A 'thin place': the 19th century municiple
graveyard, Great Yarmouth
A educational
mission
A mission is a
special quest, one that involves more effort than, say, a trip to
the nearest supermarket. Mission comes from a Latin word that means
“to send.” It was first used by Jesuit missionaries who
sent members of their order overseas to establish schools and
churches. Foreign travel is still associated with the word. When
diplomats and humanitarian workers travel abroad, we often refer to
those trips as missions. If you were to drive all around the
country searching antique fairs for porcelain cats, you could say
you were on a mission. Similarly, if you were searching for
somewhere to contemplate your place in creation you could say your
mental needs had sent you on a mission to find places for
imaginative meditation. This is the basis of self education
to build a personal body of knowledge. Places that act as a
perceptual focus for this kind of educational mission are sometimes
referred to as thin spots. They have greater spiritual and
transformative powers than others; the veils between material and
spiritual realms are subtle and porous. James Joyce summarised this
process as: "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate
of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods”. What
matters is quality attention to a limited space that provides a
portal to release the imagination. In this context, the most
ordinary objects of contemplation become thin places for
stimulating creativity.
Imagination in
place
The arts of
imagination in place, by virtue of their grasp of the power of
word, story, and image to reinforce, enliven, and direct
environmental concern, can contribute significantly to the
understanding of environmental problems: the multiple forms of
ecodegradation that afflict planet Earth today. All branches of
what have become known as the the environmental humanities;
ethics, history, religious studies, anthropology, humanistic
geography and ecocriticism, take the viewpoint that environmental
phenomena must be comprehended, and that today’s burgeoning
array of environmental concerns must be addressed imaginatively,
qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
The concept of
‘Imagination in place’ is presented here in a topic
outliner and mind map where the top level of interaction includes
ten 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.
The next nine
windows provide views of the targets of multi purpose 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 and icons 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
landscape and bear 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 long lost
intimacy between people and other living things.
The 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
increasinly 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 conservation management. This is the new 'balance of nature,
where economic activity has a lighter ecological
touch.
Education should
therefore deal with the value of affluence compared with the value
of nature. Development happens when we humans utilise Earth's
natural resources by linking the capacities of the human brain with
the institutions of human society. The resulting
technological and social innovations are driven by energy, the
cheaper the better. Hence the overwhelming historic
importance of fossil fuels in kick-starting the industrial
revolution. Developing nations see this clearly. If
their energy becomes too expensive, their development will
stall. So they will not agree to 'save the planet' just
because the developed nations tell them too. This is the
dilemma underlying the control of climate change, which, it is
generally agreed, is the result of increased carbon dioxide
resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. The topics to be
addressed to bring nature and humanity into a resilient steady
state are individualism, unlimited progress, competition,
consumerism and the unregulated global market. Imagination in place
is required to promote economic development and delight in our own
cleverness. Imagination is also required to value nature as
for example a delight in the beauty of bird song or a sunlset
reflected from a bed of dried reeds..
Denis Bellamy;
2016
This mind map has
crystallised from several decades of cross-curricular inputs from
teachers and students who have contributed to developing the Welsh
Schools in Communities Agenda 21 network, now based in the Welsh
National Museum and Galleries at Cardiff, and on line
at www.resilience-uk.wikispaces.com.
