chapter two

This year, the Cuckoo didn’t sing. The song of the Cuckoo is often thought of as the first sign of Spring. It is the first time this has ever happened in living memory in our neighbourhood.
How do we make sense of something as vast as an eco-crisis? Perhaps our instinct is to look towards personal and family survival. Do we run for the hills? What should we take with us? How much land do we need to grow our own food? What do we do about energy? Is there a water supply? Obvious ins’t it, that this is a road to nowhere. In the context of a global crisis the idea of going it alone is a non-starter for almost everone on the planet, because it is immediately an unpredictable social crisis as well as an ecological one. Personal survival into the future is also community survival. We are all in this together. So we need to begin to create the conditions where our capability to maintain resilient, sustainable communities is nurtured and understood.
It is a critical moment in human history because this involves choice. It is a moment where we choose either to move towards a more sustainable way of living on planet earth, or we choose to move towards an ever more chaotic future. The nature of learning that takes place in the coming years will move us more closely towards an environmentally sustainable future, or lead us ever further from that possibility. Education is therefore a vital tool in our response to the crisis. As E.F.Schumacher (1973) once suggested, education is ‘our greatest resource’, but he also added that unless our ‘central convictions’ are made clear, education will be seen as a destructive force, taking us in the wrong direction, with the wrong fundamentals. It is not an impossible task to change this trajectory of choices and to begin to create resilient communities, human history is laced with examples of amazing ingenuity and creativity in the face of immense challenges. But it does need action on a massive scale.

We have examples. Recent times have seen considerable efforts being made to improve education and the education systems of western societies in response to the perceived needs of the knowledge society. A central feature of all of these improvements has been to respond to the needs of an ever changing commercial market and to prepare the young for participation in the global economy. This has brought reforms in both the structure and mechanism of schooling, and in the management and operation of the system. Education standards have improved. But reforms have continued to emphasise a mechanistic interpretation of the world founded on industrial and economic growth, not founded on ecological awareness. As a result schools continue to adopt a mechanistic version of learning, they progress and are managed from year to year as an age-specific body of students, they pursue a curriculum that is fragmented and largely oblivious of the significant challenges that young people will encounter as they grow up in the 21st century, they pursue individualised models of learning which marginalise interdependence and community, and they learn little of the interplay between people and environment.

This effort is I think, slightly misplaced. Our times call for interdisciplinary and holistic approaches to persistent problems, whilst individual endeavour may provide solice for the few, it is less likely to make the shift we need (see Wisdom of crowds). The challenges to our human and planetary existence cannot be addressed by purely personal ‘run to the hills’ thinking, nor for corporate, short-term solutions geared around profit first - environment second. This is not to say that we do not need to develop careful, finely grained, locally nuanced and deeply grounded knowledge and social practices of sustainable living to provide example and guidance. Such perspectives are, if anything, more critical than ever. But they need also to be situated in the wider context of longer-term, broader and deeper views that make sense across regions, nations and continents. These need to touch all aspects of all our lives, from personal to public, from work to leisure, from local to global.

One way of framing these observations is to think of what we humans generally do. In their recent work (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) illustrate this in the form of a four domains of response to the ecological crisis, consciousness, culture, behaviour and system.

Interior Exterior
individual

Crisis of consciousness
Reactive emotions
Lack of perspective-taking
Self-identity issues
Psychological domains


Crisis of behaviours
Apathy
Resource use
Consumerism
Under adherence to science




collective
Crisis of culture
Worldview clashes
Religious fundamentalism
Philosophical unclarity
Tribalism
Crisis of systems
Globalization
Political dynamics
Ineffective education
Poor regulatory inforcement

In their analysis, items within the domains of the quadrant can be seen as a point of leverage to help to overcome the eco-crisis. Whilst it is important to consider all of these different items within all of the domains they emphasise that each has a different relationship with the eco-crisis. What is interesting in their work is the way in which these domains are related to what they call different dimensions of self in response to the eco-crisis. Identifying eight different ‘selves’ they illustrate how different situations generate different types of individual response.
Eco-sage No crisis
Eco-integralist Crisis of perspective
Eco - holist Crisis of global systems
Eco - radical Crisis of biodiversity
Eco-strategist Crisis of resources
Eco-manager Crisis of management
Eco- warrior Crisis of power
Eco-guardian Crisis of harmony

A common factor emerges from their argument. The need for integration – it is simply too complex to attend on all fronts to all of these things all of the time. So a process of synthesising and integrating these overarching themes generates focus and enables us to consider forms of identity, action, communion and membership (ibid p313).
interior exterior
individual


Integral identity
The experience of ecological awareness


Integral action
The behaviors that result from ecological awareness


collective Integral communion
Relationships that emerge out of ecological awareness Integral membership
Roles within eco-social systems that express ecological awareness

I find this taxonomy extremely useful in framing the ways in which we might begin to explore the different and sometimes confusing ecological debates.







Another way of thinking about this issue is to consider the ecological, economic and equitable footprint of individuals, or to put it simply - the amount of land that each person requires to sustain their lifestyle. A fair ‘earth share’ is approximately 1.7 hectares per person on the planet, that is the amount of land that is available to live on divided by the number of people on the planet. On average a person’s footprint in Britain uses about 5.6 hectares . It means that if everyone in the world lived like the average person in Britain we would need 2.7 planets of earth size to sustain life for us all to survive. The whole thing works at the moment because a majority of people in the developing world live on less than their fair ‘earth share’ but as global warming increases this effect is magnified as areas that were previously habitable become unfit for nurturing life. Inevitably, many people with less aspire to more, and it raises some tricky questions for individuals, organisations and governments. For more of the planets population to have a fair earth share implies that those of us who take more of our share will need to take less - to reduce our consumption, or as we might see later, to redefine how we consume so that whatever we consume is part of a tight eco-cycle where we re-use, or biodegrade. This has major implications for what we educate ourselves, and our future generations into thinking about how in relation to life on planet earth.

A further way of engaging with the eco-crisis comes through an equitable approach to the problems of economy and society. In their recent work The Spirit Level, (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explore in considerable detail why more equal societies seem to flourish in almost every aspect of human activity, ranging across such matters as improved physical health and life expectancy, higher educational performance, to reduced occurance of violent behaviour and increased levels of social mobility.
The authors argue that there is evidence to suggest that individuals that place a high level of value on material wealth increasingly find themselves more anxiety-ridden, depressed, concerned about how people think of them and generally live in a state of continuous self doubt and insecurity. It is a theme that has featured in the recent work of other authors such as Oliver James and Tobias Jones in the form of affluence, and its negative effects on happiness, and community and the destructive trend of individualism. In Wilkinson and Pickett’s work they cite a study from the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation in the USA which suggests that people in the USA – the bastion of capitalism and free market, report that they feel that ‘materialism comes between them and the satisfaction of the social needs’ (ibid p.3). The report called Yearning for Balance, concluded that Americans were ‘deeply ambivalent about wealth and material gain’. A large majority of people were more interested in moving towards a society which ‘moved away from greed and excess toward a way of life more centered on values, community, and family.’ (p4). The fascinating and revealing observation however, is not that this was a declared ambition for a majority of those interviewed, but that ‘they felt that those priorities (of values,community and family) were not shared by most of their fellow Americans, who, they believed, had become increasingly atomised, selfish and irresponsible.’ (p4) The resulting sense of alienation and disconnect from each other was often cited as a result of these feelings. When people were brought together to discuss and explore these issues there was a sense of relief, surprise and excitement to discover that other people felt much the same way. Their private concerns were in fact collective concerns, but for some reason they were not part of the collective conversation about how people might live together. In effect they illustrate that there is a crisis of consciousness and behaviour that is being individually lived out which has a direct impact upon culture and system, this is however iterative, as systems and culture send messages to the individual which in turn frame and define their behavior and conscious actions.

As material success and social failure is a persistent challenge in many Western economies it seems sensible to explore further into ways in which our responses to these issues might connect to other pressing challenges. As Wilkinson and Pickett argue; …’it suggests that, if we are to gain further improvements in the real quality of life, we need to shift attention from material standards and economic growth to ways of improving the psychological and social wellbeing of whole societies.’ (p4)
This is not to deny that economic activity is very important, but to explore and to create ways in which economic activity, which pays the bills and puts food on the table, can be better shaped into a way of looking at social equity and environmental pressures in such a way as all these different agendas and demands are brought into sharper focus and unity of purpose. Why tackle psychological wellbeing, economic and community dysfunction as individual problems, why not explore it as something in the form of a pathology on a more collective level and link it closely to a redefinition of the economic needs a country, a continent, a planet may functionally require?

Messing with your mind. The plants in the planters by the canal are there for anyone to use, but primarily they are available for the people who pass by on the canal in their barges. The thing is that people were not sure if they could use them. Who do we pay for the lettuce? How much are the herbs? They are free. Use them. Think about it.

I want to focus a little longer on Wilkinson and Picketts work, as it sets one significant parameter on this book. They argue that we are drawing close to the end of what economic growth can do in the form of improving the quality of human life through the raising of living standards in most industrially developed countries. Using a series of illustrations they explain how life expectancy has a relationship to gross national income per head. In poorer countries, life expectancy increases rapidly during the early stages of economic development. But, from the point where countries reach a middle income level the rate of life expectancy begins to slow down until in the case of countries that are the richest in the world, their financial richness adds nothing further to life expectancy. So we may be rich, and get ever richer, but we will not live any longer because of that richness. It is not the connection of GNI to life expectancy, rather it is that as countries move further up the scale of richness, the corresponding increases in living standards do little for health. This is interesting, as it raises important questions about the relentless emphasis on betterment through financial wealth in already rich countries, and enable us to consider at what point would it be strategically beneficial to emphasise other, equally important ‘wealth’ indicators – examples might be more time to spend with family and friends, more opportunity to participate in a community activity, opportunity to attend a night class and learn a craft, opportunity to read a book, or to go walking, to invent something, or to visit a museum. They continue, ‘…whether we look at health, happiness or other measures of wellbeing there is a consistent picture. In poorer countries, economic development continues to be very important for human health and wellbeing. Increases in material living standards result in substantial improvements in both objective measures of wellbeing like life expectancy, and in subjective ones like happiness in poor countries. But as nations join the ranks of the affluent developed countries, further increases in personal income count for less and less. I will come to the implications of consumption, continuous growth and equity again later, but the obvious implication is that equitable financial wealth rather than disproportionate levels of wealth would seem to matter within countries and communities. But there are other issues related to inequality which are of significance in our discussion.

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam (2000) describes how inequality relates to social capital. ‘Community and equality are mutually reinforcing…social capital and economic equality moved in tandem through most of the twentieth century. In terms of the distribution of wealth and income, America in the 1950’s and 1960’s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century…those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement. Record highs in equality and social capital coincided…Conversely, the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital…The timing of the two trends is striking: Sometime around 1965-70 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically. (p359).
Puttnam’s work raises the importance of trust in a period of change. Communities of people that trust themselves have some interesting fringe benefits – first of all, people live longer in them. But they are not necessarily the panacea we might anticipate. As Subramanian (Subramanian et al 2002) argues, ‘people who trust others benefit from living in communities with generally high levels of trust.’ So we have the possibility that perhaps we need to teach commuity more explicitly in the form of community related actions, where financial gain is not the common denominator, but where connection, social support, fun, experimentation with the physical place which people share, all forms of community action become lessons which facilitate a trusting capability. In itself, community breeds community. We see this in the exponential rise of the internet social networking sites such as Facebook. But such examples also illustrate another fascinating aspect of community – that it can be both virtual and physical. It is clear that different forms of community can and do exist within which people can continue to benefit from connections which in turn generate trust, leading to experimentation, innovation and change.

Incredible edible gets about 5000 hits each week from people from around the planet who are interested in what we are doing. In most cases these connections remain virtual, they never extend to physical connection, and yet they serve as part of the fabric of change to which we are contributing. A small number of these connections convert into deeper conversations and exchanges of ideas and information, sometimes relating to physical locations of their own across continents, sometimes simply in the pursuit of ideas and designs for further development and study. It is, I think, a form of wealth production – community wealth.

Trust is an important capability that can help to create a more cohesive and cooperative social fabric. It creates less of ‘them’ and more of ‘us’, in the community mind and therefore serves as one important indicator of ways in which we look to see if any effort to influence and change a community is having an impact. If we are to tackle some of the considerable challenges associated with environmental change such as climate change, our need for trust, cooperation, furthered significantly by more equitable use of available resources would seem to have an important role to play. As Wilkinson and Puttnam convincingly demonstrate in their work, further improvement in the quality of life does not depend upon continuous economic growth, they make it very clear that the issue is now community, and how we can learn to relate to one another in much more productive, equitable, coherent and convivial ways.
In reaching this community goal, it is also clear in their work that there is a need for a shift in public values, where ‘conspicuous consumption is seen as part of the problem, a sign of greed and unfairness which damages society and the planet.’ (p263). This attention on a shift from the material to the relational, forms the foundation upon which our considerations are based. It denies neiher of them, but it emphasises the significance of one over the other.