Ecological Literacy - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 149

Building Ecological Literacy
Cognition is the action of knowing and perceiving; therefore, cognitive
systems are learning systems. They take in information, process it and
change, as a result. A cognitive system coheres - it sticks together different
knowledges and still remains a single whole. It goes beyond the modernist
single code, or even the post-modernist recognition of fractured and
multiply different knowledges. It implies synthesis and the capacity to
change and adapt. Three decades ago, the Chilean biologists Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela developed their radical Santiago theory
of cognition. They posed the question 'how do organisms perceive?' Their
theory centres on the idea that all living organisms continuously bring
forth a world - not the one world, but something individually unique
arising out of the fundamental differences between the way in which
internal neurological processes work and how these processes interact with
our environments. We actively construct a world as we perceive it. We are,
therefore, 'structurally coupled' with our environment. Such structural
coupling describes the way in which a living system interacts with its
environment, and these recurrent interactions trigger small changes,
adaptations and revisions in the system. Cognition is not a representation,
but the continual act of bringing forth a world. The constant dance of
cognitive systems, continually shaping, learning and adapting to their
environment, thus describes our relationship with nature.
James Scott, in his visionary topic Seeing Like a State , deploys the Greek
term me - tis to describe 'forms of knowledge embedded in local experience' . Me - tis is
normally translated as 'cunning' or 'cunning intelligence'; but Scott says
this fails to do justice to a range of practical skills and acquired intelligence
represented by the term. He contrasts such me - tis with the 'more general, abstract
knowledge displayed by the state and its technical agencies' by describing 'villagization'
in Tanzania and Ethiopia, Soviet collectivization, the emergence of high-
modernist cities, and the appalling standardization of agriculture. Failures
come when we design out me - tis because the state rarely makes the kinds
of necessary daily adjustments required for the effective working of
systems. Me - tis , Scott says, is 'plastic, local and divergent. . . It is, in fact, the
idiosyncrasies of m - tis , its contextualities, and its fragmentation that make it so permeable,
so open to new ideas'. 3 What is encouraging is that an increased number of
government departments have found the methods and processes to work
sensitively with local people; and the recent spread of sustainable agri-
culture discussed in earlier chapters is partly a result.
Ecological literacy can be created relatively rapidly, and does not
necessarily have to have great antiquity. This is what offers us all hope.
Farmer field-schools in South-East Asia create new intimate knowledge