Ecological Literacy - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 148

people about their own communities. All too often, outside professionals
(whether planners, developers or scientists) begin by asking about
problems, and then identify solutions to these problems. As a result, they
miss the fine-grained detail about people's connectedness to a place. We
find that people focus on two main themes - special things about the
community, such as neighbourliness, friends and family, and special aspects
of the land, nature and environment. In excluded urban communities,
where physical infrastructure is poor, people will often say things like 'we
have a strong sense of community', and 'when anyone has a problem, we
all pull together to help'. They celebrate tiny spaces of greenery - even
though, when placed against a mountain meadow, these spaces are
impoverished. They mourn the steady erosion of their community's value
through the accrual of graffiti, litter and dumped cars.
In rural communities that are more obviously close to nature, people
will select many valued features. In a series of community assessments
involving six villages within Constable (the landscape painter) country
in the Suffolk and Essex borders, we found that people emphasized
more than 130 features special to them in a river valley extending only
20 kilometres by 5 kilometres in area. The most special places are open
countryside around settlements, places where people have walked all of
their lives and have, in their minds, made their own. Many sites that were
named are water features, such as the river, weirs and local streams and
water meadows. Special buildings included those with historical interest,
together with the schools, churches and village halls that form the social
fabric of the region. Put together, these comprise a rich picture of an entire
landscape. These are not partial views and knowledge held by a few people,
but are widely dispersed throughout the community.
This is not to say that everyone knows their local place intimately. They
clearly do not. England is scattered with dormitory villages, populated by
commuters working long hours who know their places only at weekends,
or when the evenings stretch out in summer. They rarely notice if
something is damaged or lost from the local landscape. Even if they do
notice, they may not know what to do because they lack social connect-
ions. Some, though, arrive from the city with strange values. In the same
valley, one wealthy incomer hired two hit men to shoot the rooks nesting
in their tree-top rookery on neighbouring land, as they were making too
much noise for him. The ensuing scandal within the community did
nothing for the birds. They never came back. Nonetheless, it is also true
that it sometimes takes 'incomers' with a different perspective on the
environment to provoke changes in thinking amongst local people who
are wedded, for example, to industrialized agriculture because they know
no alternatives. How, then, can we build this necessary literacy about place?