Two cultures or one ecology?

I’m on very shaky ground with this topic. It’s not my specialism, its controversial and the definitions and debates shift all the time. But it’s important and interesting so I’m going to have a go. There’s been a lot of chat lately about the value of both culture and science. One bit of chat is this week’s daily dose of Melvyn Bragg, examining The Value of Culture. He covered the science/arts divide this morning with Simon Schaffer and others. The other bit of chat was Tom Chivers in the Telegraph on ‘Knowing about science is not a trivial pursuit’.

Let’s start here: Tom Chivers argues that you should be ashamed not to know scientific facts, but he conflates scientific knowledge with scientific progress. He says “Scientific progress is keeping you alive: we literally wouldn’t be able to feed the world if it weren’t for the 1960s Green Revolution in agricultural science.”  For him this is ‘literally’ a scientific fact, but it is highly contentious. For example, Vandana Shiva cites research to say that diverse permaculture is much more efficient. Or, some might argue that the world would not be so overpopulated and stressed if our food production system wasn’t so artificial.

Whenever science is promoted over other domains such as philosophy or art, the examples given to demonstrate its value are usually more about technology fuelling the growth economy than they are about the value of enquiry. In the same way, those in the cultural sector tend to advocate culture’s value to politicians with evidence that it grows the economy.

Because I’m Green I’m regularly accused of being anti-science. Being anti-science is the most often cited reason by my network that they won’t support Greens. I love discovering about the world, I love knowledge and I think the scientific method is utterly essential. However, I don’t love the aggressive tactics of the pro-science camp. Professor Brian Cox regularly calls people ‘nobbers’ who are interested in the paranormal or alternative medicine, which I find an offensive term. I can tolerate rudeness though. Worse is when those who promote evidence and thoughtfulness fail to examine evidence or think. Failures to think seem to occur most often when there is undue influence of industrial lobbyists.

As Sunny Hundal said here, in relation to an attack on the Green Party for Jenny Jones’ support of an anti-GM food protest, “The divide is not between ‘pro-science’ and ‘anti-science’ political parties at all. Rather, politicians and parties will always side with science when it suits their constituency or aligns with their interests.”

Peter Melchett, in this article, exposes the ‘sins against science’ of the pro-GM lobby. I’m not going to repeat them all here as you should read his article. He says “This characterisation of those opposed to GM as being anti-science has always ignored the fact that the NGOs concerned, like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Soil Association, are staunch supporters of science, have scientists working for them, and run campaigns to combat problems which were only identifiable through scientific investigation, like the depletion of the ozone layer and climate change. People opposed to GM, including farmers and environmentalists, often have professional or scientific qualifications, and are well versed in the scientific disciplines that affect agriculture. This has not stopped supporters of GM crops dismissing all of these people as irrational, emotional, anti-science zealots.”

A while ago, I tweeted a tentative question: what if all study could be called science, to embrace the arts and humanities? I meant that science could be seen as enquiry into everything, using metaphorical and emotional methods as well as logical. Nobody agreed with me and some greatly disagreed, saying that the arts and humanities could only be protected by being distinct from science. I wasn’t making a polemical point but was posing a naive question to try to grasp at my own thoughts. I’m not sure that merging everything into a mush is a good idea and I wasn’t suggesting that. Bruno Latour’s proposal of modes of existence could be a helpful route. He explains how we’ve separated domains of study or work as if they are discrete worlds, in tandem with our separation from nature. Instead he proposes that different domains such as law, ecology or science are different modes of existence, distinguishable but very intimately connected.

Those who defend arts, humanity and spirituality against taint by science are reacting in such a way because science has become so tainted by its over-association with exploitative and ecocidal technology. Felipe Fernandes-Armesto in his book Civilisations writes “History is a humane pursuit, rather than a ‘scientific’ one, in the conventional sense, because the past is not present to our senses: we can only know other people’s impressions and perceptions of it.” Thus, science is empirical enquiry, based on what can be observed materially. But he goes on to say “Yet people are part of the awesome continuum of nature and you cannot encounter them except in the tangle of their environments and the nature of the ecosystems of which they form part.” For me, this tangle is just as much about science, if not more, than the establishment of firm evidence.

Richard Feynman in this animation explains why he, as a scientist, can appreciate the beauty of a flower as much as, if not more than, an artist can. Tom Chivers uses this example to suggest that those who don’t know all the science behind a flower only see it as a “pretty little ornament”. But who is to say that the artist seeing beauty isn’t unravelling complex thoughts about the historical associations or formal aesthetics of the flower, amongst many possibilities? Beauty in an artist’s eyes is not just ornamental. I think Feynman in promoting science is describing what a good artist does, either in looking at the world or remaking it. Artists enquire into the many levels and dimensions of the world, which is what Feynman does with the flower. Scientists don’t always do that in their studies – when they’re not open-ended or ecological enough in their enquiries. The same with artists.

What I’m getting at is that the missing link in all these debates is ecology. This lack renders the debates less meaningful and polarised than they could be. I suspect that if an ecological epistemology was more rooted in our discourses there would be less antagonism between ‘the two cultures’. Indeed, there would not be two cultures but a range of diverse specialists collaborating, using both creativity and enquiry, both empathy and objectivity, to solve problems.

Children and the Olympic century

I’ve had blogger’s block. I’ve been brewing a post, waking up with fully formed phrases ready to write here. But my own words make me choke and I don’t know that you’ll want to hear them either.

I’ve been thinking about children and their future, after their abandonment by the politicians at the Rio+20 Summit. When even scientists like Stephen Emmott give their considered opinion that ‘we’re fucked’, how can we say we love them and carry on destroying their world?

It’s the kind of thinking that raises hackles a little because it can seem sentimental. There’s too much love in it. I’ve started this with a picture of my lovely daughter, her hair all caught in a burst of sun, and a picture like that can only convey a tiny fraction of parental care. That kind of warm expression can make some people feel uncomfortable, mainly because they think we should protect children by keeping those feelings private and certainly offline. Or maybe there’s a sense that if you express love for your child too openly that you’re somehow expressing negative emotions about other people’s children. There’s also a strong established belief that we best love our children by not loving them, as it were. (Or rather, that we should formalise relations and prepare children for a challenging world by withdrawing affection tactically. There’s an element of effectiveness in this approach but the emphasis is usually too weighted on control and also affection can be withdrawn too early. This early withdrawal is part of the damaging notion that if children need to learn anything we should start teaching them as early as possible.)

Whatever the reason, we’re uncomfortable talking about loving our children. But beyond the discomforts around love, and much more critically, given that our planet is on fire in parts and slippery with melting ice already, there’s too much fear in what I need to express. There’s just far too much of both love and fear in the topic of children and their future to discuss it comfortably in front of other adults, let alone the children. I thought it was about time to discuss it, gently. So we hosted a house concert as part of a European tour of Transition Towns by a friend from Canada, Michael Holt. His own blogpost about the evening is here. He combines live music and cabaret with a conversation about Transition. We decided to focus on the question of what children need from adults to help the transition. We invited some families from the home education community and Transition New Cross and had a full house. We talked in fairly gentle terms about some future threats – scarcity of resources, rising sea levels and extreme weather. The adults in the room generally felt we shouldn’t lay anything frightening or gloomy on children’s shoulders and focus on being happy and well here and now. They agreed that we should talk about a different future, not a difficult one. We asked the children what they thought about that. One of them very strongly said ‘tell us the truth’. Another said ‘you should lighten up’. We’re prepared to accept that telling the truth is the correct thing to do but we don’t admit the truth to ourselves or between ourselves as adults. And maybe that depresses us.

I talked a bit about the Leysdown tragedy, the centenary of which was on 4 August this year. Nine boys drowned heading from Southwark to the Isle of Sheppey for a summer scout camp, overturned by a freak storm wave. They were poor boys from Walworth scout troop, learning how to sail. Their deaths touched a nerve for the public, due to the impending build-up to the 1st World War, and allegedly over a million people turned up to their funeral procession all the way from Leysdown to Nunhead Cemetery in Southwark. I did a memorial walk and photography exhibition/book on 4 August 2010. The coast of Sheppey is very fragile and eroding as storms cause more damage due to climate change. Old Second World War military buildings are being tossed onto the beach, making a playground for (older) children. I also saw younger children being overly protected, shouted at not to take their shoes off in the mud. It all raises intractable questions about how we prepare children for a difficult future, with eroding certainties and lands, whether we prepare them through protection or challenge, or a careful balance of both.

In the run up to the 1st World War, there was a build up of anxiety about impending war because of the naval arms race between Germans and British over the new Dreadnought warships. There were worries too that young people lacked the right skills and fitness for modern warfare. In response there was Baden-Powell’s publishing of Scouting for Boys from 1908 and the introduction of the Sea Scouts in 1909.

London hosted the Olympics in 1908. Baron de Coubertin had been mortified by France’s defeat by the Prussians in 1870, had looked at the lack of sport in French schools and dedicated himself to creating a highly motivational international games as both a preparation in case of, and an alternative to, war. The Olympian values are paradoxical: developing fitness for war and a strong emphasis on competition between nations, while promoting peace. I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t more direct ways of promoting peace, like reducing dependence on fossil fuel supplies and a more active implementation of the International Crimes Against Peace. But, perhaps there is a good deal of symbolic power in having face to face challenges with people from different cultures, which get such a mass of spectators? Perhaps that spirit will be significant in its effects? See this defining image of an Iranian and an American, embracing, for an example.

As TeamGB chalked up more and more medals, we’ve heard Cameron and Hunt capitalise on their success by denigrating schools for their (supposed) ‘all shall have prizes’ culture. We’ve heard them think on the fly to cancel their cancellation of a compulsory amount of sport in schools, and to announce a new school sport scheme.

It’s 100 years since the Leysdown Tragedy and the obsession with youth fitness of the 1908-1914 era. We are still hearing the same kind of anxieties via the media and Government about young people. Are they fit, skilled and disciplined enough to ensure that our nation can compete on a global stage? To ‘compete on a global stage’ means to grow the economy at the expense of others and protect our global resource supplies, through war if necessary. Parental worries are stoked by these public discourses, by the insidious messages of an achievement culture in schools and by a celebrity culture in the media.

To nurture this national competitiveness the Coalition Government is following the last regime in investing in many schemes all about ‘pegging’: GDP measures, Key Performance Indicators, streaming by ability, League Tables, schemes to promote social mobility, awards for individuals, Performance Related Pay in public jobs. The list goes on and on.

Then there are endless debates about how fair, evidenced and inclusive these measuring systems are. Of course they aren’t fair on the whole. Applying success measures to most activities is extremely difficult, because most things in life are so very contingent and interconnected. Seeing semi-arbitary rewards for a few leads to demotivating feelings for the rest of us. The measures of success can be too narrow. Adulation can focus on too few characters. Certain skills (football, money hustling) are overly rewarded while others (design, caring for others, growing food) are neglected. Success is usually built on access to resources (which can be sourced unethically e.g. a country that has grabbed land or oil, a male rower who has been given a BMW etc) making the factors of talent, innovation and hard work less significant than they may seem.

Sport is one area where measures of success are pretty clear, so we can genuinely celebrate it. There’s uncertainty in not knowing who will win, but the chaos is well constrained within limits. Because judgement of success isn’t based on our subjective preference (unlike music, say), we can feel at one with the whole crowd. The more formalised and official the sport system, the more certain we are that there has been fair play. There isn’t a media channel in the UK right now that doesn’t have at least one article saying that our Olympics success shows that we have every reason to be optimistic about the future. They are asking ‘what can we learn from sport to apply to culture/economy/education etc?’ But sport and these other domains are just not the same.

Those of us who raise critical questions about the Olympics or about competition are not being cynical, but rightly critical. Those of us who are impressed and pleased by excellent performances while asking those critical questions are not being hypocrites either. Most of those who raise critical questions are hardly being critical enough in my view. It’s right to ask about the legacy, the sponsorship and the cost but we mostly need to ask: Is winning lots of medals going to make a material difference (outside continued investment in sport) for the UK? How is practice and prowess in sport actually transferrable to other domains in ways that will ensure continued human thriving?

The only one transferrable outcome I can see is that it may result in more people doing physical activity (recognisable sports, unrecognisable sports, and just moving your body in work or dance). Better fitness means a more resilient population as food becomes scarce and challenges increase.  I’d rather see people get fit by using their own bodies for transport and growing food, though.

There will come a year when we will have to consider reducing the Olympics. There will also come a year when we will have to consider cancelling the Olympics. We’ll look back on the 20th as the century of Oil and Olympics. The 21st will be a century of chaos. We may love to watch sport ever more as it creates a utopian world of certainty. But also it will become less relevant. The games children are forced to play in compulsory school sport will seem less and less relevant.

So if we do love our children enough to prepare them for a difficult/different future, what training do they need now? What would a new Resilience Olympics look like? What activities would be included?

Here are some suggestions:

Aikido – it isn’t an Olympic sport (yet) maybe because it’s key principle is concern for the wellbeing of your attacker, and its second principle is chaos, or coping with the uncertainty of unknown attacks from any direction.

Maybe we need extreme road cycle safety and competence, to cope with increasingly aggressive road conditions.

I also found out about this new game called Switchball, being developed by Play for Change, which helps you cope with changing rules.

The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World played forest football and other games during their FluxOlympics this summer, linked to their Games People Play exhibition.

I’d like to hear your ideas. Could we make a Resilience Olympics happen?

The Happy Museum from a distance

By Paul Clarke

Personal circumstances conspired to stop me attending the Happy Museum symposium. One thing keeping me at home was a visit from the Home Education Inspector, which was unmissable really. (We passed the inspection.) But, too interested, I couldn’t keep away from the Twitter stream and the photos coming from Paul Clarke, who I was delighted to see had been employed to document the symposium.

Tony Butler has just written a great post reflecting on the event, and listed some fascinating questions that he wants to pursue. Although each one is worth a thesis and I’m foolishly starting this at midnight, I’m paraphrasing each one and responding with some half-formed thoughts.

1) Why are museums good at ‘high well-being’ but less good at addressing good stewardship of our environment? Some tentative thoughts:

Maybe, because good environmental stewardship is not integrated into our ways of thinking or talking, not just in museums but in the wider culture? We don’t have an ecological epistemology. You might see campaigns about litter or tree-planting or counting birds. But these campaigns don’t reinforce how human wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of ecosystems and biodiversity. Museums endorse and reflect a traditional taxonomy, whereby Natural History and Earth Science are always in different museums or departments from Art, Design, Anthropology etc. Even the question which holds ‘high wellbeing’ and ‘environmental stewardship’ as distinct activities or concerns, reflects this separation (which isn’t to criticise the question or questioner).

2) Why has the dominant radical social justice paradigm in museums been so poor in linking social justice with resource equity and climate change? Some very tentative thoughts indeed:

Funding sources setting the agenda have required museums to focus closely on social agendas. 13+ years of Blairism: Museums & schools have been expected to overcome social inequality, while the Government’s policies on taxation and the liberalisation of capital worsened inequality. The more we saw inequality worsen the harder some of us in the sector tried to tackle it.

Wider society, including the elites of politicians and media commentators, are almost entirely blind to the connections between social injustice and the resource iniquities resulting from agribusiness, food shortages due to climate change, conflict fuelled by fighting over resources and so on. They are, however, starting to wake up to the connections between resource inequity and corporate greed.

Because reports like this (review of 2011 from an environmental perspective) don’t get extrapolated and mapped onto other projections or interpretations of what is happening in the world.

3) Why is it we have to revisit examining the relationship between culture and wellbeing when we have years of experience and analysis? Some rather simplistic thoughts:

From a positive perspective, because we do now need a radical fresh understanding of culture and wellbeing. Cultural research hitherto has been carried out in a vacuum, in which an understanding of wellbeing has a limited frame of reference, one which is not informed by an ecological epistemology. Conventional discourses skew the public debate because culture is generally represented as a decoration above brutish life, a form of escape rather than a return. When culture is not recognised as the fundamental means by which we spread and grow knowledge and thereby develop the means to thrive (not just between our own species but with others) we can only measure its value in ways that devalue it.

To be more critical, it is because we now have a Government which is blundering through a radical reform agenda with a questioning naivety, asking for simple restatements to inform their policies but without maintaining contracts of enough experts (e.g. DCMS civil servants) who have prior experience.

4) It is possible for small amounts of investment to make effective change. Why does larger scale funding often miss the mark?

I’m not sure about this one. I’d need to see a bit more evidence to prove this assertion. Not that I’m sceptical, just that it doesn’t fully accord with my experience. If there is an answer, it’s because large scale funding is usually for buildings and infrastructure, which gets spent up on project managers and concrete. Smaller education, or staff training or community projects which might have more impact on how museums deliver wellbeing are too often tied up by predetermined outcomes, often servicing those big infrastructure projects. These small projects often have conflicting outcomes, by both serving the corporate goals of growing visitors or income and serving social or learning outcomes. So, I’m not sure how common it is for small amounts of investment to make effective change, though I do concede it’s possible.

5) Is risk-taking more likely through funding of ideas and individuals or organisations and projects? Good question, one which I’ve not thought about much:

I guess this question arises from a comparison of funding of museums, where the only individuals funded are a few PhDs or researchers, compared to the arts, which is a more individualistic domain. I’d like to see more funding in the museums and heritage sector for creative enquiry, for individuals or loosely constituted teams. I’d very much like to benefit from such funding myself. However, I don’t know how much impact such individual enquiry would have on museum organisations (if that’s the way to make effective change). How much would museums have to change to allow an individual or a radical action research project to make a real difference? As I write this I’m remembering that there have been a number of individual creative research projects in museums in the field of cultural diversity, which have been exciting and have maybe helped to radicalise the profession if not the organisations themselves.

Ultimately I think this isn’t so much about individuals vs organisations, but open-ended outcomes for research vs closed outcomes that serve the most corporate aspects of an organisation’s agenda.

6) Could the ancient notion of the Commons provide a framework to deliver this change, gathering virtual and real-time communities around a desire to share and steward heritage?

Yes! And yes again. For me the Commons isn’t just an ancient notion but a current and highly relevant notion. Fundamentally, the commons are goods that are all shared (universally) and are all gifts (so, impossible to measure economically, or commodified, but important to value).  The idea of the commons sits well with taking a long view: they exist to be preserved and passed down the generations. Just right for the museum sector. The beneficiaries or owners of the commons are not just humans but all species. The commons is a principle that should be applied to both our biosphere and our digitally-powered knowledge sphere, and both need preserving as heritage and nurturing as new growth. Our knowledge sphere should be applied to preserving the biosphere as commons. Museums must start seeing their digital strategy as much more than marketing through a web presence but exposing their collections to the hive mind for this purpose. It’s much more than just a technical or legal challenge of digitisation. It’s a philosophical and educational challenge too.

7. This change can only happen if embedded within highly participatory organisations, right?

Well, yes. Participation and the commons go hand in hand. But I’ve run out of steam now. Let someone else have a go.

Choosing case studies

I’m at the point in my writing of The Learning Planet that I need to home in on some case studies of communities or organisations that are successful learners. The three main criteria are:

• They learn fast and adapt to change in a timely way
• They learn together and co-operatively
• They learn with a turn towards ecology and sustainability

I’m interested in organisations that learn well through a good mixture of play (experiment, creativity, fun etc) and praxis (serious challenges, real experiences, thinking about context), that are open to diversity of cultures and views, and that encourage co-learning between peers.

I am writing chapters on the following kinds of community or organisation, and would love to hear your suggestions for the best case studies for each category:

1. Indigenous communities, especially ones that draw together emerging technologies with traditional knowledge (my inclination is to focus on the Sami)
2. Intentional communities, especially ones that are restoring ecosystems and developing eco-innovations
3. Cities, for which I need an example where large-scale change is happening from the ground up or by non-Governmental agencies
4. Businesses, especially ones which are radically changing to adapt, rather than start-ups
5. Schools and colleges, especially ones that give maximum freedom to learners  (my inclination is to focus on Hellerup School in Denmark)
6. Research institutes, especially ones that have a strong emphasis on world-changing and praxis
7. Activist groups or campaigns, especially ones that have an emphasis on co-learning
8. Artist and designer communities, especially ones that are ecologically focused
9. Online communities, and I need advise on how to narrow this category down

I have a lot of ideas already but am really quite spoilt for choice. For each chapter I will refer to three or four examples and then home in on the one case study. I intend to visit each place, if not by travelling by plenty of virtual contact and interviewing key individuals, so they must be accessible to a researcher.

So, I want to know, do you have any inspiring case studies to share? What communities would you like to know more about?

Please feel free to spread this call for help widely, and contact me to discuss on bridget.mckenzie@flowassociates.com

 

Five years left to cry in?

This is a reflective extension of the talk I gave at Pat Kane’s wonderful (stimulating, fun, coherent…) conference Play’s the Thing: Creative Approaches to Wellbeing. I was asked to give a practical guide on how creative and cultural approaches can be applied to communities. Wellbeing, especially in terms of health and social care, is not my specialism so I felt a little ill equipped. Also, some may ask why I focused my talk on climate and ecology? That’s because I think that human wellbeing depends entirely on a flourishing planet, and that given the dire predictions of thermogeddon within even our children’s life span, I think we can only really feel well if we turn to the purpose of averting this prospect. (I was speaking alongside Marek Kohn, who talked of our duty to future generations in the face of the climate crisis, so I was responding to his talk.) My approach may not seem to address how we ensure the wellbeing of the more vulnerable or excluded in our society, and indeed, I was gently accused of taking a rather middle class stance. However, I don’t see a conflict here: Sustainability, equality and care for others go hand in hand.

One response to the crisis is to ‘get to a place of safety’ and create small self-sufficient communities there. People who do this are called ‘Doomers’. This is an entirely legitimate response and their experiments in living can be very informative for us. However, it’s not open to most of us who need or who want to stay where we feel at home. I wonder if we might use a new term of Loomer, a more optimistic kind of Doomer. Loomers look to a difficult future looming but they also weave sustainability into the fabric of their own places. Weaving or looming is also a good metaphor for wellbeing because Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his research for his book Flow, found that weaving was consistently the activity cited as creating the most flow, or optimum engagement. It perfectly combines tradition and novelty, comfort and challenge.

So, here’s a summary of the key points I was making in my talk, and also here are my slides (as there were lots of pics).

Time: We don’t have as much of it as we might think. When I was 18 I smoked, thinking it was more important that I was seen to be like others, and that I had plenty of time left to worry about my health. I used to listen to David Bowie, and Five Years was a favourite song. I used to wonder, whimsically, whether there would come a time when we really did have five years left, because ‘earth was really dying’. Well, it turns out that at this point we do have five years left to reduce emissions drastically (to 5-9% year on year) if we want to avert thermogeddon. (Andrew Simms and Marek Kohn also made the same point.) I pointed out that it’s not just a case of reducing CO2 but tackling all the planetary boundaries as they interact with each other. Existing systems are not equipped to bring about this change, so the overall system needs overhauling. That’s a massive challenge. But, how will we feel in 5 years if that hasn’t happened?

We have no higher authority: Homer Simpson is often left alone, drunk in charge of the nuclear power station. We’re all ordinary guys, in charge of this planet. It’s up to us. There is nobody in higher authority over our governing institutions, which are made up of ordinary people. So, the system change must be about generating that higher authority in our common consciousness. We all have a contribution to make. As Tim de Christopher says “We think we have no power when in fact we have more than enough power”.

What’s my contribution? I talked about the difficulties of persuading cultural organisations to turn their mission towards sustaining life on the planet, for example, explaining to Tate why it is not ethical for them to accept sponsorship by BP. I also talked about my research towards a book, The Learning Planet, and about the theories of Flow that inform our company’s work. I’m also inspired by the work around the Common Cause Values and Frames initiative, to explore the contribution of the cultural sector to change our cultural values, or our deep frames.

What is the root issue our practice should address? The root problem is equating wellbeing with wealth. To attain wealth, we blind ourselves to or veil evidence of ecocide.

So, what are some tactics to address this? Note that my tactics place an emphasis on design, as I think it’s the creative form most suited to tackle problems yet the least discussed in gatherings about the arts. Also, I include discussion of companies in thinking about communities, as they are potentially the same thing: a collective of people for the production of common goods.

- Not pussyfooting about the difficult stuff but unveiling the ecocide. People are much happier if they can explore difficult issues and be helped to take action, even if it’s small actions, to make things better.

- Bringing fun and discomfort more closely together. I showed an example of this device that places a goldfish in a transparent water supply so it gives you a clear emotional choice whether to save water or let your pet die.

- Turning the bad into good. An update on turning guns into ploughshares is to turn carbon into a useful energy-saving material. For example, see this carbon-coated ploughshare that reduces energy use by cutting more easily through earth.

- Companies have the influence: Governments of rich nations are already giving up on the Kyoto Protocol and many care more about the interests of super-corporations than their citizens. We should focus more attention on persuading supercorps to turn towards eco-innovation, and leading by example, creating our own eco-innovative community companies. We all love Apple for their user-friendly and aesthetic design, and have made them very rich, but they are really not very green. We need to help them become more so. Philips is a more positive example: Their EcoVision5 seems on the surface to be quite a typical sustainability statement, but their product design experiments are inspirational. My father-in-law, Noel McKenzie, was chief engineer for Philips in the days of VCRs. We have to remember that companies are made up of our friends and family, people who have friends and family. We need to appeal to their humanity if we find them wanting.

- Create companies in our communities: In my neighbourhood of New Cross Gate/Telegraph Hill, we’ve created a charity called Bold Vision, as an incubator for a number of small-scale regeneration initiatives. One is the Hill Station, a cafe and arts centre, with a big emphasis on learning about food. Another is the Common Growth garden, not just for growing food but growing knowledge. Another is the New Cross People’s Library, running the library closed by Lewisham council, with a vision to become an arts and literacy centre. Transition New Cross intersects with all these initiatives. Culture is a really important aspect of Bold Vision. For example, we’ve ‘reinvented’ the ancient traditions of solstice parades particular to our area, with Garlick Man in summer (as the area was Plowed Garlick Hill) and the Night of the Beasts in winter. The idea is that these celebrations will become traditions in the future – we’re spooling heritage out forwards. If we are to think in longer horizons, we need to imagine a long future stretching before us.

- Exploit urban spaces: One project that inspires us at Bold Vision is the Farm:shop in Dalston, with its combination of artistic practice and pragmatic design for living. It is, literally, a farm in a shop, using hydroponics and aquaponics and keeping animals on the roof. They show how we can grow food in unused spaces without needing to use land as extensively as we might think. It exemplifies what Alex Steffen says, we can live sufficiently in cities and restore more of the land.

- Restore rather than exploit wilderness land: Woollen Line is a great example of imaginative and community-based ways to restore the land, and also a great example of ‘looming’. Artist Pip Woolf invites volunteers to gather unusable sheep’s wool from Black Mountain hillsides, and to make sausages or weave nets to lay on top of the peat. The top layer of peat in this part of the Black Mountain has been destroyed by fire, losing its ability to store carbon and water. It needs protecting as grass won’t easily grow back.

- Use art to reflect on building a community: Nowhereisland is another artist project where the top surface of land has been removed. There was some media fuss about this Artists Taking the Lead/Olympics project because it cost £500k. A tiny rock island exposed by Arctic melt has been towed down to English shores. Yes, it is a lot of money but now it’s spent we can make use of it to stimulate learning about citizenship and future worlds. It’s a notional state, a metaphor for a new world, and a provocation about what this world could be if we ran it. You can become a citizen and have a stake in its constitution.Hopefully it will also expose other initiatives, like the Seasteading institute, imagining and designing ways we can live with rising sea levels. Their designs are currently still in virtual form but they are not metaphorical (unlike Nowhereisland, despite its rocky reality). The group are serious about wanting to build seagoing villages.

- Use art as emotional connection: A powerful example is The Water is Rising, a USA tour of 36 performers from Tuvalu. Tuvalu is the first sovereign nation likely to be lost to rising seas. Everyone sings and dances here, so they are making full use of their resources to connect with us. The people of Tuvalu are very concerned to preserve and promote their cultural heritage in the face of a permanent tour, their inevitable future escape to a place of safety. We can connect with them because all of us, in some way or other, has been or is going to be detached from the land (or habitat, a healthy ecosystem). Our human creativity and technology will be a layer we need to weave together to protect our knowledge and heal the land, as the Woollen Line shows.

So, the turn will take place because of people, working to change the systems at the level of companies, local communities and cultural organisations. I suggested we’re all like Homer Simpson, dim ordinary drunks in charge of the planet, but we’re not all that dim really. Some people are incredible and we need to fund, treasure and learn from them. For one of many examples, look at Theo Jansen, who makes creatures who walk powered by wind.

An emerging theme at Play’s the Thing was this: The pursuit of happiness will be fruitless and labyrinthine, whereas the happiness of pursuit will bring rewards. Indy Johar said we should talk less of wellbeing and more about how to live with purpose. I agree with that wholeheartedly, but the key is in how we craft our pursuits so that they are open enough to allow us to play and explore. We can change cultures towards sustainability not by making machines or systems with narrow goals to change culture, but by helping people to imagine and make with as much openness as possible, with as much awareness of the context in which we live as is possible.

 

Prototype Green School

I’m planning my research for my project/book The Learning Planet. There are an awful lot of places I could visit, all around the world, and I’m very aware that it would be environmentally irresponsible to go to all of them. I can do a lot of learning without visiting. But one place that seems really amazing is The Green School in Bali. It aims to be the number one model for education for sustainability in the world.

Here’s a little extract from their website to show why that is:

“We believe that if we are going to serve as a model of responsibility, Green School must be a nursery for ecologically friendly technologies and ideas. Every day, our students will be able to live within and think about environmental concerns in disciplines ranging from mathematics to current events. We will also sponsor pilot projects, such as testing plastic bags as materials with which to pave roads as well as other new recycling technologies. In addition, we are experimenting with ways to assess CO2 sequestration and to measure what we produce. Our intention is to share our research with companies, schools, and organizations interested in reducing and eliminating CO2 production.”

The school is not a place for the inputting of received knowledge but a laboratory, a factory, a farm, a creative studio led by the children.

Fruiting Bodies

I’ve just completed laying out our Fruiting Bodies cabinet of curiosities. This artwork is collaboration by me, my daughter Megan and my partner Brian. Megan has made some amazing woodland sprite figures from fallen branches, and Brian has made a wonderful tree-human figure lying flat on a lower shelf of the cabinet made from smooth symmetrical slices of beautifully marbled diseased wood. The brain is made from a gnarled knot, and the feet are spreading out roots. I’ve gathered some words, photographs and natural specimens into a cabinet. All three of our contributions work together in layers. It will be on display every weekend throughout September as part of the Woodland Wonders exhibition, part of the Open Cities festival, in Nunhead Cemetery in SE15.

Please do come and see it, and wander round the Cemetery too. If you come 3-4th or 10th-11th you can also visit the Unextinction Machine in the Hill Station nearby, by Brian and Megan McKenzie. If you feel moved to support an organisation that helps keep trees healthy in cities, you could sponsor me as I’m running the Tree-athlon for Trees for Cities.

I’m sharing the writing element here:

King Alfred’s cakes, cramp balls, coal fungus, honey mushroom, shoestring root rot, artist’s conk, heart rot ash, shaggy bracket, chicken-of-the-woods, brittle cinder, carbon cushion.

Phytophthora lateralis, Ophiostoma novo-ulmi,  Ceratocystis platani…

The old fruiting bodies have poetic names. The new diseases are harder to say, harder to take.

This ‘wunderkammer’, or cabinet of curiosity, pulls together fragments of writing, photographs, sculptures and specimens. Maybe it’s a gentle wind in the trees, rustling the leaves, calling you to look up and see trees differently, and, to see them change.

Harmful diseases in trees are accelerating due to changes caused by human actions. Combined with forest fires, stronger storms, logging and pollution, Earth’s tree cover is depleting faster than we can replace it.

We are used to thinking that human disease is the biggest problem and that being a hero is all about arresting human death. We see trees thrust, full of life, out of this earth where our old fellows lie. We can’t see their fragility.

There is a growing movement of people opting for natural burials. The idea of this movement is that you become a nutrient system for the trees.

When people have a near death experience they report leaving their body, rising up to the ceiling and looking down on themselves on their near-death bed. As a child I had some teeth out under general anaesthetic. I remember rising up into a long spiral tunnel then looking down on myself, sweat in my hair, mouth wedged open. I heard recently that children can die under general anaesthetic. The angel of death hovers very near, even when our solutions in contemporary science seem foolproof.

Imagine human consciousness rising up, minds together, to look down upon ourselves in our planetary sick bed. We would be very confused. We’d see that our species has found its way everywhere and seems to be thriving. True, here and there, in some parts of the world we see famine and desperation.

But on the whole, the human species is too many and is crazed all over the planet, eating much of it rotten. It looks fine to most of us when we are close to the surface, as most of us are eating and some of us are very fat. The leaves still come green each summer. But we are hollowing it out, and soon it may suddenly fall.

We are pests.

We have viewed too many forms of life as a pest. But we have not eradicated pests because we have created the conditions for some pests to thrive. When you read about borers, moths and beetles attacking trees, the story often goes that the pest is ‘imported on vehicles or packing cases’. You also see ‘worse spreading in cities’ or, ‘due to increased temperatures and humidity’.

We can see the horse chestnut trees in this cemetery and all over London weakening, with their yellow leaves. They are hit by a double whammy of drought, bleeding canker and the leaf miner moth.

“Like all living things, trees are susceptible to disease. A tree needs a good supply of light, water, carbon dioxide and nutrients from the environment for optimum growth. A lack of one or more of these may lead to reduced growth and put the tree under stress. If a tree is stressed then it may not have the energy required to manufacture important defences and can become vulnerable to disease.” (The Royal Forestry Society)

Try replacing ‘tree’ with ‘child’: “A child needs a good supply…” You only need to replace carbon dioxide with oxygen. Trees and humans give each other the elements they need.

Symbiosis

Mutuality

Breathing together

Disease factors are complex and cumulative. A tree could be weakened by drought, by soil erosion or by wounds from storms, and then become subject to a fungal attack. Changed temperatures due to global warming may lead to intense infestations of pests. Chemical pollution and ozone depletion may play a part. As with humans, if one disease is present, another may move in.

Tree Fungi can be: Harmful (pathogenic), Non-harming (saprotrophic) or Helpful (symbiotic)

One reason why trees came to thrive is the start of a symbiotic relationship between trees and a fungus in the roots, about 400 million years ago. With this mutually beneficial infection called Mycorrhizae, the fungus eats the sugars produced by the tree during photosynthesis. In return, the fungus enhances the ability of the tree to draw up water and soil nutrients.

Mychorrhizae allow trees of diverse species to connect with each other. From a mother tree, strands of the fungus spread out to others, providing water and nutrients from tree to tree according to the needs of each.

The evolution of trees is a primary reason for the relative stability of Earth’s climate and its landmasses, allowing for Earth’s immense biodiversity of life and for one particular species, Homo Sapiens, to thrive. Without symbiotic fungi, this would not have happened.

Non-harming or saptotrophic fungus causes wood to rot. If you walk off the paths in the Cemetery, you can walk on a raft of fallen wood, concealed by weeds, bouncing and sometimes breaking where it is rotted. The rot mixes with leaves to make soil that covers the gravestones. Dust to dust.

The ones to watch are the harmful or pathogenic fungi, which are like viral or bacterial infections. They will weaken and kill the tree they infect.

Sudden Oak Death is a bacterial infection affecting both pedunculate and sessile oaks, the two species of native oaks. It is not yet in Nunhead Cemetery but it is spreading and jumping species. Infected trees bleed, then areas of bark die, followed by rapid die back and death within five years. It could be England’s tragedy.

In Victorian times, there was no panic about the health of trees, only of humans. Cholera was considered an English tragedy, an infection that spread in cities due to poor sanitation. It was believed that disease was generated spontaneously from filth and transmitted by invisible gas or ‘miasma’. Old, crowded cemeteries were thought to be rife with miasma, spurring the building of new cemeteries out of town like this one. Cleanliness came to be next to godliness.

In fact, although cholera was frightening, most people died of other causes, especially to do with food: alcoholism, malnutrition and chronic food poisoning. Myths and misunderstandings continue today about the causes and solutions for disease. We imagine moral or political causes, but as ever, the reasons relate to how we treat the soil, what we put in the air and what we put in our mouths.

‘Arts funding’ and ‘a creative and critical life’

Originally posted May 2010:

Today the media will be reporting announcements from the Minister for Culture, Olympics, Media & Sport, Jeremy Hunt, on the new Con-Dem Government’s priorities and funding decisions for DCMS. Their reports will be headlined as ‘arts funding’, the arts sector will be asked to comment and the uninvited responses from the arts sector will circulate. ‘The arts’ is often used as a synecdoche for heritage, tourism, museums, archives, libraries, creative industries & arts (give or take sport).

It seems that ‘the arts’ is used in preference because ‘culture’ is seen as too vague a term. True, ‘culture’ is a floating category. Its meanings can be so relative they can become opposed: It means ‘sort of heritage and broader’ to the arts sector and then ‘sort of arts and creativity’ to the heritage sector. To anyone outside those two poles it means ‘sort of everything that humans do and what ties a people together’. Maybe it would help if we could agree new terms for our sectors and domains of activity, that help us be both more inclusive and also more precise. Maybe these terms could also be set within a framework that helps us rethink and advocate the value of culture?

Bill Ivey has noted the problem that ‘the arts’ is too narrow and ‘culture’ is too broad.  The effect of this seems to him (especially in the US) to put arts or culture projects at the bottom of the funding pile. He has come up with the model of ‘the Expressive life’ as a more inclusive and singular definition of arts and culture which helps with their advocacy. In the UK, this has been published in a DEMOS pamphlet and in the latest RSA magazine. I appreciate what he is aiming to do but not sure that his model hits the mark, for our cultural institutions and attitudes. Instead I propose something which still needs to be properly named, which I call for now ‘a creative and critical life’. I will have to write in more detail about it, but in short it goes beyond the notion of an ‘expressive life’, because it places more emphasis on knowledge (e.g. the assets in our collections or, more broadly, the importance of enquiry). My proposal includes lifting the assumption that ‘heritage’ means things that are conservative and old-fashioned, to a more positive meaning: ‘caring for, using and reinventing what we have’. It also recognises our integration with nature (or rather it includes the notion of ‘biosphere capital’). Ivey has created the Expressive Life model to advocate the arts/culture to compete against funding for the environment or health, whereas I think the future for the arts is to integrate it into work towards biosphere and human wellbeing.

I have heard frequently that Conservatives describe culture as ‘a nice to have’, not essential. If we can demonstrate and enact culture as a vital force for environmental (and therefore human) wellbeing, that’s a bit more than a ‘nice to have’. The argument will then revolve around why Government should give it public subsidy, if there is a market demand for culture. My answer would be that the market can’t enable the kind of shift that is needed to make culture such a powerful force. (Woops, I’ve slipped into using ‘culture’. I mean ‘a creative and critical life’ or something like that. Suggestions welcome.)

Children as our teachers

Originally posted December 2009:

Frank Furedi in ‘Turning Children into Orwellian Eco-Spies’ warns that there are resonances of Stalinism in the new orthodoxy by which we use children to teach adults about climate change. I have concerns about the same phenomenon but I’m coming from very different perspectives on both education and the environment. I’ve also had qualms when meeting people who are convinced that the solution to climate change is to educate children. The reasons for my qualms are many: It’s too late to wait until children are running the world; they can’t vote until 18 so if we should focus on educating anyone it’s the late middle-aged and elderly, who make up the majority of voters;  it doesn’t seem fair to put the onus on children. The main reason I baulk is that The Government’s reductive and misguided response to every problem (the root cause of which is usually gross inequality or unchecked capitalism) is to add yet another subject to the curriculum. Firstly these expensive initiatives are based on a misconception, that children will learn by being taught a lesson, by teachers who have been told to deliver compulsory lessons. Secondly, every time a new lesson is added, the less time there is for learning that might help children adapt to a difficult future.

Furedi has written a book called ‘Wasted, Why Education isn’t Educating’ in which he decries the erosion of traditional disciplines by endless additions of trendy topics (for example in the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum). In the article he says that environmentalism is infecting every subject, such as geography and history (as if they’re not utterly relevant to those subjects). I’m not concerned so much about the death of traditional disciplines in schools, but more that those in power are so wedded to the idea of subjects per se, old or new, that they continually add more to the diet. I’m not so concerned that the environment is infecting every subject, than that ecological systems thinking has been and still is so absent from education. Furedi conflates environmental topics with ‘scare-mongering’, but, on the contrary, effective environmental education is not about frightening people. It is about empowering them, helping them develop adaptive coping strategies. The more that is understood about a frightening scenario, the more people are able to resist and cope.

I suspect that if we framed school learning differently, whereby children had more involvement in deciding what enquiries are relevant, they would decide pretty quickly that the environment is pretty relevant. If we made clear to them that learning is about preparing for the future, that to live well in the future they would need to learn how to solve problems, co-operate, access knowledge and design new solutions, they would gravitate towards the biggest problems. Furedi’s position is that our current education philosophies undermine the authority of adults. I believe that adults (in affluent societies) have eroded their own authority by becoming infantilised, yet we form myths around the gravity and arduousness of an adult working life. We underestimate the ability of children and young people to think because we have forgotten how to think ourselves. We have progressed into a state of mature denial, treating problems too abstractly, too much in isolation and too much as issues for agonistic debate.

The Rose Review of the National Curriculum

Update note in 2011: It’s interesting to go through the process of deciding whether old posts have any current validity, or whether the fact that they are so out of date gives them a certain interest value. This one is interesting because, although the Rose Review was accepted by the last Government and the changes to the Primary Curriculum were about to be implemented in Autumn 2010, it was rejected by the current Government. We are now awaiting the results of Gove’s more comprehensive review of the English National Curriculum, which will be very different from the recommendations of Rose.

I originally posted this in December 2008:

Jim Rose’s interim report of the Review of the Primary Curriculum has been published. Comments are invited by the end of February to inform the final review. Before reading it, I read the Guardian piece which announced an end to history (though not in the Francis Fukuyama sense). This said that Rose proposed replacing subjects with broad areas of learning. I thought that sounded a little unlikely.

I also heard a crack-of-dawn Radio 4 story, in which Stephen Heppell was interviewed about the Rose Review. The interviewer asked Heppell something like ‘So surely primary-aged children can’t cope with research. They need to be taught subjects and given some facts first, don’t they?’ Heppell replied by describing some wonderful creative enquiry-based learning which showed how valid such an approach is. Children (and adults) learn so much more effectively by projects that are focused on solving a problem, working collaboratively, using a range of tools and skills, and crossing into different knowledge fields, as appropriate to the problem. I was heartened. If this is what Rose was promoting then, hallelulah!

In fact, the report doesn’t mention methods of organising learning, simply saying that pedagogy is up to teachers. It doesn’t refer at all to enquiry-based learning. It says that there are four main approaches to delivering the curriculum: By subject; by broad area of learning; by skills; and by themes. Whereas most countries tend to focus on one approach, most often choosing ‘areas of learning’, the report favours mixing them based on Rose’s observation of successful schools. It doesn’t advocate doing away with discrete subject teaching, as The Guardian reported, but combining this with cross-disciplinary teaching. Of course, that’s what happens in many schools. This is really about disseminating the practice seen in successful schools, where they don’t exhaust themselves trying to teach every subject separately and to the letter. As such it is a restatement of the 2004 DfES Excellence and Enjoyment report.

That said, the final report is likely to see a stronger presentation of a new curriculum structure. It suggests that more work is needed now to describe a new framework in which subject teaching would underpin the following six broad areas of learning: Understanding English, communication and languages; Mathematical understanding; Scientific and technological understanding; Human, social and environmental understanding; Understanding physical health and well-being; Understanding the arts and design. This structure would replace the current separation between Core subjects (English, Maths & Science) and the Foundation subjects, which makes sense, and means that in fact there could potentially be more history and geography, as Science would not be a Core subject and there would be less repetition of science learning at KS2 & KS3. One thing that may raise questions is the inclusion of ‘environmental’ in the Human & Social area of learning. Either ‘environmental’ is implicit in Scientific and Technological area of learning, or it is a separation, implying that science and technology is knowledge that overcomes and exploits the environment. Let’s hope that ecological thinking has a place across all the areas of learning, in the sense of understanding complex systems.

The new structure would place ‘core’ emphasis on Literacy, with Speaking & Listening acknowledged as crucial, a more multimodal approach to literacy and also ICT enhanced and integrated more into other learning. I find this is a really sensible approach. But, it needs to go further now.

To influence the next phase I would like to see an injection of some of Futurelab’s and Stephen Heppell’s thinking, evident in their Beyond Current Horizons research for DCSF. This is due out in Spring 2009 and will argue for an improved comprehension of ‘systems thinking’. The best way to achieve this, I believe, would be to ensure that a new curriculum structure is supported by investment in CPD and pedagogical action research which transforms learning into creative enquiry.