NOTIONS ABOUT NATURE

 CRITICAL THINKING in the context of past and present ATTITUDES and VALUES about environment: with particular reference to East Anglia

Summary

A Framework for Notional Appraisals

Starting With Spiritual Readings of Nature's Signs

Starting with Notions About Sustainability

Starting with Place

Starting with Personalities

Appendix 1 The Haggards of the Waveney Valley: A Notional Exemplar

Appendix 2 Suffolk Communities Exemplifying Notions of Sustainable Development

Appendix 3 'Be Kind to Efts': Charles Kingsley And His World As A Model For Studying Environmental Problems, Issues and Challenges

Appendix 4 'Flowers and Beer at Halesworth'; People of East Anglia Who Studied Nature

Summary

Four distinct, but closely interrelated approaches are offered as a framework to organise some of the many strands of a value-related environmental curriculum. Such imaginative explorations are necessary for schools to appraise local notions about nature that make a neighbourhood special. They are categorised according to whether the starting point is:-

The objective is to refer to this type of menu to stimulate the production of exemplars of best practice for networking through SCAN, the Schools in Communities Agenda 21 Network (www.scan-online.org)

A menu to appraise local values about nature

A Framework

SCAN's methods of neighbourhood appraisal were initially directed at the curriculum targets in science and geography, which deal with local indicators of economic development and biodiversity. By concentrating on the UTILITARIAN and ACADEMIC features of the neighbourhood, SCAN's methods provide knowledge about the environment for making plans for improvements. They provide first hand experience of active citizenship.

As more schools join SCAN, teachers are engaging in cross-curricular dialogues about how to make NOTIONAL appraisals about their neighbourhood, using value-forming, and value-exploring activities to reinforce plans for sustainable development.

Educational windows into 'neighbourhood'.

Environmental appraisal of the material aspects of neighbourhood deals objectively with our day to day experiences of large and small universes by analysis and experiment, but does not engage emotionally or personally with them. In a purely materialistic sense, economic development is driven by scientific discovery, and proceeds on the basis that we all have short lives of heroic effort, set in a purposeless and indifferent universe. Our material symbols are scientific ones; the "solar system" model of the atom, the double helix of DNA, and the image of our blue planet set precariously on the rim of the relatively vast galaxy of the Milky Way. Increasingly, we see ourselves as part of a changing universe, a vast cosmic development from its origins in the 'Big Bang'; hugely improbable by-products of an unconscious material system which will inevitably engulf us.

Sustainability

To become practically involved environmental appraisal requires the critical evaluation of all possibilities for environmental management.

SCAN is focused on the local Agenda 21, which is a practical expression of the interrelated notions of 'biodiversity' and 'sustainability' carrying underlying value-messages to protect, through management, our finite natural resources. To fully engage pupils in sustainable development requires a large element of critical enquiry. This can be partly achieved by inventing new surveys, although there are dangers in departing too far from standard protocols acceptable to planners. Another powerful route to critical engagement is making and operating a management plan for improvements, which often has to steer a course between opposing value judgements about the environment. A third approach is to make historical, literary, or artistic appraisals of the neighbourhood, so as to know its creation, and find a place in it. This act of the imagination could provide an important added value to support an action plan.

Each culture, or society, produces personal images and forms which are unique and peculiar to it. Even when similar images or forms are common to more than one culture or society, they almost invariably have different meanings or values attached to them. Personal images constitute not only an embodiment of a society's attitudes, values and beliefs, but are also a major means by which values and beliefs are actually formed and realised.

Identifying and teaching areas of moral, aesthetic and humanistic concern could be coupled to the incorporation of these value systems into sustainable action plans.

Nature's Signs

A spiritual view of the local environment emerges from trying to read and express various signs of the workings of nature, in relation to our position in the grand scheme of things. For example, the Koran has much to say about 'signs' which, through the imagination, point to the deeper significance of everyday life.

Religious ideas, about origins and values in nature cemented families in the past, but are now lost or diluted within minority subcultures, unattached to the major world religions, who are left to develop their place in an idiosyncratic cosmology.

Moral and spiritual teaching has always relied heavily on visual imagery in the formation and realisation of a society's attitudes, values, and beliefs, and their transmission, as signs of what it is to be human, from one generation to the next. An experimental meditation is being developed based on images of the natural world which the painter Graham Sutherland used to compose his Great Tapestry at Coventry. This is included in the folder 'Library' as 'Sutherland's Tapestry', and may be accessed through 'Index.htm'.

Examples may be gathered through local appraisals of the influential role played by the visual arts and architecture in the formation and maintenance of religious and spiritual values in all societies since prehistoric times. However, there is no generally accepted educational framework to use neighbourhood notions about nature to link communities and environment to a larger scheme of spiritual values. In particular, classroom examples are needed which highlight spiritual reasons for promoting a particular course of local development.

Spiritual appraisals take a world view that is rooted in the imagination and passes beyond the limits of ordinary life. They start from the postulate that the material cosmos in some way expresses or manifests a deeper spiritual reality, expressed through human consciousness (Appendix 1).

Humanists such as Julian Huxley have seen an apparent progress in cosmic evolution towards increasing consciousness and control. That is to say, we are part of a development from the unconscious simplicity of the Big Bang to the conscious, diverse and complex carbon-based life-forms of the planet earth. Our unknown future carries the possibility of understanding and controlling the cosmos itself.

Attempts to provide biological explanations of consciousness are far from convincing, and are certainly not established by scientific study. The ultimate personal expressions of conciousness are through the arts. The author Henry Rider Haggard, for example, through his fertile imagination, kept returning to the possibility that the material universe does express a spiritual reality. The purpose of cosmic evolution may be the emergence of some form of conscious relationship between that spiritual reality and entities in the material cosmos.

Science is not irreligious. It does not entail that there is no spiritual reality, no God, and no purpose in the cosmos. Many of the greatest scientists were strongly motivated by their religious beliefs. The sort of highly ordered and emergent universe that science discloses is compatible with, and almost overwhelmingly suggests, the existence of a creator of enormous wisdom and power. Religious myths depict the way in which that reality makes itself known in the material universe. Religious rituals establish appropriate responses to that reality. Religious symbols express its fundamental character.

Taking Chrisitanity as an example, from the beginning it attempted to present a cosmic vision of a spiritually ordered universe, whose purpose would be somehow completed by a future full knowledge and love of the creator.

The myths of Christianity show:-

The cosmic vision of the first Christians was that the spirit who was the creator of the cosmos had acted in human history to initiate the liberation of human lives from pride and egoism, and their union with the divine essence of selfgiving. In other words, we are part of the whole cosmic process from the Big Bang, and have emerged as conscious agents which can consciously unite the material to God, its spiritual source and goal.

Place

To be human is to live in a world filled with significant places, and to have a particular affinity to a particular place called 'home'. Place is a difficult concept to define briefly, but it involves qualities of authenticity, character, distinctiveness, personal significance and meaning. Places are undoubtedly valued by people, but are their absolute values to be attributed to environments, or to the people who live there? Much of the controversy of modern planning hinges on relative environmental values and value conflicts between, for example, professional planners and neighbourhood opinion.

A distinction has been made between 'place' and 'placelessness'. Places are directly experienced, and they stand out in our memory because, for example, we were happy or lonely, or experienced something new there. This experience may be contrasted with that of placelessness, where there is no personal meaning or significance, either because the environments have not been directly experienced, or because they are monotonously uniform, or planned without feeling.

People who have decided to make an effort to establish a sense of place have recognised their community is in a state of 'information poverty'. This is a state characterised by:

Their efforts are aimed at increasing their 'information capability' through recognising that there is a capacity to define 'place', which can be built upon. Improving information handling skills is closely related to information awareness and confidence, and hence to the general problem-solving capacity and development potential of a group or community. In this sense the concept of 'information capability' is a positive alternative to 'information poverty'.

A community's information capability to define a sense of place is its capacity to acquire and use information for social and economic development. A community with a high information capacity should have an array of community groups, each being aware of information sources relevant to their concerns. Individuals and groups should have established procedures geared-up to use the information. Their preoccupation with their particular passion makes them more inclined to make and take opportunities to apply their skills on behalf of their neighbours, and disseminate information about their own activities.

Examples of notions about nature which single out particular communities as being special are listed in Appendix 2 as statements about 28 Suffolk communities. Each is an notional example of sustainable development (the headings) which has a distinctive local expression, and thereby adds value to the locality. As signal exemplars of general truths about world development they point to the importance of checking for other instances in other communities.

A set of these principles of information capability was adopted to define a sense of place, and is being developed, by the Suffolk village of Parham as a basis for producing a celebratory appraisal for the 21st century. The idea is to offer routes for everyone to participate in establishing a community knowledge system, which presents a plan for the future incorporating the best of the past, and improving upon the present.

Personalities

Throughout history all cultures and societies have manifested their attitudes, values and beliefs in the personal imagery of literature and art, the creation of which was often influenced by particular places. In the context of Christianity, Francis of Assisi bonded with nature by distilling personal attitudes towards spiritual devotion from natural phenomena he encountered in the wooded hills of Umbria, and the mountain of La Verna in the heart of the Apennines. Seven centuries later, Charles Kingsley was influenced by boyhood memories of meres and dykes in fenland, and the pools of Devon's rocky shores, when he attempted to reconcile his devotional life with science.

To the likes of Victorian thinkers, such as Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin, who were seeking spiritual readings of nature's signs, bonding with nature meant coming to terms with science. Ruskin wrote as a prophet of worse to come when he spoke of Alpine mountain streams, that in his lifetime had become polluted through the impact of railway tourism. Of the two,Kingsley is the better educational model for today. Not only did he take up the new ideas of ecology, which he termed bio-geology, but he also conceived a practical value system for care for the environment, which we cannot improve upon today (Appendix 3).

Kingsley's life was suffused with notions about nature, and his classic book, 'The Water Babies', is a parable of notional values for children growing up in an overcrowded world. Within the general message of 'be kind to efts', he expressed the moral of his story as a notional expression of the ecology of aquatic ecosystems threatened by unthinking people.

At this time, important scientific notions about the workings of nature were the product of local naturalists. The natural environment of East Anglia was a stimulus for these amateurs, and a high proportion of them, with the requisite wit or leisure, influenced national developments in the biological sciences (Appendix 4). The minimum necessary to make a 'start with people' is to discover a local personage, and answer the questions about who the person was, what they did, and why their ideas about nature should remain interesting.

Appendix 1

The Haggards of the Waveney Valley: A Notional Exemplar

Henry Rider Haggard was born at Bradenham near Thetford. His notions about nature came from the intensively farmed border lands along the edges of the Waveney valley, the county boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. His boyhood impressions came from his father's Brandenham Hall estate, and in later life, from his work as a tenant farmer at Ditchingham Hall. Here his particular neighbourhood was at a point where the Norfolk and Suffolk clay-edge landscapes become one.

It seems that it is from his mother than Haggard drew his imaginative and literarary talents. She wrote poems and songs which were published in various journals and it was a year after Henry's birth that she published with Longman her first poem in book form entitled 'Myra', or the 'Rose of the East: A Tale of the Afghan War'. The poem concerned the Kabul campaign of 1842. It also reflected on the 'mysterious law' or purpose of the universe which was one of the central themes that Haggard was to develop in his fiction.

  Time passes- silently but swift

  And down its mighty current drift

  The circling worlds on high;

  We gaze upon them till some spark

  Becoming till now, extinguished dark

  A blank leaves in the sky;

  That which our hearts stand still with dread

  We think, that orb's bright course is sped

  Our haven may be nigh;

  And hush our souls in silent awe

  And muse on thy mysterious law

  Unknown Eternity.

The poem is a beautifully worded plea for humility during the period when science was becoming the new religion and the findings of Charles Darwin (1809-82) on the origin of the species and the law of natural selection were still being fiercely debated.

It is interesting that, like his mother, Henry became intrigued with spiritual ideas raised by the concept of evolution. His mother Ella wrote a beautifully worded plea for humility during the period when science seemed to becoming the new religion, and the findings of Charles Darwin were still being fiercely debated. She says that science can explain 'how' but not 'why'.

  "Is Nature God?

  Are gases reigning laws?

  Atoms fortuitous - the Great First Cause?"

In the last speech he was to make, in November 1924, Haggard tried to come to terms with his powerful imagination.

"Imagination is power which comes from we know not where. Perhaps it is existent but ungrasped truth, a gap in the curtain of the unseen which sometimes presses so nearly upon us. It means suffering, but it also means vision, and is not light better than darkness? Who knows its object? No man: but it may be that those who possess it are gates through which the forces of good and evil flow down in strength upon the world: instruments innocent of their destiny. For it seems to me as I grow old that the spirit of man is like those great icebergs which float in Arctic seas - towering masses of glittering blue-green ice, which yet hide four fifths of their bulk beneath the water. It is the hidden power of the spirit which connects the visible and the invisible: which hears the still small voice calling from the infinite".

No doubt, under the influence of her father, these notional appraisals of nature were continued by Lilias Haggard, Haggard's youngest daughter. In a diary which she wrote for the local newspaper, she added her own personal spiritual values to commonplace things in garden and countryside around Ditchingham, and the Norfolk and Suffolk coastlands.

Lilias, describes her notions on an Easter Sunday facing the imminent horrors of a world war.

"Easter Sunday and the first day of real spring weather. The garden, held back by so much cold sunlessness, gloried in the warmth, and the air was filled with the scent of the long lines of heavy-headed hyacinths, pink and purple, blue, white and palest yellow. It was a day full of those small things, forgotten through long weeks of winter, which come back to one with a little shock of joyful surprise. The loveliness of the first brimstone butterfly, questing over purple aubretias, and primroses just one clear pale shade lighter than its saffron wings. The queer resonant croaking of a toad from the dyke, the deep hum of the velvet-bodied bumble bees, working patiently in the lilac blossoms of the lowly ground-ivy, to fill their little waxen honey pots against a rainy day. The swift double note of the chiff-chaff, earliest of all our warblers to arrive, as he and his mate slipped along the branches of the wild cherry, once more breaking into blossom, a white foam against the unleafed woods. As dusk fell I stood by the pool watching the dace rising joyfully after fly-the steady plop-plop breaking the glassy surface of the water for a moment only, for it was very still. A day full of the sacrament of common things, those things which, in spite of unrest and anxiety-wars and rumours of wars, and all the fret and fever with which man surrounds his little life-are always there if you pause to look for them.

Part of that secret kingdom which, as Mary Webb, writing about her closed 19th century rural world of Shropshire, says, 'Sends one man to the wilds, another to dig a garden, that sings in a musician's brain, that inspires a pagan to build an alter, and the child to make a cowslip ball."

Appendix 2

Suffolk Communities Exemplifying Notions of Sustainable Development

A list of 21 distinct notions that categorise values of sustainable development (the headings), each of which has distinctive local expressions.

  1. Communities based on cropping natural resources are transient, because people earn greater immediate benefits from exploiting resources than they do from conserving them Example

  2. 'Increased efficiency' of mechanical production reduces biodiversity. Example

  3. Market values of natural or semi-natural habitats expressed as 'the conquest of nature' do not always reflect their true scarcity or their aesthetic/educational/ scientific values to society. Example

  4. Until the beginning of human development, 10,000 years ago, extinction was due to climate change. Example

  5. Biodiversity has significant local expressions. Example

  6. Sustaining production from semi natural ecosystems requires economic incentives. Example

  7. Everyone can contribute to protect biodiversity. Example

  8. Living things have evolved to occupy even the most transient niches. Example

  9. Ethnoecology is the study of sustainable uses of 'biodiversity'. Example

  10. Wildlife and power tools are incompatible. Example

  11. We need to develop construction/production systems based on the use of renewable materials. Example

  12. National incentives are necessary for farms to adopt anti-pollution technologies. Example

  13. Biodiversity can be valued as 'landscape', 'socio-historical heritage' and as 'a stock of wildlife'. Example

  14. Production for urban consumers reduces livestock diversity. Example

  15. Artificial fertiliser suppresses biodiversity. Example

  16. Preservation of the world's biodiversity is increasingly the task of zoos, botanical gardens and community 'seed-savers'. Example

  17. Nature conservation is about managing small ecological islands. Example

  18. Nature study should be promoted to involve people in checking-out the biodiversity of the neighbourhood. Example

  19. 'Consumermatics' provides a comprehensive knowledge system linking social- and environmental well-being. Example

  20. Soil improvement eliminates the local diversity of arable production. Example

  21. We must find ways of reducing the atmospheric impact of industrialism. Example

 

The industrialised harvesting of fish stocks once thought to be limitless has now impacted on the community of Lowestoft that is struggling to find a new pride of place without fish.

The Peasenhall mechanical seed drill made a contribution to reducing the need for jobs in farming, as did many other local labour-saving inventions of the time. These inventions, being more 'efficient' than people at maintaining 'monocultures', also reduced local biodiversity.

Some of the most diverse habitats of Suffolk were destroyed by fen drainage at Mildenhall and Lakenheath , and forestation of coastal heathlands at Tunstall.

'Crag' cliffs at Bawdsey present a record of the mass local extinction of marine species as the Earth moved into the last Ice Age.

Small-leaved lime, or pry, is an example of a species that was locally very common in the ancient Suffolk wildwood. It is now confined to small pockets of woodland in a relatively small area of the county(Groton). Some snails also have a long-standing local distribution e.g. Ena montana (Cockfield ), Aplexa hypnorum and Azeca goodalli (Mendlesham ). A slug, Boettgerilla pallens was unknown in Britain before 1972. Since its discovery at Ixworth in 1984 it had spread to eight 10 km squares by 1992.

Woodmanship at Bradfield is a modern expression of ancient labour intensive craft that made use of self-renewing community woodlands. It illustrates the economic restrictions of operating small sustainable woodland enterprises.

Minsmere, a coastal estate in the parish of Westleton, is owned and managed by the RSPB. It contains a mixture of woodland, heath, lagoons and foreshore managed for maximum biodiversity through public subscription.

Shingle beaches are one of the most dynamic and demanding physical environments, yet paradoxically, the least affected by human activity. Orford Beach and nearby Shingle Street constitute the second largest vegetated area of shingle in Britain.

A small community of hunter-gatherers left evidence of their temporary encampment at Hoxne. These artefacts tell how they lived off the biodiversity of the local tundra on their northern migration following the retreating ice sheets.

Garrett's of Leiston grew from a village blacksmith's shop to give a farm labourer power to destroy an ancient ecosystem as part of his morning's work. Its assembly line, one of the first in the world, is now a museum of the technologies that changed the face of the countryside.

The Fressingfield families of joiner-architects were a focus for woodworking/designer skills still visible in standardised timber-framed houses and barns dating from Elizabethan times. The supply of local large-limbed oaks was exhausted in the mid-18th century when smaller-roomed brick walled buildings became the norm.

Walnut Tree Farm, Chediston was the site of the first full scale commercial biogas plant, designed to reduce local water-borne pollution from intensive livestock production. It defined the additional costs to agricultural production of adopting closed-system, pollution-free intensive farming.

The UK Biodiversity Action Plan says that we should conserve species and habitats because they are beautiful or because they otherwise enrich our lives. In other words the culture of a nation is closely allied to its landscapes and their associated wildlife. Landscape appreciation is clearly in the province of art but it is really a small step to view a landscape as an expression of the local biodiversity. The painter Gainsborough (Sudbury ) expressed the quality of his local environment by drawing and painting semi-natural woodland ecosystems. 'Gainsborough trees' can still be seen throughout Suffolk, but the local uptake of 'prairie' cereal cropping to maximise unit-area production has changed the landscape norm without changing our 'Gainsborough values' (Tannington ) . 'Trees in the landscape' provides a learning route from the poetic communication of 'place' to the accurate scientific delineation of its component species (by listing, drawing and photographing).

Farm livestock used to be bred to match specific local requirements of working practices and climate. Today there is no widespread role for the Suffolk punch, the heavy horse of East Anglia, which is now largely reared as a hobby (Woodbridge ). The large barnyard turkey kept for Xmas is now a smaller animal, intensively produced continuously indoors on deep-litter, and processed in standard packages for supermarket consumers (Holton).

In the 1840's beds of phosphate minerals were discovered in south-east Suffolk, near Felixstowe, and processed commercially at Darsham for export. This discovery stimulated the local use of mineral fertilisers, a movement which has now led to a global decline in biodiversity of lakes, ponds and water courses through agricultural run-off.

Many explorers who travelled to the ends of the expanding British Empire were driven as much by the search for useful plants as scientific curiosity. Two generations of the Hooker family, maltsters of Halesworth, were represented in these endeavours. William and Joseph, father and son, were both important figures in the expanding science of botany and its commercial applications, and were successive directors of Kew Botanical Gardens.

Wink's Meadow, Metfield is one of the few surviving examples of a semi-natural flower-rich pasture. Isolated as a small enclosure of a few acres in a 'sea' of un-hedged intensive arable land, it is a tiny living genetic museum. A local site of Special Scientific Interest, it is managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, and stands for the national loss of biodiversity brought about by industrialised agriculture.

This is an extract of a letter from Charles Darwin to his former teacher John Henslow, who was pioneering the study of botany in the village school he established in the village of Hitcham.

"Now it has occurred to me that it would be an interesting way of testing the probability of sea-transportal of seeds, - to collect seeds and try if they would stand a pretty long immersion.- Do you think the most able of your little girls would like to collect for me a packet of seeds such as grow near Hitcham ? I am paying 3d for each packet: it would put a few shillings into their pockets and would be an ENORMOUS advantage to me, for I grudge the time to collect the seeds, more specially, as I have to learn the plants !"

It indicates the relatively small number of scientists who played a part in establishing the theory of evolution, and their parochial stage. Also, the general endorsement of Henslow's academic methods by the Victorian public schools and examination boards was responsible for the teaching of biological sciences being rapidly separated from its holistic social/production context. On the other hand, it shows how the recording of local biodiversity may have unexpected practical value.

The cultural system which connects social and political well-being dependent on environmental diversity, was first defined by the circle of Victorian scientists and social reformers centred on the Bunbury family of Great Barton.

Suffolk linen weavers were concentrated in the area where more flax was grown than anywhere else in the county. This district was defined in the 18th century as a strip about 10 miles wide in the valleys of the Waveney and Little Ouse. There was a particularly high concentration of flax production in the villages around Thelnetham.

Acid rain, which results from emissions of power plants driven by oil and coal, is destroying European upland ecosystems. The nuclear power plant at the tiny fishing hamlet of Sizewell is an emission-free solution to meet a part of our continuing demand for electricity.

Appendix 3

'Be Kind to Efts'

Charles Kingsley And His World As A Model For Studying Environmental Problems, Issues and Challenges

 

  1. Why Charles Kingsley?

  2. A Victorian environmentalist

  3. The Kingsleyan knowledge system

  4. Invention and Change

  5. The Heritage Conservation Movement

  6. Kingsley in our times

  7. 'Water Babies": the author's moral

As a boy Charles Kingsley became facinated by freshwater biology whilst living on the edge of the East Anglian fenland. Later in life he was part of a social network of scientists and environmental reformers centred on the Bunbury family of Great Barton.

When he was 12 years old, he xperienced violent social unrest first-hand in the Bristol riots of 1831, and until his death in 1875, was deeply involved with the social and environmental ferment of industrial development. One way or another, between the 30's and the 70's, he became associated with all major political and social reform movements of the age of steam. Kingsley's life coincided with the first historical period when primary evidence for future historians accumulated at an unprecedented rate. He moved within, and between, the circles of Royalty, the aristocracy, the church, business, and science. We can enter this world of technological change and social ferment through his novels, sermons and letters, and cross-reference to contemporary evidence about the lives of his friends and enemies. We can 'view' Kingsley from the writings of others, and study the events, and 'visit' the places and social movements which moulded his thoughts about families and the environment.

Charles Kingsley was a crusader for environmental health reform, with a deep knowledge of what we now call the ecological principles which create and maintain local biodiversity. In the following poem Kingsley attempts to equate the interdependence of living things in ecosystems with a Christian ethic of self-sacrifice. He imagined that the 'crowning glory of bio-geology', when fully worked out, might, after all, only be 'the lesson of Christmas-tide- of the infinite self-sacrifice of God for man'.

The oak, ennobled by the shipwright's axe-

The soil, which yields its marrow to the flower-

The flower, which feeds a thousand velvet worms

Born only to be prey to every bird-

All spend themselves on others: and shall man,

Whose two-fold being is the mystic knot

Which couples earth with heaven, doubly bound,

His being both worm and angel, to that service

By which both worms and angels hold their life,

Shall he, whose every breath is debt on debt,

Refuse, forsooth, to be what God has made him ?

Only someone who had actually felt the touch of earthworms could have written this.

Kingsley particularly promoted the use of religious imagery based on nature, to carry notional messages to communicate his concept of God.

On his return from a holiday in the tropics to his Chester deanery, Kingsley married his recent experience of walking the forest floor with spiritual readings of stone pillars and vaults as follows.

"Now, it befell me that, fresh from the Tropic forests, and with their forms hanging always, as it were, in the background of my eye, I was impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the likeness of those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of Chester. The grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself into one of those green bowers, which, once seen, and never to be seen again, make one at once richer and poorer for the rest of life. The fans of groining sprang from the short columns, just as do the feathered boughs of the far more beautiful Maximiliana palm, and just of the same size and shape: and met overhead, as I have seen them meet, in aisles longer by far than our cathedral nave. The free upright shafts, which give such strength, and yet such lightness, to the mullions of each window, pierced upward through those curving lines, as do the stems of young trees through the fronds of palm; and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up into the infinite, and took off a sense of oppression and captivity which the weight of the roof might have produced. In the nave, in the choir the same vision of the Tropic forest haunted me. The fluted columns not only resembled, but seemed copied from the fluted stems beneath which I had ridden in the primeval woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed copied from the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring of the boughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were garlanded often enough like the capitals of the columns, with delicate tracery of parasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the arches seemed copied from the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo shoots; and even the fatter roof of the nave and transepts had its antitype in that highest level of the forest aisles, where the trees, having climbed at last to the lightfood which they seek, care no longer to grow upward, but spread out in huge limbs, almost horizontal, reminding the eye of the four-centred arch which marks the period of Perpendicular Gothic".

"He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace. For ever He looks down on all things which He has made: and behold, they are very good. And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the most perfect works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of whatever beauty He has shown us, in man or woman, in cave or mountain peak, in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly.

But Himself ?-Who can see Him ? Except the humble and the contrite heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor quintessential diamond".

Apart from offering a personalised view of an important period, which witnessed the dawn of mass production and a greatly increased pace of world development, Kingsley's writings ring-true today because he was a social reformer who viewed society as a system driven by interacting processes which integrate 'community and production'. He was a polymath with a wide ranging grasp of the connections between scientific discovery, industrial development, social well-being, and environmental well-being.

The following conceptual map describes a system of human development through the application of science. In sequence its dynamics may be traced by clicking on the numbers.

The Kingsleyan System for social action to cure the ills of unchecked industrialism

.

Knowledge about the interactions of people with the workings of nature is accumulated by thought, observation and experiment. This knowledge is organised in the form of physical laws which explain the way nature works; and spiritual/ethical laws which define the ways we should behave towards other people and the rest of nature.

Spiritual and ethical laws are studied and applied to manage human production (the subject of political economy) : i.e. political economy defines the way people are governed in their everyday lives through political and economic understanding.

Improvements in political and economic understanding are applied through social welfare and education to increase social well-being.

Increased social well-being stabilises human production.

Physical laws are applied to manage natural production (the subject of natural economy) i.e. natural economy defines the way people process physical and biological materials to meet their needs and wants through environmental understanding.

Together political and natural economy make up the subject of consumermatics, the body of knowledge which defines the forces of consumerism which since Kingsley's day have determined the pace of world development.

Improvements in environmental understanding are applied through public health, nature study, and care for nature, to increase environmental well-being.

Increased environmental well-being stabilises natural production.

Unfortunately his efforts, together with those of some of his contemporaries, notably John Ruskin, to encourage the growth of an embryonic generalist education system, which covered this holistic perspective, were swamped by the national priority for the training of specialists to control nature and exploit an Empire. Kingsley's contemporary, Henslow, a Cambridge professor began this process in his village school by getting pupils to dissect flowers and learn scientific terminology. They helped Darwin in his botanical experiments. The impact of these revolutionary ideas at the start of state support for education certainly turned the heads of the inspectorate towards single-subject teaching.

In contrast, Kingsley's starting point was the study of 'civilisation'.

"...give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; ".

In this broader context Kingsley offers an educational model for modern times where we require a broad view of society and environment to absorb the educational implications of sustainable development.

The period of Kingsley's life was a triumph of invention and applied science which brought about great changes in the appearance of the British countryside. In the main, these changes were results of applied science, first to allow mass transport of people, and then to promote the spread of new ideas through mass communication. Kingsley described science as a 'good fairy' which could increase human well-being, providing it was harnessed to a political system which aspired to develop the latent potential in everyone.

It is convenient to define this period of rapid socio-environmental change as the 72 years spanning the opening of the first public railway line in 1825 to the first experiments in wireless in 1897. People born in the first decade of the 19th century would have experienced the benefits of mass production of goods and services in the 'age of steam', and from the launch of the penny post in 1840, would have been able to respond to overnight news about people and events throughout the world. They might have used the first public telephone exchange in 1878, and seen the first motor cars in the 1880s. A person born in 1825 might have lived into their seventh decade to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897, the year in which the first plastic records entered people's homes. Kingsley saw the early benefits of applied science but died prematurely in 1875. He lived long enough however to become intensely aware of the human and environmental disbenefits of unchecked industrialism organised for maximum profit, and the social disfigurement it caused through substandard housing of urban workers .

Kingsley was one of the first to value nature study as a worthwhile hobby. He was an amateur sea-shore ecologist, and in the Water Babies he used the cleansing power of detritus feeders in rock pool food chains as a metaphor to preach the need for proper waste management.

"Only where men are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea, instead of putting the stuff upon the fields like thrifty reasonable souls; or throw herrings' heads, and dead dog-fish, or any other refuse, into the water; or in any way make a mess upon the clean shore, there the water-babies will not come, sometimes not for hundreds of years (for they cannot abide anything smelly or foul): but leave the sea anemones and the crabs to clear away everything, till the good tidy sea has covered up all the dirt in soft mud and clean sand, where the water-babies can plant live cockles and whelks and razor shells and sea-cucumbers and golden-combs, and make a pretty live garden again, after man's dirt is cleared away. And that, I suppose, is the reason why there are no waterbabies at any watering-place which I have ever seen".

The notion of conserving living resources, from rare species to valued landscapes, means managing their use so that vital stocks of plants, and animals are maintained for the benefit of succeeding generations. But progress in educating for sustainable development has been lamentably slow, largely because it has been seen as peripheral, and sometimes as a hindrance, to humankind's continuing quest for social and economic welfare.

 

From the building of the first coal-powered factories and mines a century before Kingsley, it was clear that unchecked industrial enterprise is incompatible with nature. Linnaeus, for example, on his Royal fact finding tour of Sweden's natural resources in the late 18th century, reported on the poisonous fumes from copper smelters which had destroyed vegetation down-wind of the factories. However, it was not until the middle of the next century that commentators began to agitate for something to be done about the environmental impact of a rapidly developing industrial society. John Ruskin, for example, railed against the ugly impact of tourism on Europe's mountain landscapes. This was exacerbated by the pollution from holiday resorts, which even then had begun to defile Alpine streams. Charles Kingsley summarised his two-pronged attack on the socio-environmental effects of industrialism in a sermon preached in 1870 when he spoke of 'human soot' as a by-product of competitive investment in mass-production.

"Capital is accumulated more rapidly by wasting a certain amount of human life, human health, human intellect, human morals, by producing and throwing away a regular percentage of human soot-of that thinking and acting dirt which lies about, and, alas ! breeds and perpetuates itself in foul alleys and low public-houses, and all and any of the dark places of the earth.

But as in the case of the manufacturers, the Nemesis comes swift and sure. As the foul vapours of the mine and manufactory destroy vegetation and injure health, so does the Nemesis fall on the world of man-so does that human soot, those human poison gases, infect the whole society which has allowed them to fester under its feet. Sad; but not hopeless. Dark; but not without a gleam of light on the horizon."

Kingsley was also prophetic in his vision of more enlightened times when society would demand that the countryside and human lives wasted by industrial development should be cleaned-up.

"I can yet conceive a time when, by improved chemical science, every foul vapour which now escapes from the chimney of a manufactory, polluting the air, destroying the vegetation, shall be seized, utilised, converted into some profitable substance, till the Black Country shall be black no longer, and the streams once more run crystal clear, the trees be once more luxuriant, and the desert which man has created in his haste and greed, shall, in literal fact, once more blossom as the rose.

And just so can I conceive a time when, by a higher civilisation, founded on political economy, more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will of God, our human refuse shall be utilised like our material refuse, when man as man, even down to the weakest and most ignorant, shall be found to be (as he really is) so valuable that it will be worth while to preserve his health, to the level of his capabilities, to save him alive, body, intellect, and character, at any cost; because men will see that a man is, after all, the most precious and useful thing in the earth, and that no cost spent on the development of human beings can possibly be thrown away".

The growing conflicts between economic development and quality of environment took more than a century to come to a head in the Rio Environment Summit. This assembly of world leaders in 1992 highlighted a global imperative to promote inter-disciplinary systems thinking, and encourage communities to express their concerns about quality of life in local environmental action plans. In the context of modern environmentalism, the world of Charles Kingsley is an exemplar for constructing appropriate holistic knowledge maps about the connections between the technical, biological and spiritual components of sustainable development. He was one of the first people to offer an overview of world development that took account of applied science, its detrimental social and environmental impacts, and the need to consider the spiritual dimensions of 'place' and 'change'. His novels are imaginative and popular interpretations of his ideas presented on various stages, some of which were contemporary, and others were set in more exotic places and distant times. His messages were the same: to urge government to action, and to calm social strife through the 'eternal goodness' of religion.

"And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from this parable?

We should learn thirty-seven or thirty-nine things, I am not exactly sure which: but one thing, at least, we may learn and that is this-when we see efts in the ponds, never to throw stones at them, or catch them with crooked pins, or put them into vivariums with sticklebacks, that the sticklebacks may prick them in their poor little stomachs, and make them jump out of the glass into somebody's workbox, and so come to a bad end. For these efts are nothing else but the water babies who are stupid and dirty, and will not learn their lessons and keep themselves clean; and, therefore (as comparative anatomists will tell you fifty years hence, though they are not learned enough to tell you now), their skulls grow flat, their jaws grow out, and their brains grow small, and their tails grow long, and they lose all their ribs (which I am sure you would not like to do), and their skins grow dirty and spotted, and they never get into the clear rivers, much less into the great wide sea, but hang about in dirty ponds, and live in the mud, and eat worms, as they deserve to do.

But that is no reason why you should ill-use them: but only why you should pity them, and be kind to them, and hope that some day they will wake up, and be ashamed of their nasty, dirty, lazy, stupid life, and try to amend, and become something better once more. For, perhaps, if they do so, then after 379,423 years, nine months, thirteen days, two hours, and twenty-one minutes (for aught that appears to the contrary), if they work very hard and wash very hard all that time, their brains may grow bigger, and their jaws grow smaller, and their ribs come back, and their tails wither off, and they will turn into water-babies again, and, perhaps, after that into land-babies; and after that, perhaps, into grown men.

You know they won't? Very well, I dare say you know best. But, you see, some folks have a great liking for those poor little efts. They never did anybody any harm, or could if they tried; and their only fault is, that they do no good-any more than some thousands of their betters. But what with ducks, and what with pike, and what with sticklebacks, and what with water-beetles, and what with naughty boys, they are 'sae sair haddened doun', as the Scotsmen say, that it is a wonder how they live; and some folks can't help hoping that they may have another chance, to make things fair and even, somewhere, somewhen, somehow."

Haggard, SIR HENRY RIDER (1856-1925). British novelist. He was born at Bradenham, Norfolk, June 22, l 1856, and educated at Ipswich grammar school. He held official posts in S. Africa, 1875-79, and was then called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. A first work, Cetewayo and His White Neighbours, was published in 1882. South Africa figures prominently in his novels, the success of which is due to Haggard's exceptional narrative and descriptive powers.

In addition to King Solomon's Mines, 1885, his most successful adventure story, and Jess, 1887, perhaps his best work, his novels include Dawn, 1884, She, 1887, in which mystery is blended with adventure; Allan Quatermain., 1887; Colonel Quaritch, V.C,, 1888; Cleopatra, 1889; Allan's Wife, 1890; Nada the Lily, 1892; Montezuma's Daughter, 1893; The Heart of the World, 1896; Ayesha, 1905, Fair Margaret, 1907, Red Eve, 1911. In 1891 with Andrew Lang, he wrote The World's Desire.

Haggard, who was knighted in 1912, became prominent as a practical farmer and an agricultural economist. His journeyings through England in 1896-98 to investigate rural conditions resulted in a valuable work, Rural England, 1902. After the First Great War he visited every part of the British Empire in connection with settlement of ex-servicemen. He died May 14, 1925.