Thoreau was seeking
to develop ideas about how to bring people and nature into
equilibrium. We now see this standpoint requires a
hard-headed approach to planning for sustainability based on good
science, robust economics and community participation, in which
well-being of planet and personal beliefs are interdependent.
The old educational subjects are not suitable to encompass the
scope of this project, and early efforts to define a suitable body
of knowledge produced the the term 'cultural ecology'. This
is a development of 'ethnoecology', which was first used by
Conchlin to describe how the long-term survival of communities of
native peoples depends on the careful management of resources
produced by local ecosystems. Cultural ecology extends the
basic principle of ethnoecology to include all communities,
world-wide. For example, the day to day impacts of city
cultures involve the massive emission of atmospheric pollutants
from the use of fossil fuels that have consequences for all
ecosystems. The consumption of fast foods may connect city
dwellers with tropical deforestation, where meat is mass produced
from cattle ranges derived from tropical ecosystems. The
concept of 'food miles' encapsulates the environmental cost of
supermarket consumerism based on long-distance bulk transport of
commodities.
However, if
conservation management is to be brought into the general education
system from its current professional periphery, it has to have
cross-topic connections for learners to navigate to and from a
range of departure points. A mind-map to begin building this
navigation system has been produced from the subject of natural
economy created by the Cambridge University Examination Syndicate
for education in world development. A topic map of cultural ecology
presents world development as the replacement of traditional
systems for utilising natural resources with scientific systems for
managing industrial production systems. Conservation management is
the bridge between these historical aspects of human social
evolution. It carries value judgments and perceptions about
environment where scientific knowledge is not necessarily the
clearest representation of what reality is from the standpoint of
Homo sapiens being just one of many living things in a community of
beings.
