. This new Lacock facade for the first time stresses the import of continental Renaissance elements, which was an inseparable part of those Elizabethan times. The proportions of the design and the prominent balustraded parapet masking, yet emphasising, the roofline – an essentially classical convention – are completely novel and untraditional. The oriel windows are Gothic Revival additions by the later owner of the abbey, Fox Talbot, the pioneer photographer.

Laycock Abbey

The sharp discord between the balustraded, horizontal front and the medieval survivals preserved within the building is beautifully resolved by the corner tower, upon which the whole domestic ecology of Sharington’s conversion hinges. This is polygonal, with a Renaissance parapet, and the fenestration of the top room is absolutely regular. Yet the stair turret is crowned by a pepperpot dome and below the parapet, beast heads snarl and grimace like medieval gargoyles. Inside the tower in the two top rooms and contemporary with them, are two extraordinary stone tables as revealing of Sharington’s character and historical interests as the building itself. They are polygonal like the tower. One is supported by fauns carrying buckets of fruit, the other by four herms and four niches enclosing allegorical figures. Constructed within the tower room, they are immovable and provide today’s visitors with a direct mental connection with the mind of the designer.  But the Gothic past is not forgotten: the Renaissance-derived niches are provided with rib-vaults. The tower was built as a ‘safe deposit box’ with a view.  It also performed the essential service of drawing attention to Sharington’s dominance of the village across his private parkland. We can generalise from Laycock, that in the case of existing structures, alterations and modifications made by Elizabethans throughout the land, almost without exception, the designs exaggerate and glamorise the character of the previous buildings as well as transforming them by the introduction of classical themes. For example, shortly after 1580, the rambling aspect of Haddon Hall, which strikes us as so essentially medieval, was intensified by the addition of a long gallery, oriels and castellated bays and by the glorious terraced garden, which calls attention to the sloping nature of the site. 

Haddon Hall  

A century later, in 1687, Newton published his “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, often called the ‘Principia’.  The Principia states Newton’s laws of motion, forming the foundation of physical science, which includes Newton’s law of universal gravitation, and a derivation of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.  It explained so many different things about the workings of the natural world with such precision, that this method became synonymous with physics, even as it is practiced almost over four centuries after its beginning.  In the same year, the architect William Talman was appointed by William Cavendish, later 1st Duke of Devonshire, to remodel the south-facing garden façade of Chatsworth House. For sheer splendour, the elevation was without precedent within the realms of country-house design. Conceived for Cavendish, an influential Whig nobleman on the eve of the Glorious Revolution, it reflected the Baroque magnificence of the contemporary royal residence at Greenwich, and the palaces of Paris and Rome. Talman’s professional pedigree was first recorded in compositions executed only during his thirties when he was working with Wren.   In the lives of Newton and Talman, two poles of culture and nature had come into equilibrium.  A mysterious and menacing universe had been transformed into a vast but comprehensible all embracing structure of mathematical precision and beautiful simplicity.  In this context, science and architecture are both attempts to recreate recognisable patterns of human emotional life.  They replicate and mirror aspects of the human condition by presenting conceptual cultural and environmental structures symbolised in numbers and objects. Science and art are come to common ground in a burst of human creativity.   

We can say that the lifetime period between 1670 and 1730 was a flash of light that expelled the murky world of medieval superstition, barbarism and ignorance.  These developments in science and architecture illuminated a contemporary sense of ‘living happy’ with which we are enveloped as soon as we step into the three-dimensional ‘pictures’ of buildings in 18th century landscape gardens.  Three centuries ago the owners were dominated by a noble zeal for building, for laying out gardens, planting avenues and improving their land and thereby achieving a deeply satisfying cultural equilibrium between family and environment. However, all of this costly building activity was backed by an increase in inequalities of wealth within the rural population who provided labour.  This division was at variance with the long-term aim of the property owner, which was to pass his family happiness associated with property and office to grandchildren yet to be conceived.  The other key words in relation to property were nature and the picturesque. In the vocabulary of eighteenth century landowners, nature stood for order proportion, authority, clarity and concord. Picturesque stood for the presence of something not inherent in the nature of the thing like ruggedness belonging to a mountain, or a deeper expression of it such as age or sorrow. This quest for the artistic qualities of people in nature and the picturesque is still evidently a powerful human cultural goal today.  It is expressed in membership of the National Trust, cosmopolitan events like the Chelsea Flower Show and the subject matter and style of pictures we like to hang on our walls and snap with our digital cameras. 

Cultural evolution of the country house 

‘The fact that buildings, particularly in pre-industrial cultures, do seem to develop through the testing and selection of discrete variations has added strength to the narrow analogy with evolution, but I would argue that buildings emerge in this sense from a host of intertwined mechanisms in which the forces of culture, and now media, are every bit as important as the narrow functional terms such as structural efficiency. In fact, looked at in this way, it seems remarkable that building forms or uses are at all stable when there are so many kinds of forces active’. William W. Braham (2002) ACSA Technology Conference  

The country house culture can be said to have begun in the 17th century when wealth began to accumulate widely beyond the aristocratic divide.  Mostly it derived from the perks of political office and the personal profits of entrepreneurship.   An example of the latter is the rise to social prominence of the Midlands Foley family. Richard Foley (1588-1657) was a prominent Midlands pioneer ironmaster.  His son Thomas took over his father’s business and made great profits from it in the 1650s and 1660s, which he used to buy estates. In the late 1660s, he founded a bluecoat school at Stourbridge known as Old Swinford Hospital, which he endowed in his will. On one of his properties in the village of Great Witley, in 1655 he erected two towers on the north side of the existing house and his grandson Thomas Foley, the 1st Lord Foley, added wings to enclose the entrance courtyard. This house became the ancestral home of the Foley family and the family continued to prosper. In 1735 the 2nd Lord Foley constructed a new parish church to the west of the courtyard, an undertaking begun by his father. The church was given a remarkable baroque interior in 1747 when he commissioned James Gibbs to incorporate paintings and furnishings acquired at the auction of the contents of Cannons House. This was the magnificent Middlesex home of the Duke of Chandos from where the artwork was shipped by canal to Great Witley.  During the second half of the 18th century the park at Great Witley was landscaped. This included relocating the village, which brought the lower orders, from which the first Thomas Foley had sprung, too close for comfort.  In about 1805 the 3rd lord employed John Nash to carry out a major reconstruction of the house, including the addition of huge ionic porticoes to the north and south fronts. The portico on the south front is probably the largest on any country house in England.   

The impecunious 4th Lord had to sell the estate in 1837 to the trustees of William, Lord Ward, who had inherited a great fortune from the coal and iron industries in the Black Country.  In the 1850s, Lord Ward (by then ennobled as the Earl of Dudley) engaged the architect Samuel Daukes, who had already altered his London house, Dudley House on Park Lane and the church at Great Witley, to remodel the house in Italianate style using ashlar stone cladding over the existing red brickwork. He also commissioned the leading garden designer William Andrews Nesfield to transform the gardens.  Much of his wealth was devoted to the restoration of Worcester Cathedral and as a major benefactor his magnificently decorated tomb is situated prominently in the retrochoir. 

These major investments in country living took place within a significant lifetime period between 1770 and 1830 during which profits from industrialism moulded the English country house culture.  Iron working in the 17^th century had marked the first phase of industrial profitability. The next century saw the introduction of power spinning in the Lancashire cotton industry through the invention of the Hargreaves jenny and the Arkwright water frame.  In 1732 a few Stockport manufacturers acquired a mill and started the mass production of silk.  Their impulse came from the purchase by Parliament of Lombe’s silk-throwing machinery, when the British patent expired.  Pirated from Italy, the machine had 26,586 wheels and 97,746 movements driven by a 24 ft diameter water wheel.  The industry expanded rapidly and by 1770 there were a dozen silk mills in Stockport alone.  Its wholesale adoption marks an epoch in the rise of the British factory system.  The local uptake of ideas and inventions was becoming commonplace and produced wealth beyond imagining for those landowners, bankers, lawyers and businessmen who, one way or another, became engaged in mass production. Invariably, one of their first intentions was to consolidate their social status by devoting a significant portion of their newly found wealth to purchase or embellish a country estate. 

Downton Castle

Between 1770 and 1830 the picturesque form of the country house was exemplified by Richard Payne Knight’s Downton Castle.  There is no doubt that Knight, who was born to a parson and his servant girl, owed his wealth to the fortunes of his grandfather, one of several wealthy pioneer ironmasters.   Downton Castle was a practical expression of the ideas of Knight, as an arbiter of the culture of the picturesque.  It led to a powerful architectural movement led by the building designer Anthony Salvin, who eventually produced the giant house of Harlaxton Manor for Gregory de Ligne Gregory in the 1830s; a drama of curves and pepperpot domes, oriels and strapwork and towers all in golden stone.   

Harlaxton Manor

John Gregory, who was Mayor in 1571 and again in 1586, established the Gregory family in the highest levels of civic culture of Nottingham during the 16th century. His son, William, represented the town in Parliament and gave tenements to the town for the benefit of the poor. The family has always been very intimately associated with the public life of the town until almost modern times.  The source of Gregory Gregory’s wealth to build Harlaxton probably came from the rising prosperity of the family’s business interests in the town.   Nottingham’s industrial wealth sprang from Heathcote and Leavers numerous patents for machinery, which collectively revolutionised the mass manufacture of lace at the beginning of the 19th century.  Mass production of lace brought the lace industry to the fore in Nottingham, over and above that of the earlier textile industry, framework knitting.  

Thoresby Hall was Anthony Salvin’s last great commission.  He was building the house in his inimical Gothic revival style when Lewis Henry Morgan was publishing ‘Ancient Society’ in 1877.  Salvin had pioneered this Tudor/Jacobean confection when a young man.  Every building he designed was based on his own research into authentic medieval examples.  His objective the cultural fusion of domestic or castellated architecture of the Middle Ages, the Tudors, and the Jacobeans, with design techniques of the picturesque.  He used the past as a basis for creation, not copyism, in order to satisfy the needs of the early Victorian upper classes for a house to display their property and office. Two other houses in this by now outdated style were completed at just this time, Elvetham Hall, by S.S. Teulon and Ettington Park by John Prichard. All three houses are now preserved as luxury hotels.   Coincident with the Thoresby build, two of Salvin’s pupils, Norman Shaw and William Eden Nesfield, were building Leyswood and Kinmel respectively in a new English vernacular style, which drew on simple design elements inherent in aspects of Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings, such as half-timbering and prominent gables.  Today, these features are still desirable features of mass-produced private housing. 

A vivid picture emerges from the professional lives of these architects of how people shape buildings and buildings shape people, as changing rules about the layout and uses of space have an impact on social relationships.  In this sense, we are dealing with the construction of new cultural niches, which mark the progress of rural social evolution. Landowners modify their own selective environment to such a degree that it changes the selection pressures acting on present and future generations as to how they will engage culturally with space.  

The cultural interaction of animals with space is a firm biological principle, which may be traced to Charles Darwin, who identified the variable dialects of bird songs as traditions of social learning.  To him they illustrated “that an instinctive tendency to acquire an art is not peculiar to man”.  Culture consists in behaviour patterns transmitted by imitation or tuition. Animals acquire behaviour complexes by the imitation of one another. Many instances of instruction of the young by animal parents have been authoritatively reported. For example, songs invented by certain birds and then acquired by other birds through association are conclusive evidence of the rudiments of culture in the strictest sense of the word. Domesticated animals acquire culture complexes from human beings.  The niche construction concept can be applied to all animals with culture.  In this respect it has been generalised as the ‘triple-inheritance model’ of cultural evolution because it builds on previous so-called dual-inheritance models, which cast genetic and social evolution as by and large independent evolutionary systems.  Through Morgan’s dictum that ‘property and office were the foundations upon which aristocracy planted itself’, the niche construction approach extends such models to human cultural ecology.  It incorporates the ecological domain rather than only addressing cultural traits learned by individuals. Genetic selection pressures are not discernable through the generations inhabiting different versions of the country house.  Nevertheless, in less opulent living spaces it is more obvious that our bodies are in constant dialogue with our surroundings. Interior space characterised by high mortality would favour those with genetic resistance to cold, smoke inhalation and diseases carried by insect vectors.  The lack of access to a domestic safe water supply, sanitation and hygiene is still the third most significant risk factor for poor health in developing countries with high mortality rates. Similarly, the risk of disease and death skyrockets when sick and hungry family members are crammed together in a leaky, smoke-filled hut.  This powerful genetic selection pressure of poor homelife, which is still with humanity in a global perspective, casts light on the situation in the village community surrounding Salvin’s Thoresby Hall in the 1870s.  In this respect, it is interesting to read General Sir Allan Shafto Adair’s comments on life in Flixton Hall, which Salvin had built for the Adair family in the mid 1840s.   ‘Flixton Hall was a vast, uncomfortable mausoleum still with no proper central heating…. It was bitterly cold there in winter that our children had to wear their overcoats when they went from room to room’. (A Guard’s General, 1986). 

Regarding living space, we can contrast the one-up, one down, norm for a 19^th century English labourer’s cottage with the multitude of interconnected rooms of the local lord, where, for example, it is known that in one country house, a cottage-spaced room was designated exclusively for ironing the daily newspapers! Paradoxically, we put this blatant social inequality on one side to follow architectural traces of the past in buildings designed to encase a family standard of living, which we still admire and willingly accept when we pay to be a guest of Thoresby Hall.  Despite this incongruity, by considering the cultural and biophysical interplay between our bodies and buildings, generalised insights can be gathered into the habitability of buildings and how they are occupied and understood spatially as cultural markers.  We take with us on this quest unrealistic ideas of habitation and comfort that we anticipate when responding to the external picturesque form of a building and associate with forthcoming interior experiences. Architecture, therefore provides a stage upon which everyday social life is enacted.  It thereby generates a “concept of history,” both individual and collective.  Our biological imperative is Georges Perec’s architectural mantra for stating the ordinary and everyday aspect of cultural evolution: ‘To live is to pass from one space to another’

Thoresby Hall

Educational framework As an educational proposition, cultural ecology deals with the interactions between ‘’place and ‘people’ to produce material and spiritual values for the cultural management of:  

• consumerism to reduce social inequalities;
• material resources to improve livelihoods;
• and biophysical resources to maintain environmental sustainability;

 and thereby ensure sustainable development of the natural environment, the built environment and the designed environment, which together with biological niches, categorise place. 

This proposition is set out in the following mindmap

 

The next mindmap develops the above concept of biological niches.  The proposition is that interactions between spaces and culture take place by organisms partitioning the environment to create biological niches.  Biological niches result from social and genetic selection, which are adaptations to environment that change human culture through processes of social inheritance and genetic inheritance.  Processes of social inheritance are family legacies of wealth and property and the adoption of status models of house life and architecture arising from historical scholarship and technological innovation.

Our ancestors of 4 Myr ago lived in a world as they found it and left it intact.  Since these primeval times it is through culture that we have irreversibly transformed our physical, biological, social and informational environments to define human ecology. Humans of one generation bequeath a constructed world to the next generation, who, on average, alter it further before transmitting it to their successors.  With the evolution of this new human ‘ecology of construction’, a transformation occurred in hominin morphology and life history. Humans are less sexually dimorphic than australopithecines, but we are larger, with relatively bigger brains. Our cortical regions, especially, have expanded and we pay the metabolic cost of these vital tissues and the long learning curve they promote.  But we are still part of nature in everything we do.

Mindmap of ‘ecology of construction’

Humankind now has to face managing the dynamics of being an indivisible part of nature from shopping to kissing.  This is the scope of cultural ecology, which developed at the interface between biology, geography and anthropology in the early 1970s.  It was a time when applied ecology emerged as a profession aimed at understanding how plants, animals, microbes and people coexist spatially. The aim was to discover how the environment can be constructed socially and organised technically and ethically for sustainable production of all species. This requires a major cultural change by adopting a progressive sense of space, where place is the intersection of sets of social relations over particular spaces and the connections they make to elsewhere.  

The first ecological models of the progressive relationship between environment and culture were native subsistence societies in Central America and Papua New Guinea.  They illustrated the shift from local cultural beliefs and practices, developed in a pristine environment, to encompass external economic relations.  New cultures were created based on commodity production with the adoption of wage labour and the pursuit of cash. Now that ancient cultures of self-sufficiency are extinct, all levels of education are increasingly focused on the ecology of construction expressed in the spatiality of human and other life forms.  Spatiality is the outcome of the act of dwelling in or living permanently in a place comprising the habitats of all living things.  Appropriate synomyms are inhabitancy, inhabitation; the hypernyms are occupancy, tenancy; and the hyponyms are cohabitation, living together.

 To illustrate the generality of this habitat dynamic I have taken two Western cultural entities, the East Anglian village of Flixton and the farm of Rhos Llawr Crwt in West Wales.  I came to know these places through a series of random geographical collisions in my work as an applied ecologist.  To me they present examples of what is called ‘third space’. These are spaces where two or more cultures have and are interacting with the production of place through a blending of historicality with sociality. They show that the study of ‘third space’ has to involve the perception of place, time, habitancy and ecological development as equal participants in the ecology of human existence.  Third space is produced by the incorporation of spatial awareness into social processes based on a deep cultural understanding that we are one among many species. It is a space for the imagination to link humanity across generational and temporal boundaries. 

Space is understood as ‘a creation’, ‘a site of production’ and ‘a site to be experienced and consumed’.  In order to define a space, first we locate objects; we relate them to other objects and make spatial patterns; then we see how the objects and relationships are established by social processes to become part of a local culture.  Finally, spaces become hybrids when it is realised that they are subject to contestation from different groups who want to redefine the meaning and boundaries. This blending occurs through socio-ecological management by people investing a place with social and spiritual power.  In so doing they produce a ‘cultural map of meaning’.  Such luminal islands of the spirit are used to make sense of the local environment in which natives and visitors are immersed practically and notionally. At any time, the primary factor changing a cultural map to deepen the spatiality of human life is the input of money beyond that which can be generated from the land itself.  In the simplest possible terms, money is anything that can be exchanged for goods and services.

We cannot help making each place we encounter distinctive.   Its part of our genetic endowment to embed ourselves in our immediate surroundings, often imposing idiosyncratic romantic and literary clichés on spaces with no claims to accuracy.   It is this evolved property of humankind that impels us endow every being and every place with a particular spirit, known from ancient times as a ‘genius loci’.  We cannot help giving beings and places a unique character.  These personal endowments, together with all other personal choices we make contribute to what has been defined as an individual’s ‘existential essence’.  Existential philosophy is interested in how human beings live, and make sense of where they live given the limitations of what it is to be human.

Flixton

US Airforce personnel* at Flixton Hall circa 1943

 

The above snapshot was taken by one of a group of off-duty American airmen stationed at an airfield constructed in the village of Flixton at the outbreak of World War 2.  They are posed in the deer park against a northern portion of the garden wall surrounding Flixton Hall.  In this position they are situated at one of the many social boundaries of the village, which gave everyone living in Flixton at that time, their human identity. Until the coming of the military, the population of Flixton, since records began, had remained stable at around 100 individuals.  The operation of the airfield increased its populace about thirty-fold.  The base was a temporary addition, which emptied after the War when the village returned to its pre-war size.  It was not until the 1960s that plans were imposed by the local authority to deliberately increase the housing stock to make space for incomers arising from an increase in the UK population. 

Sand and gravel to build the airfield was excavated from valley pastoral lands and this industrial activity continues to this day.  The current operations and the old abandoned flooded workings have created a new barren and derelict landscape of sand, gravel, flints and water along the northern boundary of the village with the River Waveney. Attempts are being made to beautify this legacy of wartime expediency through planting hedgerows.  These boundary features delineate a new space within the village but from which people are excluded. Although the airfield was vacated in 1956 the concrete runways and military infrastructure remained and attracted some new commercial investment and activities with jobs which employ people who live outside the village. 

The Second World War was therefore a turning point in compartmentation of the village.  Before the upheaval brought by the airfield. Flixton as a place was rooted and bounded by physical features of hill and water. It had a fixed set of economic and social characteristics that had equilibrated with the fortunes of the dominant landowning family, the Adairs.  As a third space its internal social skeleton was visible in the footpaths, roads, ponds, moats, woods, field boundaries, gates, farmsteads, and houses, all interwoven with the continuous metal fence of its large deer park.  The latter was a statement of the Adair’s economic and political power, which had lasted for over three hundred years.  During the Adair’s time and well before, Flixton’s social hierarchy was a steady state; a dynamic equilibrium where families came and went but the village was in thrall to a top-weighted manorial system.  At first the peak was represented by St Felix and his ecclesiastical mission to Christianise the pagan Angles, then there was the prioress of the local Augustinian nunnery.   The Tasburgh family acquired their power base by taking over the rights, privileges and properties of the nuns. 

In this long run of historicality the Adairs were the last to assume overlordship of the village.  Somewhere along this time line of sociality the common rights of the villagers were extinguished and tenant farms created, so shifting the third space duality of ‘observable’ to ‘hidden’, as the affairs of the village retreated into numerous spaces of private property.  This process was accelerated after the War by the breakup of the Adair’s vast estate to pay inheritance tax.  The neglected woods are currently the assets of distant bankers and the old deer pasture is a grass monoculture supporting an intensive dairy unit. Mechanisation of farming removed communal figures from the fields and the church lost its role as a social focus.  Now the parkland, which was one huge no-go area for the villagers, has been fragmented into numerous private places as barns and their outbuildings have been converted into middle-class homes. Society has become steadily more privatised with cars, computers, and shopping centres, so extinguishing the public component of village life.

 Flixton Hall today

Flixton Hall has a long history as a complex space given ideological meaning by male dominance in rural architectural form-making.  Since the 1950s it has been a forlorn ruin awaiting redevelopment.  Like all ruins, the few remains of carved stone, cracked floor tiles and cow-grazed curves of the ornamental garden are redolent of the dualities of past and present, growth and decay, myth and history.  They evoke deep emotional, philosophical, and literary responses against which modernity can be measured. In this respect, the Hall’s monumentality is key to Flixton as a third space because it immediately affects our notions of place, of self and the need to ensure ruins are kept ‘alive’.  Flixton Hall in the 18^th century was at the forefront of expressing the English country house concept of ‘the picturesque’.  Its ruination reminds us that reason kills everything, that place and space are both social constructs which are culturally mediated and intermeshed.    The exclusion of ‘felt life’, by which we evaluate the spirit of place, strips away mystery, religion and even art.  Nowhere is this more evident that in one of Flixton’s latest social constructs, its aviation museum.  This is a thriving enterprise with free entry, supported by volunteers who come regularly from far and wide.  The annual visitor numbers are in the tens of thousands.  It is both a technical history of aviation and a memorial to those who flew the bombing missions from East Anglia’s military bases in World War 2.  To understand Flixton’s symbolic role in this conflict one has to walk from the museum in the valley to a flat treeless hilltop above the village; to a luminal island of the spirit where the old runways are lost to view each year in acres of vigorous crops of cereals.  Walking allows new spaces to be discovered, which are physical, in this case a concrete runway, and which are also epistemological, an understanding of the runway and the personal meaning it holds. A narrative with transcendental overtones emerges that might not have been uncovered in a stationary investigation. It is from the undistinguished hill top, in the space of three years, that hundreds of men took to the air with their deadly cargoes never to return.  This spot becomes a third space and is yet another reminder that we unthinkingly accept the premise that because of globalisation, all places are becoming the same, rather than assuming that all places are different.  

Rhos Llawr Cwrt 

Rhos Llawr Cwrt can be accurately described as an absolute distinct physical reality. Its topography can be traced back ten thousand years or more to when the Welsh ice sheet melted revealing the outcomes of climate change in a complex surface of permafrost depressions and moraine ridges. As a geographical space it consists of 25 ha of  wet, unimproved grassland, which goes under the generic name of ‘rhos pastures’.  This habitat is the outcome of a regional combination of high rainfall, thin soils, glacial topography and history of subsistence livestock-farming and was once abundant in the Ceredigion hills of West Wales. As the crow flies, the reserve is only about 10km from Cardigan Bay. The land rises steeply from the sea, and the dough-like folds of the hills, cut by the occasional ice-gouged valley, form an amphitheatre to the north and west.. The land which rises at the south-western end of the reserve is now bright green with improved grass swards, but it once belonged to the farm as seminatural rhos pasture.  

Rhos pasture below improved hill grazing

The reserve was singled out as a special place when it was notified as an SSSI in 1979 and declared a National Nature Reserve in 1986, Wales’ only grassland ecological treasure. Owned and managed by the Countryside Council for Wales, it is also the site of one of the most exciting experiments in habitat restoration in Wales, which has the aim of converting the surrounding 25 ha of semi-improved rushy grassland back to rhos pasture. Because of its carefully researched action plan the site is used widely for training conservation managers. It is a candidate Special Area of Conservation, designated under the EU Habitats Directive for its populations of Marsh Fritillary and Slender Green Feather-moss.  At the time of its discovery by a roving scientist it was a rare wildlife habitat, part of a 230 acre farm called Llawrcwrt.  Since 1983 it has been subjected to scientific study.  Now, with its huge population of butterflies Rhos Llawr Cwrt is a small ecological island and a superlative example of the biodiversity that subsistence farmers could produce without actually knowing it! The nature reserve, with its tracts of butterfly- and flower-rich wet meadows, and the evidence of glacial activity, feels timeless and ancient. With foreground of ancient banks and woods, the approaches to Llawrcwrt Farm yield only glimpses of the humps and bumps of the glacial landscape through which you are passing. Arrival at the farm itself is a moment to savour. Ancient stone built buildings, straddle a small rise in the valley floor.  This is where two cultures, the old self-sufficent family hill farm and the modern government-backed national conservation agency; the farmers and the applied ecologists, meet and blend.  History and natural history are deeply entwined at Rhos Llawr Cwrt. However, one glance at the surrounding hills destroys this sense of an unchanged landscape. They are bright green, gashed with plough lines and fences of intensive pastoral farming. The space of Rhos Llawr Cwrt reserve probes the hill in a tongue of textured browns and greens, an indication of what the surrounding hills would once have been like.   In theory, an understanding of ecology can help the historian to read the management history of a site like the pages of a book. Similarly, knowledge of a site’s management history can explain its ecology. The theory usually breaks down in practice, partly from a lack of information, and the need for interdisciplinary skills that can put history and ecology together, but also because the 20th century has so comprehensively torn and scribbled all over the pages of ecological information which plant and animal communities represent.   First mentioned in 1214 in a charter granted to the Cistercian monks of Whitland by King John, Llawrcwrt combines the word ‘court’, which was often attached to monastic lands, and ‘Llawr’, meaning ‘floor’, or in this case the flat valley bottom. Although the fortunes of the monks declined, the foundations of the 13th century farm economy, based on sheep and cattle, have remained to this day. The human population was almost completely dependent on farming, and on the natural resources available to them in the immediate area. Brown trout  and even the odd Atlantic salmon could be caught in the streams; wood provided furniture, fuel and footwear (clog-making was an important local industry); and rushes were gathered for bedding, to make ropes and for rush lights. Until the 19th century, much of the Clettwr valley and its surrounding hills was unenclosed. The reserve occupies what was originally the large ‘unenclosed’ part of the farm, although even this has been split into smaller compartments in recent times.  The pattern of farms and smallholdings, dotted along and above the valley and circled by small fields, has not changed all that much. However, the boundaries and methods of farming adapted to them have completely changed.  The first Ordnance Survey map of 1834 shows a great sweep of land to the east and west of the Clettwr valley free from roads, with only farm tracks for access. The track to Llawrcwrt also gave access to two further farms. These and other neighbouring farms appear on the 1844 tithe map in the midst of clusters of small, inbye fields, the boundaries of which have long since disappeared. These were mostly on gravel out-washes or had field drains, so they could be ploughed to grow ‘black oats’, barley and potatoes, or they were cut for hay or kept for lambing and calving. Surrounding these farms were large, unfenced areas, with tapers of land connecting these ‘wastes’ with the farms. These areas are now all fenced, drained and ploughed. Level land was ‘improved’ first, but much of the steeper, hilly land was not ploughed until as recently as the 1970s. Local people well remember the heathery hills, coconut-scented with the bright yellow blooms of gorse. Unless you take an imaginative leap back in time, and capture some sense of what life was like on farms like Llawrcwrt, it is hard to appreciate why the reserve is as it is. There were many people living off the land a century or more ago. Peat-cutting shaped the reserve in a direct, physical way. It continued on a part of the reserve known as Gors Las, or the ‘green bog’, as late as 1950. The peat here is many feet thick. Dragonflies circle the peaty pools where it was last cut, and here Crowberry is at the most southern edge of its range in Wales, a natural biological monitor of climate change.  The land around Llawrcwrt represents the last vestige of this ancient farming pattern. Most of the present field boundaries can be seen on the 1844 tithe map and also on the plan prepared for the sale of Llawrcwrt in 1875, when the farm and 285 acres were sold as one lot. The 1881 census shows 21 people living at the farm or other cottages, mostly described as labourers or farm servants.  

Historically, rhos pastures were grazed by livestock, and this has been central to conserving the habitat that we value today. Conservation management at Rhos Llawr Cwrt is based on a controlled grazing regime using cattle during the spring and summer. The grazing programme is designed to maintain the marshy grassland, wet-heath, neutral-grassland and mire communities that are present as a fine-scale mosaic over the majority of the site; this also maintains the habitat in the condition required by the Marsh Fritillary butterfly. The conservation and the livestock production objectives for vegetation structure are the same.  The target is best described as a patchwork of tall, often tussocky, grasses and rushes with a moderate amount of litter and areas of short turf with little or no litter. The foodplant of the butterfly, Devil’s-bit Scabious, will thrive in these conditions, in its prostrate form. The stock keeper does not have to monitor the visual outcome by counting species or measuring the average gap between tussocks; the pattern of vegetation either looks right or wrong.  Stocking rates to achieve this structure are normally within the recommended range of 0.3-0.5 livestock units per ha per annum, but it is sometimes necessary to raise or lower the level of grazing. The main reason for this dynamic is variation in the weather. A warm, wet summer will result in greater biomass production in the sward, necessitating higher stocking rates to achieve the required structure. The reverse is, of course, true for a cold, dry summer.  The stock keeper is an artist and the glacial topography of Rhos Lawr Cwrt is his studio. Currently, the majority of the grazing stock are Welsh Black cattle belonging to an adjacent farm.   The availability of farm-owned stock for grazing on what is in agricultural terms ‘poor-quality’ grassland is uncertain in the long term.    Stocking rates used on the reserve are too low to prevent scrub development, particularly of Common Gorse Ulex europaeus and Grey Willow Salix cinerea.  These are controlled by periodic cutting and use of selective herbicides. This raises the paradox of livestock management to maintain and extend the biodiversity of rhos pasture in that it partially follows the chemical path of extensive farming.  Nevertheless, walking through Rhos Lawr Crwt is to make contact with a living textured and coloured space that has not changed in centuries.

Like viewing an abstract work of art or a ruined monument the visual experience involves a spatial emotion of a ‘felt life’.  In this context, it is profitable to use synonyms with subjective attributes to describe the experience of depth as a penetration into layers of things more distant.  When we wish to express the experience of intensity of feeling for instance, we say ‘depth of feeling’ or ‘penetration into knowledge’ or ‘having a revelation’.  The mind is bringing a mental state of contemplation out of the depths of a partially seen phenomenon into a frontal understanding. The rhos pasture thus becomes a portrait of an idea. In contemporary parlance people increasingly speak of spirituality rather than religion when trying to express what moves them most deeply; and many consider the two to be distinctly different. Most of the characteristics associated with religion, however, are found whether people consider themselves spiritual or religious. Therefore, there is little analytical reason to assume these are different kinds of social phenomena. The two ways of forming a sense of  place can certainly come together when viewing rhos pasture.  It is important, however, to understand what most see the distinction to entail, especially because the term spirituality is more often than the term religion associated with nature and nature-loving.  Spirituality is often thought to be about personal growth and gaining a proper understanding of one’s place in the cosmos, and to be intertwined with environmentalist concern and action.  This contrasts markedly with the world’s predominant religions, which are generally concerned with escaping this world or obtaining divine rescue from it to enter a space that is out of this world. At Lawrcwrt the outcome resulting from a blending of management with ecology is raised to the same cultural level of intensity and emotion as music and poetry.   Walking through Flixton or Rhos Lawr Cwrt at the interface of ecology and culture we can let the unseen and the external govern our enthusiasm for the phenomenal and passing.  This perspective crosses continents and ethnicity.  The Indian poet and dramatist Rabindranath Tagore expressed this awareness of another way of thinking when raw logic fails in a word picture of his place in the streaming cosmic life process of his Bengali homeland.   

“No one realises that in his blood the waves of thy sea dance, the forest-restlessness trembles.  This thought fills my mind today, that I have come, from age to age dropping silently from form to form, from life to life.  I have come, using up in gift after gift, in song after song, whatever my hand has gained in night and morning”.

So we go our ways, drawn

“to the great stream, from the tumult of the past which lies behind, to the bottomless dark, to the shoreless light!

 Without this transcendent mode of cultural ecology we shall find ourselves unable sooner or later to make any sense of the full range of human self-awareness.  This was an important standpoint of the author, John Steinbeck.   To see nature with great clarity was important to Steinbeck. To see beyond the physical to an underlying cultural pattern and larger significance was equally essential. He wrote this in 1948: “There are good things to see in the tidepools and there are exciting and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing”. (“Preface ,Between Pacific Tides) 

Steinbeck, in Sea of Cortez, asks his readers to shift perspective because Nature yields more than simple beauty.

 “[A] man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world, if he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL”.  

References and Acknowledgements

 *Men of Ordnance Section of the 705^th Squadron, 446^th Bomb Group.  Left to right: top row – Phil Schenker, Fred Mahnken, Leonard Mayer; bottom row Vincent DeAngeles, Alex Cote (Suffolk RO)

Reserve Focus: Rhos LLawr Cwrt (2002) James Robertson & David Wheeler, British Wildlife 13, 171-176

www.nineparishes.wikispaces.com

Google maps

Flixton: http://www.communitywalk.com/flixton/map/524506

Rhos Llawr Cwrt: http://www.communitywalk.com/map/index/533452

Lying there on the drifted sand, under the white stars, I thought about how the vision of wildness with which I had begun my journeys -inhuman, northern, remote – was starting to crumble from contact with the ground itself. No such chaste land exists in Britain or Ireland, and no such myth of purity can hold. Thousands of years of human living and dying have destroyed the possibility of the pristine wild. Every islet and mountain-top, every secret valley or woodland, has been visited, dwelled in, worked, or marked at some point in the past five millennia. The human and the wild cannot be partitioned.  Robert McFarlane, 2007  

An Anglo Indian Perspective 

The rise of the English novel during the 18th century coincided with a growing pride in the landscape of Britain. As novels portrayed rural society in its environment, so maps and topographical views delineated the grandeur of Nature and the man-made elegance of new urban streets and squares. Town and country often provide the travelling backdrop to novels and poems, sometimes exerting such a strong presence they seem to become players in the plot.  Poets in particular were inclined to idealize nature, and their treatment of it in poetry was often symbolic and literary.  Keats’ nightingale was a creature of the imagination, Greek myth, and poetic tradition, not of observation.  From this point of view, the question is to what extent a person’s response to landscape is conditioned by education or environment.  This was an issue explored by Edward Thompson writing about the Europeanised Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore who spent fourteen months in England at the age of sixteen, staying in Brighton and London. Thompson contrasted the impact of the two environments of England and India as follows. 

“His father brought him for a short stay at Bolpur. This Bengal is a dry uplifted country. The villages are scattered, and there are great spaces of jungle. The landscape of the jungle is of quiet loveliness, such as wins a man slowly yet for ever. At first sight it is disappointing. There are few great trees, and absolutely nothing of the savage luxuriance of a Burmese rattan-chained sky-towering forest or of the ever-climbing dripping might of Himalayan woods; the one good timber tree, the sal, is polled and cut away by the people for fuel. The mass of the jungle is a shrub, rarely ten feet high, called kurchi; bright green, with milky juice and sweet white flowers. Intermixed with this are thorns; zizyphst and pink-blossomed mimosas. The soil is poor and hard. Where there is a tank, you have a tall simul (silk-cotton tree), lifting in spring a scarlet head of trumpet-shaped flowers; or a wild mango. Often the soil cracks into nullas, fringed with crackling zizyph, the wild plum, or crowded with palas trees. These last, and simul, furnish in spring the only masses of wild flowers. Palas flowers before the leaves come; twisted ungainly trees, holding up walls of leguminous, red flowers, which the Emperor Jahangir thought ‘so beautiful that one cannot take one’s eyes off them’. After these, before the spring quite shrivels in the summer heats, nim and sal blossom; but their flowers, though exquisitely scented, make no show, being pale green-white and very small. 

But the jungle has a peaceful charm, which even the great forests cannot surpass. At evening, seek out one of the rare groves of tall trees-possibly preserved as a sacred grove, and with multitudes of crude clay horses round their bases, that the thakur may ride abroad-or plunge deep into the whispering wilderness. Wait as the sun sinks, as the leaves awaken. Through the trees you see the evening quietness touching all life. You are not alone, for many scores of eyes are watching you; but of them you catch no glimpse, unless a jackal slinks by or a tiny flock of screaming parrots races overhead. In the distance, the cattle are coming back to the village, the buffaloes are lazily and unwillingly climbing out of the tank. It is ‘cow-dust,the Greek ox-loosing time’. 

Loken Palit’-told me that what he missed, on return from England to India, was our profusion; our hedges crammed with shining beauty, our glades and meadows ; after blackthorn, the ponds netted with crowfoot, the water-violets and kingcups and lady-smocks, the riot of gorse and may and wild rose, avenues of chestnut, the undergrowth of stitchworts, the sheets of primroses, violets, anemones, cowslips and bluebells ; and, when summer is ending, heaths and heather and bramble-roses pleached deep’. Rabindranath himself has spoken to me of this variety in landscape, and also of the beauty of autumn foliage in England”. 

With a mindset in the English countryside, Tagore was influenced to express his feelings about landscape by the poetry of Keats.  Keats is one of the greatest admirers of the sensuality of nature. In his poetry, we come across exquisitely beautiful descriptions of the wonder, sights and senses of nature. He looks with child-like delight at the small elements of English landscape and his whole being is thrilled by what he sees and hears. Everything in the outdoors is for him full of wonder and mystery – the rising sun, the moving cloud, the growing bud and the swimming fish. 

However, in the slow changing Ganges Valley there is a lack of variety that does not speak to English minds.  At the age of 30, Tagore undertook the management of his father’s country estates in the Bengal Ganges landscape, a place of vast flow-moving rivers, great reed beds and mud-banks where the population is almost amphibious. Plying his houseboat up and down the broad reaches of a tributary of the great mother river, living among the rural poor, he grew acutely sensitive to their hardships in the face of an uncompromising nature of their natural surroundings.  

“Why is there such a deep note of mourning in the fields, ghats, sky and sunshine of our country? I think perhaps the reason is that nature is constantly before our eyes. The wide open sky, flat and endless land, shimmering sunshine-and in the midst of this men come and go, crossing to and fro like a ferryboat. The little noises that they make, the ups and downs of their happy or sad efforts, seem in the context of this endlessly reaching, huge, aloof nature so small, so fleeting, so futile and full of suffering. We feel in nature’s effortless stillness and serenity a vast, beautiful, undistorted generous peace; and compared to that, such an agonised, tormented, petty, unstable lack of peace inside ourselves, that when we look at the distant blue line of the shady woods on the river bank, we are strangely unsettled.”  

For many, the world of matter and nature, conceived as a created whole, is the best, clearest and most universal evidence for the knowledge of creation. In India, Tagore wrote, “circumstances almost compel us to learn English, and this lucky accident has given us the opportunity of access into the richest of all poetical literatures of the world.”  He made an appraisal of Western culture in an open-minded way in order to see what uses could be made of it in a Bengali environment. 

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!

Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?

Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.

He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.  

Landscape and culture 

The vastness of the Ganges river system is resilient to human intervention.  But how a society shapes its physical environment is a fundamental reflection of its culture.  In this respect Tagore’s writings remind us that now, most of Earth’s terrestrial surface is a patchwork of cultural landscapes and as such has to be managed as a human resource according to the principles that define human cultural ecology. Landscape comprises the visible features of a field of view.  These include the physical elements of landforms, water bodies such as rivers, lakes and the sea, living elements of land-cover, particularly the indigenous vegetation, human elements expressed in land uses, buildings and infrastructures, together with the visible impact of climatic elements such as sun, wind and rain. The key ecological parameters which determine the landscape character of a particular view are the number of its human inhabitants, their demands on the local natural resources and the amount of resources that have to be imported, over and above local productivity, to sustain the population. At a global level, the conservatively calculated Ecological Footprint Indicator suggests that the Earth can sustain about 2.1 billion high-income individuals (one third of the present population) or 6.2 billion middle-income individuals or 13.6 billion low-income individuals.  This assumes all of Earth’s biocapacity is used for humans. No matter what the size of the population, an increasingly important feature of human well-being is the quality of the landscape and its definition within an area small enough to give people a feeling of belonging to a ‘neighbourhood’. 

Landscape’ as neighbourhood, defines the human visual response to a locality in terms of its physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia.  It reflects the living synthesis of people and place vital to local identity. Through their perceived character and quality landscapes help define the self-image of individuals and groups.  It is this local sense of place that differentiates an area from other areas and is the dynamic backdrop to people’s lives. 

Idiosyncratic responses to places are one of the most common human emotional experiences.  However, the complex of biological, cultural and psychological reasons that shape our feelings toward landscape are rarely explored to establish why, as individuals, we like or dislike particular scenes.  Historically, landscape quality assessment has been approached on the basis of two contrasting models.  One regards quality as inherent in the physical landscape. The other regards quality as a product of the mind; the eye of the beholder. These are termed, respectively, the objectivist and subjectivist models.  

All measures of quality rest on the definition of beauty. Such definitions are local cultural conventions resulting from the pattern-seeking/forming behaviours which have evolved in human primates to remember and understand the environment. They involve making sense of repetitive elements received through eyes and ears.  In music, they are repeated sequences of notes and in environmental scenes are taken in as repeated patterns of form.  Both responses have to be within the limitations in what the human brain can handle. To fully appreciate these rhythms in music we have to move from hearing them to listening to them.  In the environment we have to move from seeing them to visualising them.  Through listening and visualising we gain emotional and spiritual understanding.   

These beauty-paradigms underlie surveys of the physical landscape and its human structures.  Studies of observer preferences are expressed in generally agreed designations, such as ‘degraded landscapes’, ‘world heritage sites’, ‘wilderness’, ‘nature reserves’ and ‘areas of outstanding natural beauty’. 

Examination of these paradigms through the approaches taken by philosophers from Plato to modern times demonstrates their ubiquity underlying a person’s perception of his/her surroundings. Until recent centuries, the objectivist paradigm provided philosophers with the basis for understanding beauty, including landscape beauty. However, Locke, Hume, Burke and particularly Immanuel Kant identified beauty as lying in the eyes of the beholder rather than in the intrinsic properties of the object. Most philosophers over recent centuries have adopted the subjectivist view of aesthetics in researching landscape beauty. As Simon Schama puts it in his monumental Landscape and Memory, “it is culture, convention and cognition…that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty”. Beauty in this context seems to be best defined as the quality of something that has been given a new meaning, which transcends its primary form or purpose. 

Regarding the subjectivist view, Steven C. Bourassa has attempted to resolve the conflict between biological and cultural explanations of aesthetic behaviour by combining the biological, cultural, and personal bases for aesthetics in a comprehensive paradigm. This paradigm is based on Vygotsky’s developmental approach to understanding the human mind and its behavioural expressions. Vygotsky identifies three fundamental processes of development: phylogenesis (biological evolution), sociogenesis (cultural history), and ontogenesis (individual development). These in turn correspond to three modes of aesthetic experience: biological, cultural, and personal. Bourassa concludes that each mode has distinct qualities that justify its separate inclusion within a subjectivist paradigm of environmental aesthetics.   

Environmental aesthetics was comprehensively developed in the second half of the twentieth century. However, it has roots in earlier 18th century traditions concerning the aesthetic experience of nature together with notions such as the ‘sublime’ and the ‘picturesque’ qualities of scenery.  It led to landscape gardening/design as a profession.  This movement reached a climax at the end of that century when its practical objectives were mostly defined through the philosophy of art.  

From the twentieth century, development of environmental aesthetics virtually began anew. On the one hand, the landscape gardening movement was strongly influenced by the focus on aesthetics of art.  But it was also bound up with growing public concern for the aesthetic quality of the real green environment. Both factors helped, first, to broaden the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of earlier picture-aesthetics, particularly regarding public concern for the state of the environment.  The latter was not simply about preserving natural scenery, but also about the aesthetic condition of the everyday human environment and the practical needs to preserve outstanding natural beauty and beautify degraded landscapes. Thereby, the central modernist philosophical issue of producing a comprehensive ‘environmental aesthetics’ was the contrast between the quality of the everyday environment and the cannon of beauty expressed in landscape paintings.  Beauty in landscape painting was for the most part associated with the depiction of a rural environment characterised by a great richness of elements, which were small, natural, or embedded in nature.  They were perceived by people as a comprehensive whole.  Urban dwellers who compare today’s rural environment with that of pre-modern and early modern time, see that their surroundings have not only lost their wealth of elements but also their sense of unity which gave form to that variety.   

This loss is not only perceived visually when travelling or on holiday, but also through the contemplation of maps, which play a critical role in supporting the visualisation of landscape.  Indeed, in recent years it has become widely recognized that the visualisation of aesthetic information is critical in the domain of cartography, where there has been a long-standing interest in issues of communication effectiveness. In a practical sense, by incorporating cartographic aesthetics with landscape aesthetics, the cartographic design process can be strengthened and effective tourist maps can be generated. At this cultural junction of environment with mapping, asethetic visualisation of the countryside may be described as a mental process in the minds of urban dwellers, facilitated by maps. Cartography also alerts us to beauty in the urban setting, where it is difficult to gain an overview from street level.

With regards urbanisation, by the end of the nineteenth century the functional and aesthetic failings of the large-sized industrial city had been recognised.  In the United States, for instance, the ‘City Beautiful Movement’ from the early-1890s until the 1920s sought to create modern beauty in the urban environment, frequently through the use of architectural principles like proportion, symmetry and scale in large-sized Classically-styled buildings and civic center schemes. 

Although these projects were driven by the injection into the planning process of 18th century aesthetics of grassy spaces, tree-line avenues and classical architecture, it is now evident that there is a significant health benefit associated with urban beautification.  For example, city dwellers living near parks are healthier and suffer fewer bouts of depression.  When socio-economic background is taken into account it is found that this effect of green surroundings is greatest for people with low levels of education and income. One recent study showed that in urban zones where 90 per cent of the area is green space the incidence of anxiety disorders or depression in this group was 18 people per thousand. In areas with only 10 per cent greenery the incidence was 26 per thousand. 

These beauty paradigms may be assemble as a mindmap, which encompasses human evolution in relation to the use of landscape as a resource.  This map is a subset of cultural ecology and may be used to make analytical bridges between the key topics.   

Mindmap of landscape and culture 

http://cercles.com/n19/morley.pdf 

http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVII/congress/4_pdf/104.pdf 

http://managing-natural-beauty.wikispaces.com/