Judgement of Water
What's NEW?
11/14/2007
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Current developments are coordinated by the Going Green Directorate
Following Fish
Background
- the project originated in an educational network established in the 1880s involving schools in Milford Haven, Grimsby, Yarmouth, and Lowestoft;
- it was organised by a group of teachers working to national curriculum targets of IT, Geography, Science and Art;
- the work was associated with the creation of a new GCSE subject entitled Natural Economy by the University of Cambridge International General Certificate of Education;
- the project was part of the Schools and Communities Agenda 21 Network based in the National Museum of Wales, sponsored by Texaco and the Countryside Council for Wales
Life After Fish
This educational resource is about learning how people make social and economic adjustments in a rapidly changing world. Life in a UK fishing port in the 1950s may now be taken as a bridge between relatively stable, traditional ways of life to a less certain, potentially unstable, future.
It is likely that the 50s will come to be seen as a 'watershed' or a 'hinge of history'. There was optimism about ever-increasing prosperity for all in the decades to come. Britain was in the top league of scientific and economic progress. A decade later things were not so rosy. In 1964 British ecologists organised an unprecedented meeting to discuss environmental problems related to 'industrialisation', and from that time 'renewable resources', and 'sustainable development', began to penetrate the educational agenda.
The next decade produced the "Global 2000 report to the President of the United States" which predicted that the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption. This new local vulnerability of natural resource utilisation is reflected in the happenings in Grimsby, during the 70s and 80s, particularly with respect to the rise and fall of the fishing industry. This cycle of industrialism is also reflected in other 'one industry communities', such as Corby (steelmaking), and Cardiff (the coal trade), which have had to rebuild their local economies.
Now, on a global scale, children are hungry and sick; people live out lives of physical or intellectual poverty, and lack of opportunity; war or some new pollution may suddenly appear on our TV screens. A better future does not happen automatically, or without special effort, as was thought by most people in the 1950s. It will happen because people- sometimes as individuals, sometimes as enterprises working for profit, sometimes as voluntary non-profit making groups, and sometimes as governmental agencies- will address problems with muscle and mind, and will probably overcome adversity, as has been usual throughout history. The experience of some of the former fishing ports has proved that 'there is life after fish'. But all is not well everywhere.
