The rationales we employ
on behalf of anything, including nature conservation, reflect
our attitudes and values. Our attitudes and notions toward and valuation of those
places classed as heritage sites are revealed in the many traditional arguments used
to defend those places. Moreover, our attitudes and values profoundly affect the
manner in which we treat something.
Many claim that heritage
sites are important to maintain because they provide
inspiration for the artistically and intellectually inclined. In the process, these
designated areas add to and help shape culture, and are the inspiration for painters,
photographers, writers and musicians find their inspiration.
They also serve to
inspire those in the intellectual arts as well. Philosophers, for
example–especially environmental philosophers–who seek a wildness experience to
be a contemplative catalyst or cognitive genesis for the really big questions of
philosophy: What is the meaning of the universe where we all came from; what we
are all doing here; where we are going; what the character of our existence is, and
what our moral place in the world is. Heritage sites are the only muses for art, but
rather that they are excellent and unique ones, and that to lose any such inspirational
kindling would be tragic.
One of the central
themes of conservationists is to be a friend of the planet and to
live at peace with ecosystems. The friendship concept is embodied in 'Friends of the
Earth', the largest international network of environmental groups in the world,
represented in 68 countries. Peace with ecosystems is at the heart of Greenpeace.
a non-profit organisation, with a presence in 40 countries across Europe, the
Americas, Asia and the Pacific. As a global organisation, Greenpeace focuses on the
the most crucial worldwide threats to our planet's biodiversity and environment.
At a local level, where
most people interact with nature, a spiritual view of the local
environment emerges from trying to read and express various signs of the workings
of nature, in relation to our position in the grand scheme of things. For example, the
Koran has much to say about 'signs' which, through the imagination, point to the
deeper significance of everyday life.
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"In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and
day; in
the ships that sail the ocean with cargoes beneficial to man; in the water which God
sends down from the sky and with which He revives the earth after its death,
dispersing over it all manner of beasts; in the disposal of the winds, and in the clouds
that are driven between earth and sky; surely there are signs for rational men." (The
Koran 2:163)
- In a similar set of holistic notions,
St Francis of Assisi praised God "for our sister,
Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers", and
ended with praise to God "for our Sister, the death of the body." Neighbourliness on
the part of a stranger is signed, as an important element in the evolved pattern of
human behaviour, in the parable of the good Samaritan. A sunset seen above an
urban skyline can be both a scientific and a unifying spiritual experience.
Religious ideas, about
origins and values in nature cemented families in the past, but
are now lost or diluted within minority subcultures, unattached to the major world
religions, who are left to develop their place in an idiosyncratic cosmology.
Moral and spiritual
teaching has always relied heavily on visual imagery in the
formation and realisation of a society's attitudes, values, and beliefs, and their
transmission, as signs of what it is to be human, from one generation to the next. An
experimental meditation is being developed based on images of the natural world
which the painter Graham Sutherland used to compose his Great Tapestry at
Coventry.
Examples may be gathered
through local appraisals of the influential role played by
the visual arts and architecture in the formation and maintenance of religious and
spiritual values in all societies since prehistoric times. However, there is no generally
accepted educational framework to use neighbourhood notions about nature to link
communities and environment to a larger scheme of spiritual values. In particular,
classroom examples are needed which highlight spiritual reasons for promoting a
particular course of local development.
Spiritual appraisals
take a world view that is rooted in the imagination and passes
beyond the limits of ordinary life. They start from the postulate that the material
cosmos in some way expresses or manifests a deeper spiritual reality, expressed
through human consciousness.
Humanists such as Julian
Huxley have seen an apparent progress in cosmic
evolution towards increasing consciousness and control. That is to say, we are part
of a development from the unconscious simplicity of the Big Bang to the conscious,
diverse and complex carbon-based life-forms of the planet earth. Our unknown future
carries the possibility of understanding and controlling the cosmos itself.
Attempts to provide
biological explanations of consciousness are far from
convincing, and are certainly not established by scientific study. The ultimate
personal expressions of consciousness are through the arts. The author Henry Rider
Haggard, for example, through his fertile imagination, kept returning to the possibility
that the material universe does express a spiritual reality. The purpose of cosmic
evolution may be the emergence of some form of conscious relationship between
that spiritual reality and entities in the material cosmos.
Science is not irreligious.
It does not entail that there is no spiritual reality, no God,
and no purpose in the cosmos. Many of the greatest scientists were strongly
motivated by their religious beliefs. The sort of highly ordered and emergent universe
that science discloses is compatible with, and almost overwhelmingly suggests, the
existence of a creator of enormous wisdom and power. Religious myths depict the
way in which that reality makes itself known in the material universe. Religious rituals
establish appropriate responses to that reality. Religious symbols express its
fundamental character.
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Some religious thinkers take the view that modern science can help to clear away
some elements of literalism, ignorance and myopia which still disfigure religion by
providing a new and better understanding of the material universe. Spiritual notions
extend the this scientific world view through ideas which define a realm of spirit, from
which the material cosmos emerges, and to which it will return. Religion has an
irreplaceable role to play in relating human life to that wider spiritual context. Our age
offers the possibility of relating the scientific and religious perspectives in a mutually
enriching way.
Taking Christianity
as an example, from the beginning it attempted to present a
cosmic vision of a spiritually ordered universe, whose purpose would be somehow
completed by a future full knowledge and love of the creator.
The myths of Christianity
show:-
The cosmic vision of
the first Christians was that the spirit who was the creator of
the cosmos had acted in human history to initiate the liberation of human lives from
pride and egoism, and their union with the divine essence of self giving. In other
words, we are part of the whole cosmic process from the Big Bang, and have
emerged as conscious agents which can consciously unite the material to God, its
spiritual source and goal.
-
The cosmos and all life in it, will eventually cease to exist. But the Christian view
has
always been that the fulfillment of God's purpose lies beyond this space-time, even
though it must be approached through it. God's goal for the cosmos is that everyone
who has ever lived will have the opportunity to share in a trans-historical knowledge
and love of God in a 'new creation'. From a Christian viewpoint, this Cosmos is the
place where souls emerge in the material and temporal realm. But they were always
intended to find their fulfillment in the eternal realm, which is the spiritual reality of
God.
