We hold an immense responsibility in our hands to pass on to our children the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to ensure that they are both capable and competent to live their lives on the earth in a responsible and caring manner, confident in the knowledge that their actions ensure that their children will inherit a place that is better equipped to sustain and provide abundant facility for life. A critical part of this knowledge and understanding comes through a robust relationship with the natural world. An ecologically sustainable world is predicated upon the interconnection of ourselves with the web of life, if we lose our connection with the earth we forget we are of the earth, we begin to fabricate an illusion of our own importance alongside the larger presence of our planet.
I have written this book with the simple sentiment in mind that a revised form of education might play a transformational role in cultivating a cultural change towards a more sustainable way of living. I choose my words carefully, in Cultivating the Future I am exploring the way that the metaphor of nurture, the art and science of growing can have both physical and meta-physical connotations. The notion of growing from within has long been associated with the quest for learning, whilst growing in a physical sense concerns transitions from birth, to child, to youth, to adult and ultimately to death, but we transcend our own demise by passing on knowledge and understanding to the next generation, we extend our reach intergenerationally from cradle to cradle. This cycle of life is universal, it extends from every one of us to the entire biological community of which we are a part. As we grow we learn, what we learn therefore serves to define us. In this book I am interested in how we can learn to be self-reliant and at the same time interdependent, how we can learn to live sustainably, and be enabled to see the power and agency of our actions, the capabilities inherent in such ideas are important foundations for a sustainable form of living.
The book also pursues the idea that we are governed by powerful narratives. Narratives are important for our understanding, but they are not always consistent nor are they entirely coherent. In writing this book I have grown increasingly aware that this work is inevitably unfinished, there is such a vast arena of work to connect under the sustainable theme that any traditional sequential narrative is immediately engulfed in the wave upon wave of connecting narratives. To tackle this stylistic problem I have come to the view that this book is just a set of thought pieces. Bertold Brecht was famous for his montages, a series of divergent episodes which have some connection but in turn are in themselves coherent pieces. The aim here is not to claim overall coherence, as I am not yet in a position to suggest that what the book examines is in any way coherently conceived. Instead I want to indicate that there is a need to experiment, and to explore the possibilities that are currently in front of us to generate a new narrative, a new realism for our time.
Introduction
'Stories,' writes Ben Okri, 'are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves and you change the individuals and nations…Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.'
Our sophisticated post-modern civilization is not keen on grand narratives, it is suspicious of any single solution to the problems of our time and perhaps rightly so; recent history demonstrates the dangers of tyrannical obsessions and single solutions. At the same time in encouraging the multivarious we have created a context where nothing seems to have any value over anything else, where everything is relative. I think that this is the breeding ground for cynicism, so I am not convinced about the value of this situation either. Instead I think that there is a pressing need for a new narrative for the post-industrial world which challenges existing orthodoxy and presents a set of alternative visions of the future that are achievable and sustainable, the way to this is simple, we reconnect hand, heart and mind, something that the last two centuries have managed to dislocate.
One form of this dislocation comes in the way that our children are ill at ease with the natural world. Many children express fear and concern over the future of the natural world, much of this fear is informed by their observation of television images and messages, and from the conversations that they have with parents and other adults who in turn have observed over their own lifetimes a steady deterioration of the natural world. The result is a dismissal of the natural world as broken, a place which has nothing more to offer, and so they turn inwards, to their human centric solutions. This starts early in life and is then continually supported into adulthood. It crushes the connection, the story becomes ingrained in the collective psyche that the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual possibility of the natural environment are no longer a necessary part in our lives, no longer needed in our sophisticated world and no longer necessary for us, we turn away.
This book is written to challenge the sleep walking of our society, it is written to raise the profile of the importance of the natural in our daily practice, and how a re-culturing of this connection into the collective mind is a critical component of our realignment with ourselves as a species, and our relationship with other living creatures and the planet. The book is not founded on an idle day-dream, it is built on a disturbing set of facts. The prospects for life on earth at the end of the century on an equivalent scale to that of today are becoming extremely unlikely, especially if we continue to deplete the natural resources in such an unabated fashion. We are in what the renowned biologist E.O.Wilson describes as a bottleneck, where demand is continually outstripping supply across the planet. He writes ‘Everyone can, in theory at least, be housed and fed, but the pressures on the last remnants of wild biodiversity might easily grow fatal for a majority of the remaining ecosystems and their distressed plants and animals. The only way to carry biodiversity safely through the bottleneck of this critical period is by a combination of scientific and technological innovation, abatement of population growth, and environmental education, guided by redirection of moral purpose.’ (Wilson 2001:viii). it is in response to this crisis that we must fashion the new moral purpose, an educational challenge which extends from what we have achieved in our past narrative and moves us into a narrative of and for the Google-Age (Trippestad 2010). It could be a narrative where the singular and the collective are in a process of continual emergence (Scharmer 2008) and redefinition, a narrative of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) where we are fully immersed at the optimal point of challenge and skill in our responses to the world around us, a narrative through which we begin to recognise our place amongst all species (Capra 1996). It could be a narrative of scale, reflecting both the large and small as a relationship between the micro in the form of community, and the macro in the form of the global or universal effects of our actions (Esbjorn-Hargens and Zimmerman 2009), but fundamentally it is a narrative of ecology, of nurture, of cultivation of an ecological mind which will see us through the bottleneck.
To break into such a narrative there is a need for simple starting points, in the case of my own work this starting point comes in the simple craft of growing food. I like to use food production as a metaphor for our reconnection with the local, and to demonstrate in turn, how that reconnection enables us to reinterpret our relationship with the whole, the earth. My practical source of inspiration and evidence for the whole of this work comes from a community food programme, Incredible Edible. I have been involved with this programme since it began in early 2007, and prior to that as an activist in environmental issues throughout my adult life. Incredible Edible is a deceptively simple project. On the one hand it maintains a determined focus on food, growing, cooking, eating, celebrating food. However, to get to and from this focus we have learnt that there is a need to encounter a whole set of relationships, of people, places, interests, activities that can be examined and these can be used to illustrate a new way of living, ‘treading more gently’ as Thomas Berry (1996) says, on the earth. Our mantra in Incredible Edible is ‘if you eat you are in,’ this profoundly connects with people, but also anticipates participation without pressure, simply by existing, we begin to reconnect with our own relationship with nature, through food, and with others through the communion of food that exists in every person, in every place on the planet.
For over a quarter of a century, there has been a slow and growing realization amongst people from many different social, economic and cultural backgrounds, that the way the human race is living on planet earth is not healthy, for us, for other living things, and for the earth itself. The urgency is examined in some of the chapters of this book, where I will point to the reasons why so many commentators are emphasising a clear need for local and global action. Added to this is the growing frustration of many people with established versions of participatory democracy (Sandell et al 2005), where freedom and choice are of secondary significance to the needs of commerce and we begin to see that the renewed interest in what is local is more than the stuff of life-style choice, it is the formative period of a new social and cultural movement. This diverse movement is challenging the consumerist narrative and presenting practical alternatives to the existing themes. These alternatives converge upon the critical questions of our time, how to learn to live sustainably and as one with our earth, using resources within our means and not depleting the very stuff we need to retain. In pursuing this idea, people construct a narrative of what it means to have a real connection with the world around us, it enables people to re-imagine a future where they play an important part, personally and in connection with others.
In this book I will suggest that both our personal and shared stories, serve as the carriers of our day-to-day realities and understandings. These narratives have over the past centuries carried the rhetoric of tribalism, feudalism, religion, communism, fascism, capitalism and democracy to name but a few. However, in recent times one dominant narrative has prevailed, the narrative of consumerism. This narrative carries with it values of affluence, individualism, wealth, lifestyle and industrial progress pursued without conscience or consequence within and between nations. This narrative transcends all of our established ideological boundaries. It restricts, inhibits and influences our capability to explore other ways of living by commodifying all aspects of our lives. It influences and informs how we see ourselves and how we relate to and live and work with others. However, in the end, it is just a narrative, a story we are telling ourselves about the illusion of certainty of endless resource, continued economic growth and freedom at any cost.
Clearly to move these ideas forward requires examples, and workable solutions so that they become an antidote to the mainstream narrative, and by making them real and practiced they do not fall victim to the accusation that the ideas are in any way idealist, elitist, factional, or illusory. That is why it has been a central feature of the Incredible Edible programme to show people ways of achieving simple sustainable living solutions. When people can see examples of sustainable living for themselves and build the moral purpose behind their actions, in the everyday and the mundane aspects of daily life we know that they begin to migrate from their previously held positions. They might begin being skeptical and hesitant, but with example comes inspiration and hope, and through hope comes a new perspective of the art of the possible. In Incredible Edible we have played with the architecture of mind and place. We deliberately provoke response through growing in urban spaces within the built environment. We have seen how physical examples can stimulate the broader debate on ideas of sustainable living, and how these physical examples slowly become the new landscape, which in turn influences the new mindscape of sustainable living and becomes the reality of daily living.
Our work as educators is therefore a work of cultural change driven by purpose, it is to use Michael Fullan’s term, the new meaning of educational change, the new agenda for the century. How we become accustomed to the many ideas associated with sustainable living will have to be established through the commonplace, through the landscape that surrounds us. We will have to learn to adopt sustainable practices in every aspect of our lives, some will come through choice, but much might have to come through mandate, such is the urgency to realign practice to try and counter the excesses of climate change. We are more than aware that at the moment our built environment, our economic action, our transportation, our energy systems, our food production systems, our health and education systems are insufficiently encultured with the sustainability ethic, but there is already some early evidence of change.
Despite the many problems we have created for ourselves, there is clearly a widespread interest among people from all parts of the planet, to take a stance which seeks to be part of a solution, a positive response to the way things are, and to see if it is feasible to redirect the dominant consumer narrative, to radically alter the direction we might take in the next stage of our collective experience of life on earth. As storytellers, each and every one of us contribute to this new narrative, a narrative of parts which combine in multiple ways to inform a broader whole, a narrative for the Google-Age. Exactly how we contribute, matters.
When I started to work on this book I thought I would revisit the ideas of a decade ago when I was interested in learning communities and the part the community within school might play to promote more sustainable forms of knowledge and understanding. I drew upon what I had learnt from working with networks of schools, in a number of different countries around the world. I was interested in the ways in which the symbolic nature of networks, of connection, and of emergent systems provided a powerful metaphor for our times and could foster conditions for a realignment of practice. But I also discovered that it represented much more. Enquiry into the idea of a networked, sustainable model of our world pointed me to a whole new, vibrant and emerging story, and not a revised version of my earlier text. I saw educators at all levels of the system, together with people from the high office of government to the individual citizen, all of whom were acutely interested in the pursuit of some form of enlightened truth through their work and through their daily lives, but at the same time they were struggling to achieve this because of the underlying fault that runs through the system.
Over the last half century or more the educational community has played its part in creating the next generation of young consumers. Our nations are getting better at educating our young people, as nations we are increasingly literate when we leave school, we understand the importance of education and its association with well-being and self-efficacy. We recognize that education is essential for our collective national needs, to participate in society and contribute to the workforce, to be good citizens and pay our taxes and share in the pursuit of the collective wealth of the nation. But we are still in our infancy on a wider scale, the planetary literacy, the role we all play in the global story. I would go so far as to suggest we are fundamentally illiterate when it comes to our relationship with the natural world. The curriculum we offer to our young people has completely failed to generate a literacy amongst the young of the ecology around them, within them and between them. This claim is easily substantiated. If it were the case that education prepared our societies for sustainable living, then our actions out in the world, in the workplaces and the choices we make in our daily lives would demonstrate this literacy in action, and clearly, our actions do not seem to be present in the majority of such environments and lifestyles. Some early examples of a move towards the formative practices of sustainable community are visible, we have discovered in the last decade that the idea of the learning community has both personal and collective value, but it is of restricted transformational potential when it remains framed by the same systemic problem of consumerism and industrial growth. I think that the true potential of the learning community if it is to liberate, emancipate, or truly empower has to be discovered in reinventing the entire notion of learning within, between and beyond schools. Our present form of schooling has become too closely aligned with specific forms of literacy, defined across the developed world in the form of reading, writing and numeracy. This has served us well as we moved from the field to the city and we embarked on the journey of industrialisation. However, as our people gathered their qualifications, their PhDs, MBA’s, MSC’s, their BSc’s and BA’s and the like, a parallel phenomena emerged, as it was not the illiterate and the indigenous people’s who have trashed the planet, but these very same literate, educated and successful people. As we step forward into the 21st century, it is worthwhile remembering this fact, and ensuring that whatever track we choose to take is cognisant of the need for intelligent sustainable design, and not a compromised version that ensures business as usual with a green wash.
This raises some interesting challenges for educators. How do we connect ecological sustainability into the fabric of our organizations? In exploring this question I have been drawn to the grounded and the practical. I have witnessed first hand how action in the form of hand, heart and mind defines the Incredible Edible programme, and how the simplicity of this enables people, from the diaspra of the community, to participate. It enables people to work together on ideas, put them into place, experiment and reflect, and refine and share, this is a simple learning process with profound effects. I will describe some of my experience of Incredible Edible later in the book.
We are also realising that the scientific and the technological solutions are vital in our response to the ecological challenges we face, but they are not enough on their own. There is something about ‘spirit’ that we have to acknowledge is a critical part of the mix, moving into a broader connection with what is beyond ourselves. As Swimme says, ‘unless we live our lives with at least some cosmological awareness, we risk collapsing into tiny worlds.’ (Swimme 1996:60). These tiny worlds are the reality of today, where our narrative is laced with the illusion of thinking that our lives exist simply on political entities, such as the state or a nation, or that the bottom line concerns in life have to do with economic realities of consumer life styles. Swimme suggests that ‘In truth, the narrative of sustainable living is one which confronts the reality that we live in the midst of immensities, and we are woven into an immense cosmic drama.’ (Swimme 1996:60). It is then, a matter of consciousness as well as action, a matter of individual and collective change of practice, and of mind. I will suggest in this book that we can create the conditions, through the way we relate and respond to the world around us to generate an ecological literacy, but we can also begin to ensure that this is more than just a technical response to a crisis, it has to establish an equilibrium between our hands, our hearts and our minds (Pestalozzi 1894).
This broad quest for how to act today, how to live, how to be, to think, to do, serves then, as a script for our time. It is through such questions that a counter-cultural narrative has emerged on a global level. This widespread and dispersed set of narratives are creating the fault line in the conventional story, busting the myth of consumer growth and economic progress, it opens us to the possibility of a new rhetorical position based upon a new reading of how to live. The conversations are both face to face and digital, local and global. Personally I find that it is immensely empowering to be a part of such a network. It serves as a support mechanism to see beyond the enormity of the symptoms and to see clearly the solution – the move from ego to eco. As all great challenges go, this one is both personal and collective, our time has the burden of making a critical contribution to the next stage of human progress and it is now reaching a point where it can go two ways, one, towards rapid self-destruction, or the other towards a new enlightenment, a renaissance of connection between ourselves and our earth. Ben Okri poignantly recognizes and tells of the symbolic significance of stories, as the secret reservoir of values. It seems to me that if we change the story we use to educate ourselves with, towards this new renaissance, we begin to change the stories we live by, we begin to tell ourselves a new set of stories, a new set of narratives through which we learn to become literate of our earth.
Finally there is something about action as choice that can be drawn into our narrative of a new literacy for the planet. We are all part of this world, we are all playing our part in the construction of now, and we all have our part to play in the direction that we take next. What we choose to do, be it to proceed with a version of the present which remains very much in keeping with the recent past, or a version of the present which moves us to a reappraisal of our place as a species amongst other species, a species that presides now over its own and its neighbours destiny through the actions it takes. We have the capability to eradicate poverty, to seek ways to stabilise the climate, to learn to live within our means and to learn to maintain and cherish the resources that are of the earth to provide support for us and for generations to come. We have the know-how to make this happen in our daily lives, today, we simply need to learn how to see that through to our new reality, our new story, our new literacy of ecological awareness, that is the cosmological legacy that we have to live up to, it is asking us as teachers to ensure we instruct wisely as we tell our stories, a theme I will explore further in these pages.
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