The history of people connected for many centuries with a place, particularly islands, is contained in place
names referring to stories, resources, and the shape of the land. This is an expression of kinship. Places can
be ancestors, and long standing cultural traditions can imbue places with a sense of history, community, and
spiritual power.
I first went to Skomer seeing the island as a material resource for teaching and research. Only gradually did it
come to be an essential spiritual reservoir that never failed to augment my inner life that was being inevitably
shaped on the mainland by haste, noise, and consumption. It began my search for a 'knowledge' and a
'teaching' that shows humanity a path to a better future and that would help us reshape our values. From this
point of view Skomer brought the subject of
cultural ecology into being. This cross curricular knowledge
system It is one of Skomer's legacies because to understand the island's wholeness requires a cross subject
navigation system that begins and ends with the first settlers who built the round houses and set stones in
lines. As a teacher, being on the island and watching students change their mind set to come into tune with
the rhythms of tide and wildness set me in pursuit of the long cycle of a shifting pattern of vegetation. This
quest has become my Western Toa, because for at least three thousand years something new has been
added to Skomer as a world of knowledge everyday, with or without human action. My quest is reactivated
every time I step onto the island and I can only think that the island is reiterating the philosophy of Chuang
Tzu. He took the primary Taoist position of Lao Tzu, the father of
Taoism, and developed it further with a
greater and more exact attention to Nature and the human place within it, which also leads to his greater
emphasis on the individual as a thinking being. He says the academic
"... has the sun and the moon by his side. He grasps the universe under his arm. He blends everything into a
harmonious whole, casts aside whatever is confused or obscured, and regards the humble as honourable.
While the multitude toil, he seems to be stupid and non-discriminative. He blends the disparities of ten
thousand years into one complete purity. All things are blended like this and mutually involve each other."
Chuang Tzu's writings also bring into play the spontaneity and event-character of local ecological processes
while unfolding a sense of how to be responsive to the wider world through a practice of “non- coercive-activity”
and “letting be”.
One of Chuang Tzu's continuing interests was the issue of the interchangeability of appearance and reality. He
sometimes asks almost in a scientific way 'How can we be sure of what we are seeing, because we are a part
of that very reality? This chimes with modern 'deep ecology' that involves a gradual expansion of self-identity to
become ever inclusive, rather than clinging to a separate, isolated ego. Yes, in this sense I have always
thought myself being a part of Skomer.
Denis Bellamy (2009)