Collectives for Conservation

"A collective is a group of individuals who work together on a common project without relying on internal hierarchies. Collectives can be large or small. They might exist temporarily or over long periods, and membership in them is voluntary".

Collective acquisition of knowledge is common throughout different societies, from the collaborative advancement of human knowledge to the emergent behavior of ant colonies. The process of gthering knowlede is the product of individual agents, each with their own interests and constraints, sharing and accumulating learned knowledge over time.

Focussing on Flatbread

Global climate change has already had big observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner. This is happening against the backdrop of a loss of polar sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves. These changes are accelerating. Experts say that today's conditions (2021) are actually what their computer models predicted we would not see until 2090. Yet, we continue to promote a non adaptive education system designed over a century ago for living within a benign, diverse and resource-rich, stable environment.

The need for a robust and vibrant culture of seed diversity was one of the motivations that led Amy Franceschini and Futurefarmers to establish the Flatbread Society – a collective of farmers, artists, activists, scientists and other people involved in urban food production and preservation of the people’s commons. Since 2012, the group has been working on a permanent art installation which defines a “common” area on the waterfront development of Bjørvika in Oslo, Norway.

The term Installation art categorises innovative works that generate questions rather than being the outcome of crafting aesthetically pleasing objects. The Oslo installation consists of an urban farm, an allotment community, an ancient grain field and a bakehouse for making flatbread. The message is that flatbread can function as a social artefact: an ‘international currency’ to bring diverse cultures, defined by the food they eat, together for the common purpose of creating a culture of conservation.

https://we-make-money-not-art.com/the-seed-journey-to-preserve-plant-genetic-diversity/

The S.K.O.M.E.R. Collective

In 2016, Amy Franceschini was shortlisted in the Artes Mundi competition at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales. She travelled to Cardiff from Oslo by boat, retracing the migratory journey of seeds, to explore the politics of food production and the countries that our foods originate from. Her legacy was the idea that an installation can apply arts thinking to explain sustainability. In Wales. it led to the formation of the S.K.O.M.E.R Collective, linking art with science to demonstrate sustainability knowledge organised to manage environments responsibly.

The historical background is the history of breeding and processing of legumes and cereal crops that enabled the migration of Neolithic farmers from Scandinavia down the West coast of Britain, and now on into the future global carbon zero culture of humankind.

These migrations led to the imaginative transformation of ‘space’ to ‘environment', environment’ to ‘place’, and 'place' to belonging, which defines the educational realm of ‘cultural ecology’. Cultural ecology is an interdisciplinary, social concept. It contrasts the old sustainable relations of people to the land with the present-day worldwide scramble for scarce natural resources and the global environmental damage of unsustainable mass production. These days, everyone has their own mind map of cultural ecology, whereby sustainability knowledge is organised to manage the environment responsibly. These personal projects under the acronym S.K.O.M.E.R. chart the behavioural changes in the way the flows of materials and ideas between people, ecosystems and place are managed for smooth social continuity of belonging between generations.

Inspired by Futurefarmers and the Flatbread Society the S.K.O.M.E.R Collective is centred on a free forum entitled ‘Educating for Change’ for people to participate in creating a syllabus of radical hope .

Educating for change is necessary to equilibrate human demands with Earth’s limited capacity for regeneration. The message is that nature is a partner in food production, not an obstacle. Also, everyone is a farmer, preserving and cultivating the ‘seeds of knowledge’ for a future society that has to live sustainably. It is extremely unlikely that top-down teacher/pupil institutional instruction of the West will give way to bottom up individualised lifelong long learning. However, education leaders want students to have more autonomy, from what they learn, to how the classroom operates. With increasing recognition of the importance of transitioning students from school to an ever-changing outside world, it is argued that ‘student agency' must be the norm, not the exception.

Evolutionary humanism

Skomer is actually the name of a small offshore island marking the southernmost Welsh staging post of Neolithic migrations. The island and its prolific biodiversity was an educational blueprint for the pedagogy of evolutionary humanism. This idea emerged from Julian Huxley’s experience of Skomer’s wildlife inhabiting the deserted fields of its late Bronze Age farmers. Huxley, as UNESCO’s first director, carried these ideas of evolutionary humanism into the new organisation. Eventually they became the basis of its Man and the Biosphere programme launched in 1971, which aims to establish a scientific basis for the improvement of relationships between people and their environments,

Objective

The objective of Collectives For Conservation is to infiltrate subject silos of Western education at all levels with the cross-curricular, extramural, knowledge structure of cultural ecology. In this context, joining the Education for Change forum symbolises taking the first step in organising a personal body of knowledge for lifelong learning to meet targets of the 2030 sustainable development agenda.

In summary, the Collectives For Conservation Forum is an arena or hub for an international assembly of people of all ages. They are unified with the objective to share ideas and achievements about how to create a system of lifelong learning for adapting to the cultural changes arising from the global adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. So, by joining the forum people can make a contribution to the creation of a democratic syllabus of radical hope.