1.2 2009 Fifty years on
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Imagine you could travel back in time to Skomer 1000 BC with a mobile phone containing a video of our everyday life, which the Iron Age Skomerites could be induced to watch.  They would doubtless regard the lives of the tiny people living in the shiny decorated object you hold in your hand an amazing, incomprehensible, and rather terrifying sight. We came from a land very similar in its scenery and climate to their own island; but every morning, so far as they might understand, we left a cliff face by a small hole, entered hard and shiny houses which moved over the ground, went into another great cliff-house, and climbed inside to a small chamber into which light came from another hole covered by a slab of rock through which you could be seen. All day and all the week, it seemed, we took no steps whatever to obtain food except to ask for it in other large structures, which were apparently full of nothing else. Our magical beliefs might be detected in visits to a man or woman who tapped us all over and finally gave us a small white square which, when taken to another magician, was exchanged for a box of magic pebbles. All this time we gathered no fruits, had no personal stores of food, and tended no animals. The Skomerites would slowly understand that some of our fellows did produce food, but that their efforts were so amazingly prolific that the great mass of the people could live packed together in large rock formations occupying themselves all day long making all sorts of unnatural objects move, clang and clatter, despite an obvious freedom to sit about in some quiet spot to tell and hear stories, or sing songs. Our activities would seem incredible and meaningless.  
It was in this vein that C. Daryll Ford opened his book on habitat, economy and society, written seven decades ago.  The final chapter reads: "From the practical point of view, a civilization as dominant and powerful as that of the  Western world needs to watch self-conciously the advance of its influence, to limit the fronts  on which it invades, and to draw back at signs of disintegration. Since however, this  cultural pressure is only rarely exercised by an organised and self-conscious body, but is  rather the resultant of conflicting forces within the Western world itself, such a plan is very  difficult of achievement and the dangers are too often not seen until too late".
Ford  was referring to the spread of capitalist ideas into a planet at that time largely occupied by self-sufficient human cultures.  There have been no constraints, and not only have these cultures been assimilated into a global economy, but the self- sufficiency of all other creatures with which we share the planet has been compromised.
In Ford's day, the world could be empirically divided into a number of culture areas or teritories over which certain crafts, economies and social patterns dominated human activity. In seven decades, culture has been largely homogenised into a global entitiy where crafts, economies and social patterns are dominated by mass production of goods and services.  We are still part of nature in everything we do, and culture is now more obviously connected with ecology than Ford could ever have imagined.  Indeed, cultural ecology is an obvious framework for integrating knowledge about our use of natural resources and their conservation.  
The year 2009 will mark fifty years of Skomer's history as a national nature reserve.  A small span in relation to its planetary history.  But, there will be physical and administrative changes by which the island will move forward with expanded accommodation for visitors and researchers. The island will have become firmly assimilated into the mainland's consumer economy. In this context, it is time for Skomer to become a portal for S.K.O.M.E.R, the acronym for sustainability knowledge organised to manage the environment responsibly.  
In this perpective, the way of life of the prehistoric Skomerites is a useful conceptual and meditative anchorage from which to explore new ways for education to address the human- ecology- development problem.
The S.K.O.M.E.R portal therefore opens with a link to a multidimensional, cross- curricular information source about cultural ecology.
Denis Bellamy, Ed.
Nov. 2007