As the rate of
social change accelerates, so there is an increased need for long-
term management of community assets to maintain cultural
stability. At the heart of being environmentally friendly 'is the
problem of how to turn Agenda 21, the blueprint of the 1992
Rio Environment Summit, into political, social and technological
management systems for sustainable development. This can only
be achieved by transforming our more demanding consumer
systems into 'systems of sustainability' using appropriate methods
of environmental appraisal with operational indicators for
checking out success of local community management
plans.
In its early days
the four themes of SCAN were:-
-
'Pointers to Change'- tick box forms,
and visual/literary expressions of place, which bring forward
environmental problems, issues and challenges facing local
communities.
-
'Voicing the past'- how to produce an
interactive oral archive incorporating local wisdom of senior
citizens.
-
'Stone Tapes'- using the local built
environment to appraise how the community was created through
historical investments and plans for economic
development
-
'Clocking Nature' - environmental
appraisal using nature diaries to highlight special biological
elements of the community through literary and pictorial records of
the passing of seasons
In 1999, SCAN in
collaborated with the UK Conservation Management System Partnership
(now a consortium) (http://www.cmsconsortium.org) in an EC LIFE
Environment programme to evTaluate a professional software package
as a community conservation toolkit. A mindmap, entitled cultural
ecology, was also produced which places conservation management
alongside world development as a provisional syllabus for living on
an overcrowded planet (www.culturalecology.info)
This work was funded
by Texaco(Pembroke refinery)..
