Education has always been the driver of political change to remove environmental barriers to human betterment and in the late 1980s, when I was giving public lectures on education, ecology and culture, the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate evaluated the Cardiff environmental studies course as the basis for a new subject about world development in their international GCSE. This assessment of the conservation curriculum I had set up in the university had been prompted by the Duke of Edinburgh, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who in 1986 had directed UCLES to come up with a cross-curricular subject as a UK contribution to world development education. I met with the UCLES team at a headteacher’s conference in Cardiff and joined a group of Cambridge advisors and teachers which eventually turned the joint honours ‘environmental studies degree syllabus into the GSCE school subject 'natural economy'. Natural economy was launched in 1991 as a part of the Cambridge University International GCSE examination system, the first example of a school syllabus being created to promote thinking about the future of a globalised humanity.
Although this period coincided with the creation of a root and branch educational reform to create a UK national school curriculum, there was no widespread demand for change with respect to the limitations of ‘traditional subjects’. However, natural economy was taken up by UK schools within the independent sector and by European schools taking the International Baccalaureate. Namibia and Nepal adopted it under guidance from UCCLES as a subject to replace geography and biology at A level; using practical examples of these country’s cross subject issues of economic development. The design was consciously interdisciplinary drawing on, for example, Biology, Economics, Geography and Anthropology and focusing on real-life situations, contexts and behaviours. It promoted the teaching of skills of systems thinking which was a key element of the original syllabus. The examination, now called environmental management’, attracts thousands of candidates mostly from ‘international schools’.
My involvement with these cross-curricular matters of education coincided with the development of educational technology which I promoted in the department as a way of teaching large numbers of students in small spaces, giving staff time for small group tutorials. Then came the advent of personal computers with several research initiatives being taken up in Wales. In this connection and in an effort to reach a wider range of students I worked with the European Community’s Schools Olympus Satellite Education Programme based in North Wales on the Isle of Anglesey. The nearby Cwm Idwal mountain national nature reserve was used as a practical model for demonstrating conservation management as the practical element of natural economy beamed across Europe. A partnership was formed between the University of Wales, the UK Government's Overseas Development Administration and the World Wide Fund for Nature to produce a cultural ecology model of Nepal with the help of a sponsorship from British Petroleum. An interoperable CD version of natural economy for computer-assisted learning was created in the Department of Zoology at Cardiff with a grant from DG11 of the EC. This work was transferred to the Natural Economy Research Unit (NERU), which was set up in the National Museum of Wales in the late 1980s. The fundamental educational philosophy behind SCAN in the 1990s was to promote a practical move towards a more locally based and neighbourhood-focused education. Yet it is only now being accepted that this is the only practical route to move people towards sustainable behaviours.
Interdisciplinary knowledge and know-how about making and operating community action plans for sustainable living are bound together with locality. Community cannot be distinguished from locality because it is locality, in terms of such factors as history, demography and income, that sets the agenda for how the community functions.
At this point it is worth defining the above interdisciplinary area of citizen participation in neighbourhood action, which is wider than natural economy or environmental management. There are two meanings of natural when referring to economy:
· Being in a state regarded as primitive, uncivilized, or unregenerate.
· Of, relating to, or concerning nature, e.g. a natural environment.
In the first instance, 'a natural economy' defines a money-free barter system by which a producer exchanges his goods and services for others which he cannot produce. In the second instance 'the natural economy' refers to the managed processes by which various kinds of natural assets are acquired as raw materials to their final preparation for consumption or marketing. The working definition of ‘natural economy’ for the Cambridge syllabus was ‘the organisation of nature for production.’
Where does politics fit in? From the time of the Brandt 1980 report it has been clear that all nations have to cooperate more urgently in international management of the atmosphere and other global ‘commons’ and in the prevention of irreversible ecological damage. This political imperative was embedded in the environmentalism surrounding the Rio Earth Summit and the Agenda 21 which extends actions from government to families, individuals and communities, which all have a role to play. This can only happen through participatory governance within the local political economy. Political economy deals with the laws governing the production and distribution of goods and services, in other words the organisation of people for production. It was John Ruskin who brought political economy into line with modernism by insisting that production and consumption patterns should be re-drawn in a way that would create a just and fair society. His vision was of a society that allowed individuals to achieve a higher plane of being or wholeness (a “felicitous fulfilment of function”). Most importantly, he sought to prove that the political economists employed faulty reasoning and the implausible concept of economic man to prevent the emergence of this just society and the associated ‘whole’ or perfected man. Political economy and natural economy are then two sides of the coin of universal human betterment and are encompassed within two-way interactions between culture and ecology. It is in this politicised area that environmentalism entered politics under labels like conservation, or public health, preservation of nature, smoke abatement, municipal housekeeping, occupational disease, air pollution, water pollution, home ecology, animal protection or many other topic areas.
Actually, the practical outcome of cultural ecology is the making of community action plans for environmental improvements by managing local ecosystem services . The CMS Consortium, which develops and promotes the use of software databasing for planning and recording biodiversity management plans, linked up with several UK communities through their local authorities to test the suitability of the CMS software package for volunteers carrying out environmental improvements. The most successful effort came from the small Suffolk village of Parham, which adopted a community version of the CMS to carry out a village environmental appraisal to celebrate of the millennium and used the CMS to make a biodiversity action plan to manage hedgerows, ponds and three village greens. Suggestions for simplifying the CMS professional package for volunteers resulted in a community management system based on a PC network of electronic diaries.