These web pages come
from many years of cross-curricular inputs from
teachers and students who have contributed to developing the Schools in
Communities Agenda 21 network, now based in the Welsh National Museum
and Galleries at Cardiff. The pages are a provisional attempt to produce an
educational framework for project work in the environment that entails making
value judgments about the management of nature where there is conflict
between ecosystems and economic development. These values are commonly
known as 'non-consumptive values'. Non consumptive values are intangible and
can be highly personal and subjective. There may be conflicts of value
perceptions which emerge from notions about nature where the imagination
works on features of the environment to produce works of literature, art and
religion that express human relatedness to nature. Nevertheless, imagination in
place is a powerful drive for conservation management where nature under
threat is invariably part of a multivalue system.
The material is presented
as a provisional anthology within a topic outliner
where the top level of interaction includes nine windows. The first opens up a
point of view that a new educational framework is required that places world
development alongside conservation management. This dual arrangement of
ideas about nature is necessary to encourage the search for shared values in
confrontations where self interest, on one side or another, is seen as a supreme
virtue. Cultural ecology is presented as a workable body of knowledge with
which to embrace human relatedness to the rest of nature (organicism)
alongside scientific authority and economic benefit.
The remaining eight
windows provide views of the targets of conservation
management in relation to the values attached to them by human observers.
These views of the relationships between people and nature encompass the
actual targets (ecosystems, landscapes and historical monuments of
people/nature interactions) and the values attached to them by people, through
art, wayfaring, folk ideas about the cosmos, places for deep-thought, and
philosophical views of nature. All involve attachments of imagination to places
are important factors bearing upon the long-term achievement of a people-
nature equilibrium. The latter is presented as a cultural climax reached by the
renewal and sustenance of a lost intimacy between people and other living
things.
These windows reveal
various routes to a life-revering ethic within a realm of
ideas that bind us to Henri David Thoreau's 'maimed and imperfect nature' as if
we are a part of it. The problem is that when the forces of industrialism were
applied to design a more perfect, ideal, nature, this link was severed. The
American, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, was a vociferous advocate of
humankind bettering itself by casting adrift from 'the despotism of the senses'.
This entailed obtaining privileges for the welfare of people without any
obligations to wildlife. However, it is becoming clear, year by year, that to fulfill
humankind's global project for long-term economic prosperity requires firming
up the spiritual in what Emerson described as the exercise of 'spiritual lordship
of this planet and its creatures.'
The practical aim is
to encourage people, when they make contact with nature
as developers, residents or tourists, to search for a local set of empirical facts
with ethical meaning. Hopefully this activity will produce moral truths that can be
placed alongside the scientific criteria for evaluating the relative utility of
different places for economic betterment. This is the new 'balance of nature,
where economic activity has a lighter ecological touch.
Denis Bellamy & Ruth Downing: 2004
