Commonwealth Of Nature
"We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
"This may not be the sexiest place to choose for a day out, but at the peak time of metamorphosis visitors become one with the wonders of nature just as they do on an East African safari".
---David Wheeler, site manager, talking to a group of children at the Welsh National Nature Reserve of Rhos Lawr-Cwrt
David's message was that if we can't protect the butterflies of this tiny Welsh microcosm of planet Earth there is no hope for humanity ever living in a stable equilibrium with non-human species.
This page was initiated through the work of David Wheeler who was the first to produce a professional conservation management plan for a butterfly, the rare Marsh Fritillary, that was based on the best professional format first promoted by the British Nature Conservancy Council. He began this work on the Welsh National Nature Reserve of Rhos Lawr-Cwrt in 1991. His aim was to understand, protect and expand the biodiversity of a nondescript collection of marshy fields, the relic of an ancient Welsh pastoral system, which was home to an amazing annual flight of a once common butterfly. His plan, developed over the next 23 years, has been used by the Conservation Management System Consortium for training countless wildlife managers in the United Kingdom and the wider world in the principles and practice of creating and operating wildlife management plans. His research into environmental management was also used as an introduction to making plans as part of the SCAN schools climate change network of the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.
Rhos Lawr-Cwrt- a special place
1 Cultural maps of meaning
Our ancestors of 4 Myr ago lived in a world as they found it and left it intact. Since these primeval times it is through culture that we have irreversibly transformed our physical, biological, social and informational environments to define human ecology. Humans of one generation bequeath a constructed world to the next generation, who, on average, alter it further before transmitting it to their successors. With the evolution of this new human ‘ecology of construction’, a transformation occurred in hominin morphology and life history. Humans are less sexually dimorphic than australopithecines, but we are larger, with relatively bigger brains. Our cortical regions, especially, have expanded and we pay the metabolic cost of these vital tissues and the long learning curve they promote. But we are still part of nature in everything we do.
2 Mindmap of ‘ecology of construction’
Humankind now has to face managing the dynamics of being an indivisible part of nature from shopping to kissing. This is the scope of cultural ecology, which developed at the interface between biology, geography and anthropology in the early 1970s. It was a time when applied ecology emerged as a profession aimed at understanding how plants, animals, microbes and people coexist spatially. The aim was to discover how the environment can be constructed socially and organised technically and ethically for sustainable production of all species. This requires a major cultural change by adopting a progressive sense of space, where place is the intersection of sets of social relations over particular spaces and the connections they make to elsewhere.
The first ecological models of the progressive relationship between environment and culture were native subsistence societies in Central America and Papua New Guinea. They illustrated the shift from local cultural beliefs and practices, developed in a pristine environment, to encompass external economic relations. New cultures were created based on commodity production with the adoption of wage labour and the pursuit of cash. Now that ancient cultures of self-sufficiency are extinct, all levels of education are increasingly focused on the ecology of construction expressed in the spatiality of human and other life forms. Spatiality is the outcome of the act of dwelling in or living permanently in a place comprising the habitats of all living things. Appropriate synomyms are inhabitancy, inhabitation; the hypernyms are occupancy, tenancy; and the hyponyms are cohabitation, living together.
To illustrate the generality of this habitat dynamic I have taken two Western cultural entities, the East Anglian village of Flixton and the farm of Rhos Lawr-Crwt in West Wales. I came to know these places through a series of random geographical collisions in my work as an applied ecologist. To me they present examples of what is called ‘third space’. These are spaces where two or more cultures have and are interacting with the production of place through a blending of historicality with sociality. They show that the study of ‘third space’ has to involve the perception of place, time, habitancy and ecological development as equal participants in the ecology of human existence. Third space is produced by the incorporation of spatial awareness into social processes based on a deep cultural understanding that we are one among many species. It is a space for the imagination to link humanity across generational and temporal boundaries.
Space is understood as ‘a creation’, ‘a site of production’ and ‘a site to be experienced and consumed’. In order to define a space, first we locate objects; we relate them to other objects and make spatial patterns; then we see how the objects and relationships are established by social processes to become part of a local culture. Finally, spaces become hybrids when it is realised that they are subject to contestation from different groups who want to redefine the meaning and boundaries. This blending occurs through socio-ecological management by people investing a place with social and spiritual power. In so doing they produce a ‘cultural map of meaning’. Such luminal islands of the spirit are used to make sense of the local environment in which natives and visitors are immersed practically and notionally. At any time, the primary factor changing a cultural map to deepen the spatiality of human life is the input of money beyond that which can be generated from the land itself. In the simplest possible terms, money is anything that can be exchanged for goods and services.
We cannot help making each place we encounter distinctive. Its part of our genetic endowment to embed ourselves in our immediate surroundings, often imposing idiosyncratic romantic and literary clichés on spaces with no claims to accuracy. It is this evolved property of humankind that impels us endow every being and every place with a particular spirit, known from ancient times as a ‘genius loci’. We cannot help giving beings and places a unique character. These personal endowments, together with all other personal choices we make contribute to what has been defined as an individual’s ‘existential essence’. Existential philosophy is interested in how human beings live, and make sense of where they live given the limitations of what it is to be human.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AVr5S9dIRA&feature=youtube_gdata
3 Rhos Lawr Cwrt
Rhos Lawr Cwrt can be accurately described as an absolute distinct physical reality. Its topography can be traced back ten thousand years or more to when the Welsh ice sheet melted revealing the outcomes of climate change in a complex surface of permafrost depressions and moraine ridges. As a geographical space it consists of 25 ha of wet, unimproved grassland, which goes under the generic name of 'rhos pastures'. This habitat is the outcome of a regional combination of high rainfall, thin soils, glacial topography and history of subsistence livestock-farming and was once abundant in the Ceredigion hills of West Wales. As the crow flies, the reserve is only about 10km from Cardigan Bay. The land rises steeply from the sea, and the dough-like folds of the hills, cut by the occasional ice-gouged valley, form an amphitheatre to the north and west.. The land which rises at the south-western end of the reserve is now bright green with improved grass swards, but it once belonged to the farm as seminatural rhos pasture.
It was singled out as a special place by David Wheeler, the Countryside Council for Wales' , manager of the site from the early 1990s into the 21at century. Under his management the site became well known internationally because it was selected as a model for training conservation management by the Conservation Management Consortium.
The reserve was notified as a special place when it was notified as an SSSI in 1979 and declared a National Nature Reserve in 1986, Wales’ only grassland ecological treasure. Owned and managed by the Countryside Council for Wales, it is also the site of one of the most exciting experiments in habitat restoration in Wales, which has the aim of converting the surrounding 25 ha of semi-improved rushy grassland back to rhos pasture. Because of its carefully researched action plan which is why the site is used widely for training conservation managers. It is a candidate Special Area of Conservation, designated under the EU Habitats Directive for its populations of Marsh Fritillary and Slender Green Feather-moss. At the time of its discovery by a roving scientist it was a rare wildlife habitat, part of a 230 acre farm called Llawrcwrt. Since 1983 it has been subjected to scientific study. Now, with its huge population of butterflies Rhos Llawr Cwrt is a small ecological island and a superlative example of the biodiversity that subsistence farmers could produce without actually knowing it!
The nature reserve, with its tracts of butterfly- and flower-rich wet meadows, and the evidence of glacial activity, feels timeless and ancient. With foreground of ancient banks and woods, the approaches to Llawrcwrt Farm yield only glimpses of the humps and bumps of the glacial landscape through which you are passing. Arrival at the farm itself is a moment to savour. Ancient stone built buildings, straddle a small rise in the valley floor. This is where two cultures, the old self-sufficent family hill farm and the modern government-backed national conservation agency; the farmers and the applied ecologists, meet and blend. History and natural history are deeply entwined at Rhos Llawr Cwrt. However, one glance at the surrounding hills destroys this sense of an unchanged landscape. They are bright green, gashed with plough lines and fences of intensive pastoral farming. The space of Rhos Llawr Cwrt reserve probes the hill in a tongue of textured browns and greens, an indication of what the surrounding hills would once have been like.
4 A living textured and contoured place
n theory, an understanding of ecology can help the historian to read the management history of a site like the pages of a book. Similarly, knowledge of a site's management history can explain its ecology. The theory usually breaks down in practice, partly from a lack of information, and the need for interdisciplinary skills that can put history and ecology together, but also because the 20th century has so comprehensively torn and scribbled all over the pages of ecological information which plant and animal communities represent.
First mentioned in 1214 in a charter granted to the Cistercian monks of Whitland by King John, Llawrcwrt combines the word 'court', which was often attached to monastic lands, and 'Llawr', meaning 'floor', or in this case the flat valley bottom. Although the fortunes of the monks declined, the foundations of the 13th century farm economy, based on sheep and cattle, have remained to this day.
The human population was almost completely dependent on farming, and on the natural resources available to them in the immediate area. Brown trout and even the odd Atlantic salmon could be caught in the streams; wood provided furniture, fuel and footwear (clog-making was an important local industry); and rushes were gathered for bedding, to make ropes and for rush lights.
Until the 19th century, much of the Clettwr valley and its surrounding hills was unenclosed. The reserve occupies what was originally the large 'unenclosed' part of the farm, although even this has been split into smaller compartments in recent times. The pattern of farms and smallholdings, dotted along and above the valley and circled by small fields, has not changed all that much. However, the boundaries and methods of farming adapted to them have completely changed. The first Ordnance Survey map of 1834 shows a great sweep of land to the east and west of the Clettwr valley free from roads, with only farm tracks for access. The track to Llawrcwrt also gave access to two further farms. These and other neighbouring farms appear on the 1844 tithe map in the midst of clusters of small, inbye fields, the boundaries of which have long since disappeared. These were mostly on gravel out-washes or had field drains, so they could be ploughed to grow 'black oats', barley and potatoes, or they were cut for hay or kept for lambing and calving. Surrounding these farms were large, unfenced areas, with tapers of land connecting these 'wastes' with the farms. These areas are now all fenced, drained and ploughed. Level land was 'improved' first, but much of the steeper, hilly land was not ploughed until as recently as the 1970s. Local people well remember the heathery hills, coconut-scented with the bright yellow blooms of gorse.
Unless you take an imaginative leap back in time, and capture some sense of what life was like on farms like Llawrcwrt, it is hard to appreciate why the reserve is as it is. There were many people living off the land a century or more ago. Peat-cutting shaped the reserve in a direct, physical way. It continued on a part of the reserve known as Gors Las, or the 'green bog', as late as 1950. The peat here is many feet thick. Dragonflies circle the peaty pools where it was last cut, and here Crowberry is at the most southern edge of its range in Wales, a natural biological monitor of climate change. The land around Llawrcwrt represents the last vestige of this ancient farming pattern. Most of the present field boundaries can be seen on the 1844 tithe map and also on the plan prepared for the sale of Llawrcwrt in 1875, when the farm and 285 acres were sold as one lot. The 1881 census shows 21 people living at the farm or other cottages, mostly described as labourers or farm servants.
Historically, rhos pastures were grazed by livestock, and this has been central to conserving the habitat that we value today. Conservation management at Rhos Llawr Cwrt is based on a controlled grazing regime using cattle during the spring and summer. The grazing programme is designed to maintain the marshy grassland, wet-heath, neutral-grassland and mire communities that are present as a fine-scale mosaic over the majority of the site; this also maintains the habitat in the condition required by the Marsh Fritillary butterfly.
The conservation and the livestock production objectives for vegetation structure are the same. The target is best described as a patchwork of tall, often tussocky, grasses and rushes with a moderate amount of litter and areas of short turf with little or no litter. The foodplant of the butterfly, Devil's-bit Scabious, will thrive in these conditions, in its prostrate form. The stock keeper does not have to monitor the visual outcome by counting species or measuring the average gap between tussocks; the pattern of vegetation either looks right or wrong. Stocking rates to achieve this structure are normally within the recommended range of 0.3-0.5 livestock units per ha per annum, but it is sometimes necessary to raise or lower the level of grazing. The main reason for this dynamic is variation in the weather. A warm, wet summer will result in greater biomass production in the sward, necessitating higher stocking rates to achieve the required structure. The reverse is, of course, true for a cold, dry summer. The stock keeper is an artist and the glacial topography of Rhos Lawr Cwrt is his studio.
Currently, the majority of the grazing stock are Welsh Black cattle belonging to an adjacent farm. The availability of farm-owned stock for grazing on what is in agricultural terms 'poor-quality' grassland is uncertain in the long term. Stocking rates used on the reserve are too low to prevent scrub development, particularly of Common Gorse Ulex europaeus and Grey Willow Salix cinerea. These are controlled by periodic cutting and use of selective herbicides. This raises the paradox of livestock management to maintain and extend the biodiversity of rhos pasture in that it partially follows the chemical path of extensive farming.
Nevertheless, walking through Rhos Lawr Crwt is to make contact with a living textured and coloured space that has not changed in centuries. Like viewing an abstract work of art or a ruined monument the visual experience involves a spatial emotion of a ‘felt life’. In this context, it is profitable to use synonyms with subjective attributes to describe the experience of depth as a penetration into layers of things more distant. When we wish to express the experience of intensity of feeling for instance, we say ‘depth of feeling’ or ‘penetration into knowledge’ or ‘having a revelation’. The mind is bringing a mental state of contemplation out of the depths of a partially seen phenomenon into a frontal understanding. The rhos pasture thus becomes a portrait of an idea.
5 Conservation and culture
In contemporary parlance people increasingly speak of spirituality rather than religion when trying to express what moves them most deeply; and many consider the two to be distinctly different. Most of the characteristics associated with religion, however, are found whether people consider themselves spiritual or religious. Therefore, there is little analytical reason to assume these are different kinds of social phenomena. The two ways of forming a sense of place can certainly come together when viewing rhos pasture. It is important, however, to understand what most see the distinction to entail, especially because the term spirituality is more often than the term religion associated with nature and nature-loving. Spirituality is often thought to be about personal growth and gaining a proper understanding of one’s place in the cosmos, and to be intertwined with environmentalist concern and action.This contrasts markedly with the world’s predominant religions, which are generally concerned with escaping this world or obtaining divine rescue from it to enter a space that is out of this world. At Lawrcwrt the outcome resulting from a blending of management with ecology is raised to the same cultural level of intensity and emotion as music and poetry.
Walking through Flixton or Rhos Lawr Cwrt at the interface of ecology and culture we can let the unseen and the external govern our enthusiasm for the phenomenal and passing. This perspective crosses continents and ethnicity. The Indian poet and dramatist Rabindranath Tagore expressed this awareness of another way of thinking when raw logic fails in a word picture of his place in the streaming cosmic life process of his Bengali homeland.
“No one realises that in his blood the waves of thy sea dance, the forest-restlessness trembles. This thought fills my mind today, that I have come, from age to age dropping silently from form to form, from life to life. I have come, using up in gift after gift, in song after song, whatever my hand has gained in night and morning”.
So we go our ways, drawn
“to the great stream, from the tumult of the past which lies behind, to the bottomless dark, to the shoreless light!
Without this transcendent mode of cultural ecology we shall find ourselves unable sooner or later to make any sense of the full range of human self-awareness. This was an important standpoint of the author, John Steinbeck. To see nature with great clarity was important to Steinbeck. To see beyond the physical to an underlying cultural pattern and larger significance was equally essential. He wrote this in 1948:
“There are good things to see in the tidepools and there are exciting and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing”. ("Preface ,Between Pacific Tides)
Steinbeck, in Sea of Cortez, asks his readers to shift perspective because Nature yields more than simple beauty.
"[A] man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world, if he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL"
The following poem was written by a primary school student after a visit to Rhos Lawr-Cwrt
Emerging from a wettish wilderness
Encased in cobwebs
The fritillaries come
In clouds of sparky colour
Protected by people
Who are
Kind to lesser creatures
Worth as much
Or more than we.
The object of this wiki is to use the biodiversity of butterflies as a 'educational gateway-concept' into the global world of conservation management. This involves making connections and transitions between, and within traditional educational silos by highlighting examples of ecological art, literature and science. It is part of a cross-curricular framework linking culture and ecology , which encourages people to become cosmopolitan citizens by seeking wonders in nature.
To be at one with the wonders of nature means defining nature as commonwealth. That is to say using the noun 'commonwealth' to mean "public welfare; general good or advantage". The use of commonwealth in this way dates from the 15th century. The original phrase "the common-wealth" or "the common/public weal" comes from the old meaning of "wealth", which is "well-being", and is itself a loose translation of the Latin res publica (republic). The term literally meant "common well being". It was only In the 17th century that the definition of "commonwealth" expanded from its original sense of "public welfare" to mean "a state in which the supreme power is vested in the people; a republic or democratic state". These days we define the commonwealth of nature as the ecosystem services which are indispensable to the well-being of all people in all places.
The commonwealth of nature is therefore the well being that people obtain from ecosystems, including food, natural fibres, a steady supply of clean water, regulation of pests and diseases, medicinal substances, recreation, and protection from natural hazards such as floods. Human well-being therefore consists of security, the basic materials for a viable livelihood (food, shelter, clothing, energy, etc., or the income necessary to purchase them), freedom and choice, good health, and good social-cultural relations. Links exist in both directions between the flow of ecosystem services and the level of human well-being. These linkages can be illustrated at all scales, from local to global; in all places in the world, from the least to the most developed; and for all peoples, from the poorest to the wealthiest and the rural to the urban and industrialized. There are important issues of equity involved: Who experiences the gains and losses in ecosystem services under conditions of ecosystem change? How are the services and well-being distributed across space and/or time? These issues can only be satisfactorily resolved by adopting a comprehensive approach to development that simultaneously considers ecological, social, and economic outcomes, balance the interests of all affected groups, as well as the benefits in the present against the options that will be available to future generations.
Despite their obvious importance, ecosystem services are in decline in many places around the world. Sometimes, the loss may be too gradual to be noticed, or may be compensated by increases in other services, such as food supply. In other cases, the loss of services is borne by people other than those causing the decline. A special case of the latter occurs when future generations bear the loss, while current generations reap the benefits.
Where the link between ecosystem services and human well-being is clear and immediate, affected people are more likely to develop regulatory and managerial institutions to ensure the continued supply of services. In some situations, though, the flow of services may be appropriated by more powerful groups. Also, if the link is obscured, ecosystem services may be undervalued and a severe loss of service can then result. Common reasons for the link not being apparent to all parties include:
- slow feedbacks (effects are felt long after the causes have taken place);
- displacement in space (effects are felt far from the cause);
- or displacement in social class (effects are principally felt by people without power).
The relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being can take on several different forms.
Often, rising incomes are initially accompanied by declines in some ecosystem services. Once a sufficient level of wealth is achieved, societal priorities may emphasize the quality of the environment and the services it delivers. In other situations, there is no evidence for such a turn-around, and some services may decline continuously with increasing wealth. In yet other places, a particular service may improve continuously in tandem with increasing wealth. It is important to note that human well being is not equated with wealth; wealth is simply one important and frequently measured component of well-being.
In places where there are no other social safety nets, diminished human well-being tends to increase the immediate dependence on ecosystem services. The resultant additional pressure can damage the capacity of those local ecosystems to deliver services, and this capacity can decline to such a degree that the probability of disaster or conflict increases. The non-linear nature of the links between humans and the rest of nature and of the functional relationship between them, means that there are some ecosystem damage thresholds that, if crossed, may prove to be irreversible. In this important respect, the future of the commonwealth of nature is rarely a simple linear extrapolation of recent trends or current conditions.
A Commonwealth of Butterflies
The butterfly is a multicultural symbol of nature's commonwealth which is also a metaphor for the wonderous beauty of Nature. The wispy, delicate nature of butterflies is part of their charm.
Butterflies appear in numerous examples of environmental art in many artistic styles. Butterflies are included as elements of these scenes because they most effectively represent all positive characteristics of Nature. This is because in all their ephemeral guises, butterflies are a source of wonder and many cultures have given them a special significance, as a symbols for varied belief systems. Many similar myths about butterflies have arisen in very different cultures that are representative of renewal, transformation, death, and rebirth or resurrection, awakening, consciousness, courage, love, joy, and hope. Their infinitely varied patterns have inspired artists for many centuries, and butterflies continue to appear in art, poetry, and myth; butterfly images have even become a major inspiration for art and design where they maintain an important presence in popular culture as symbols of continuity and resilience.
Simon Barnes, a reporter for the 'Independent' newspaper, thinks it’s a mistake to cite humanitarian aid as the only thing that counts in working for the common good after a disaster. In 2015 he described the work of 'Nature Iraq': the country’s leading conservation group founded in 2004. Now it is able to reflect the benefits its work has brought both to humans and to wildlife. He believes that conservation is one of the arts of peace. Preserving wildlife is important at all times and in all places; but when it comes to the healing of a shattered and broken country, just like an environment which is degraded by ignorance or the pursuit of monetary wealth, a butterfly has significance that towers above the short-term trivialities. In terms of public engagement, there’s a nationwide citizen science project in Iraq charting the distribution of butterflies. Thanks to the widespread use of smartphones, photographs of these insects are now flooding in to Nature Iraq, which has already identified four species new to the country. The organisation has set up a team of experts across the world, so that every species can be properly identified and mapped.
In the context of Iraq we need butterflies to remind us that positive change is possible, that there is magic in life, and that we have to be mindful of our surroundings. If we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. In this context, butterflies awaken our spirits and open our hearts. They give us a sense of hope and the possibility of our own transformation and evolution. Barnes says it’s important to know the location of troops in times of war; and it’s important to know the location of butterflies if times of peace are ever to be appreciated.
"You can’t solve a terrible situation just by stopping things getting worse: you also need to show that there’s a way of making things better. And part of rebuilding a country hammered by war is to re-establish contact with its wildlife and to look after and cherish such wildlife as remains – not just for its own sake, but because it’s a powerful symbol of the need to reclaim the country for its people, and heal it. Such projects have the vividness of a New Year’s resolution: a new start, one in which better things will surely be possible. Hope comes in a butterfly; in an eastern rock nuthatch; in the flora of a mountain; in people dedicated to looking after them all."
This message of hope was promulgated by Leonard Hugh Newman, (3 February 1909 - 23 January 1993) always known as L. Hugh Newman, a British entomologist, author and broadcaster. He wrote many popular books on insects, especially butterflies and moths. With the media naturalists Peter Scott and James Fisher, he was a resident member of the team who presented "Nature Parliament" on BBC radio's Children's Hour in the decade after the 2nd World War. He ran a butterfly farm in Kent supplying living material to among others Sir Winston Churchill, who bought many butterflies for his house at Chartwell. Similar messages through marketing butterflies are being packaged today. For example, Kipepeo (Swahili for butterfly) is a community based enterprise that supports the livelihoods of people living around Arabuko Sokoke forest in coastal Kenya, East Africa. This provides an incentive for their participation in the conservation of a forest with high biodiversity and endemism. Kipepeo seeks to demonstrate the tangible link between conservation and well being.
Kipepeo currently sells butterfly and moth pupae and other live insects as well as honey and silk cloth produced by the community. The pupae are exported and the live insects hatched and displayed in insect parks globally. As the market place for nature based products from the Arabuko Sokoke forest, Kipepeo coordinates production and sales, and ensures thorough training and monitoring that the insects are bred and raised on-farm in a sustainable manner from wild parent stock. They also sell butterflies from other Kenyan forests. Profit from the sale of Kipepeo products contributes directly to the conservation of critical local natural heritage for future generations. More than half of the 263 butterfly species known from the Kenyan coast have been recorded in the forest, of which Acraea matuapa, Charaxes blanda kenyae, Baliochila latimarginata and Baliochila stygia are endemic. Some taxa in the group have potential to be used as ecological indicators, which can complement the information already used for the birds.
http://www.eje.cz/pdfs/eje/2013/01/20.pdf
http://www.kipepeo.org/index.php
https://sites.google.com/view/rescuemission/home