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