EDUCATION IN CONCORD
towards a knowledge system of moral
naturalism
Concord is a town in
N.E Massachusetts, and it was there that Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862), emerged as one of an Anglo-American group of
nineteenth-century Romantics who were the first great environmental
subversives of modem times. The Romantic approach to nature was
fundamentally ecological in that is was concerned with relation,
interdependence, and holism. Thoreau wrote about the lands around his home in
Concord, and the ways they had been altered by two centuries of
European colonisation. In these meditations on history and
place he was one of the first Americans to articulate a philosophy
about the value of environmental heritage and the need for its
conservation.
His musings were
concerned with identifying landmarks as the remains of former
interactions of human social systems with ecosystems. People
add notional attachments to these landmarks based on ideas
generated by coming into contact with them. These random collisions
between place and imagination illustrate the inevitable creative
stimulus of combining wildlife and people. This important
intellectual outcome illustrates the progression of civilisation
carried forward by myth and legend attached to landmarks such as
marshes, ruins, and churchyards. These thoughts in place are
expressed as writings and art works. They are creative
elements of personal knowledge systems about the values of cultural
heritage and the need to inject these values into systems of
conservation management. Most of us, when we think about it,
realize that after our own direct experience of wildness, art and
literature, myth and lore have contributed most to our love of wild
places, animals, plants, even, perhaps, to our love of human
wildness. For here is the language of imagination that we so
desperately need in order to articulate the true meaning of
conservation and have the medium so necessary to communicate a
shared vision.
Thoreau's thoughts
about the juxtaposition of wildness and economic development
highlight the importance of notional values created by the people
who have day-to-day contact with places they wish to
conserve. What is unsettling is that these people, who have
led a life of intimate contact with nature at its wildest– a
halibut fisherman plying the currents of the Gulf of Alaska, an
Inuit whale hunter, a rancher tending a small cow-calf operation, a
logger with a chainsaw–are perceived as the enemies of
preservation.
The friends of
preservation, on the other hand, are often city folk who depend on
vacations in wilderness areas and national parks for their
(necessarily) limited experience of wildness. The difference in
degree of experience of wildness, the dichotomy of friends/enemies
of preservation, and the notorious inability of these two groups to
communicate shared values indicates the depth of our muddle about
wilderness and wildness. It suggests again and again the
increasingly desperate nature of our struggle. At the heart
of the dilemma is the fact that urban human beings are no
longer residents of wild nature, hence we no longer consider
ourselves part of a biological order.
The two cultures can
only be bridged through an education in moral naturalism; an
education that incorporates conservation and economic development
as the two pillars of applied knowledge for a sustainable
future.
