Cross-curricular Economics

As a park, my wild gardens have become part of the economy of local government. Their cost as an amenity is mostly accounted for through occasional planting and felling, and the need to maintain relatively dry footpaths through a waterlogged swamp. It was this particular aspect of social care that alerted me to the need for a new subject centred on the accounting systems required to incorporate inventories of wild things into market economics. When I first arrived in Cardiff to head the University of Wales’ zoology department it was a time when ecologists were taking their first halting steps into conservation management. Up until this time, nature conservation had been concerned with listing, and fencing habitats under threat from development. The next phase was to create appropriate management systems with clear, measurable targets, milestones and performance indicators. This was in the late 1960s. Pollution was then a relatively new target for legislation, and people were beginning to think about its long-term effects on human health through toxic materials entering the food chain. Young people were getting particularly concerned about these environmental issues, and one of my first efforts in this direction was to provide facilities in the departmental office for my students to produce a magazine, the ‘Welsh Environment Journal’. WEG consisted of fact-finding articles and statistical information about current national and local environmental issues, which was gathered by student-reporters in their spare time. It is significant of that era that it was seen as a valuable new information package by local Members of Parliament.

WEG led eventually to my launch of a new cross-departmental course within the General Honours Degree entitled ‘Environmental Science’. It literally covered the A-Z of the Faculty of Science (Archeology to Zoology) and included metallurgy and engineering to give an applied perspective. Roath Park’s wild-gardens were my first cross-curricular ecological model developed to focus the variety of inputs to urban ecosystems that have to be managed for wildlife to survive. Roads surround the site, from which the vegetation took up the lead in petrol exhausts; the stream through its centre received the oily run-off from the road surfaces; and a small industrial estate further upstream, occasionally turned the stream a bright orange. Finally, the fact that it exists at all is related to the deep geology of this part of Britain. It is partly fed by a deep upwelling of lukewarm water, which surfaces as a small shallow pond about a quarter of a mile away called St Denis’ Well. The source is a volcanic fault that runs from South Wales, to the Avon Gorge at Bristol, and on to Bath. At Bath the Romans developed the hot water for their Imperial bathing complex. To the north of Cardiff, its water was tapped to serve the short-lived 18th century spa of Taff’s Well.

St Denis’ Well was a medieval site locally famous for curing various female ailments. In fact the name Denis relates to the old god of fertility, Dionysius, or Pan. It suggests this small piece of wetland used to have a pre-Christian significance in the local farming community out of all proportion to its present relative neglect by the hundreds of commuters who now surge around it twice a day, unseeing, in their cars. My department used to visit the pond as a source of invertebrates for teaching first year students the elements of taxonomy and fresh-water biology. Because of its constant temperature it could be guaranteed to provide specimens in all stages of development, at all times of the year. However, zoology is no longer a fashionable subject, and laboratory technicians tend a battery of DNA analysers in the school of biomedical sciences. Chemical robots, not microscopes, have eclipsed the wonder of live animals too small to see with the naked eye.

The wild-gardens/St Denis’ well complex was very probably part of an early cultural survival kit of beliefs maintained by the first settlers associated with the rath- a Celtic fortress from which ‘Roath’ is said to be derived. This reminds me that the first humans had to know their land intimately to ensure continuity from generation to generation. As they grew slowly into cultures by developing its natural economy, they looked upon the land not as its possessor but as a companion. To achieve this, they cultivated intimacy with their immediate environment as with a fellow human. They remembered their daily progression through a limited small world; they walked it, ate from its soils and from the animals that ate its plants, gave its rocks and springs names associated with gods and saints. They knew its winds; they smelled its biology, observed the sequence of its flowers through the seasons, and the places where particular animals could be found. Making little impact, St Denis’ people were inscribed gently into their surroundings.

The early inscribed cultures of Roath have now become the relatively vast constructive cultures of the capital city of Cardiff, changing their environment by digging and building, squabbling over every square metre time and time again. Constructive cultures have a way of life that ostracises nature. The consuming visions that drive them are of merchandisable timber, ploughable forest, grazable prairies, recoverable ores, dammable water, nettable fish, and now predominantly profit-making real estate on former useless saltmarsh. We can now only read descriptions of the worlds of the inscribed groups they displaced. Worldwide, the lands of inscribed communities have been totally destroyed in the name of constructive natural economy, often to increase the wealth of people who don't live there. The first historians of preindustrial societies saw landscapes with a less acquisitive frame of mind. However, their extensive first-hand knowledge was ultimately regarded as a kind of decorative information for academic study or entertainment only. It was taken as a series of puzzles for specialists to elucidate and isolate in university subjects. The information was never taken to be what it in fact is - a holistic, practical description of a fragile "home" where we could be at ease with the planetary forces.

To be inscribed into the land is to enclose it in the same moral universe we occupy, and so include it in the meaning of the word 'community". For constructive groups to have a sense of community they must have, at the very least, knowledge of what is inviolate about the relationship between themselves and the place where they live, and how the destruction of this relationship, or the failure to attend to it, wounds people.

At St Denis’ Well the resources from the 'planetary', 'solar' and 'animate' economies converge on a small body of water, in contact with urban affluence when the bungalow-girted island is used people out for a walk or a jog. The management of these primeval resources for production defines its 'natural economy'. As a subject, natural economy traces the local flows of materials and energy in societies that come from resources existing in, or produced by nature, which are transformed into commodities; the surplus being brought to market, purchased, consumed and discarded. This is a single educational matrix for humanity and its uses of the rest of nature. It maps nature as a tightly integrated economic system, and provides reasons why economic expansion cannot go on indefinitely.

It was in the early 1970s, after I had delivered a lecture on the Roath Park model of natural economy, that someone approached me from the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate. It appeared that the Duke of Edinburgh in his role of Chancellor of the University had pushed the Syndicate to initiate a new subject dealing with world development. As a consultant to the Syndicate working with Cambridgeshire’s teachers I provided the conceptual scaffold upon which natural economy was created as a subject in the university’s International General Certificate of Education. The philosophy behind natural economy is that human economies are nested in natural systems, and from this point of view 'human economics' is a subordinate sub-division of the 'biophysical economics' of nature. The term 'biophysical economics' is an economic metaphor to encompass the flows of energy from Sun to Earth, and its expressions in seasons, climate, weather, and living things. People are part of visible nature, and the economies of communities are the dominant factor in determining a society's interaction with the rest of nature.

Increasingly, through 'industrial development', human economies typically reward ecologically destructive practices. To sustain human economic development a counterbalancing knowledge system is needed that deals with all the ideas we use to understand ourselves, and our relations with the rest of nature. It should cross subject boundaries and trace all linkages between economies of human production and their resources.

In particular, it should draw together the physical laws of the inanimate economy. These govern interactions between the Earth's molten core and its surface and interactions between the Sun and the rotating Earth. Metaphorically, these interactions may be expressed, respectively, in the 'planetary economy' and the 'solar economy'. The biological laws of the third economic system, the animate economy, govern the evolution of food chains and webs, which includes humans within its scope.

Within this broad cross-subject framework, nature conservation is the practical outcome. It is a counterbalancing managerial response of governments and individuals to make markets more harmonious with the dynamics of biophysical economies. To this end, we protect and manage selected environments and species. We do this in order to match markets with ecosystems, which provide the natural resources for economic development, and are sources of environmental goods emanating from sites of amenity, scenic beauty, and nature study, that are non-marketable according to banker’s economics.

Natural economy deals with the technological regulation of natural resources, and its environmental impact. It is a complementary body of knowledge to 'political economy'. The latter deals with the legislative regulation of rewards for labour, the outlawing of extremes of mistreatment of people, and the functioning of markets, and the social consequences. The two economies provide the social setting for sustainable development and the broader concept of cultural ecology. Political economy is a respectable academic subject; natural economy is not!

The principles of sustainability are best taught by applying methods of environmental appraisal to the local consumer network in order to develop skills required to use the neighbourhood as an educational resource in order to gain knowledge and understanding about local consumer systems. Through environmental appraisal, experiences and responsibilities are gained relating to the active citizenship required to curb the needs and wants of consumers, and connect individuals and communities to their chains of consumerism with the aim of reducing the environmental costs of day-to-day actions. Active citizenship of this kind is necessary for long-term residency of Homo sapiens on our planet.

World leaders left the Rio Environment Summit in 1992 with the task of resolving the conflicts between economic competitiveness, social welfare, and care for the environment. The premise is that the only true wealth that can turn exploitation into residency, and greed into harmony, comes from the gathering and evaluation of local knowledge about ourselves as consumers partaking of a limited global cake. Governments can set guidelines, but the environmental crisis is not a crisis of policy, or of law, or of administration, but one of self-education. We cannot turn to institutions, to environmental groups, or to government. We must turn to each other to discover what is locally possible, and participate in the formation of plans for sustainable development.

Environmental appraisal is a participatory neighbourhood process by which communities can become involved with implementing the Rio strategies at a neighbourhood level. They can do this by identifying an important local problem; producing a vision of the future when the problem has been resolved; defining the issues, which are the main obstacles to producing a solution; creating strategic objectives, which overcome the obstacles; producing operational management plans to meet the strategic objectives; and monitoring the outcome of the operational plans in relation to targeting the vision of the future.

These are the practical aims of education for sustainability, the new topic framework to encourage confrontation with the problems, issues and challenges of neighbourhood consumerism. If the findings of environmental appraisal are applied by a person, group or community to plan, and manage, the consumption of environmental resources, environmental education actually works for the environment.

So, in my thoughts about the wild-gardens of Cardiff’s Roath Park on one day of a midwinter solstice I seem to have encompassed a potted academic biography. The brief account traces my thoughts on an insignificant piece of woodland to the truth that our multiple models of environmental management do not fit into a single coherent understanding. There are different ways of knowing that eclipse the materialistic tradition of thinking, and question the machine-like view of people and ecosystems. I will develop these themes to address some of the shortcomings of the conventional routes connecting knowledge, practice and belief. Basically, these old approaches are failing humanity because they omit a cosmology based on morality towards nature.