Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 13

or protected areas. At the landscape level, this creates difficulties because
the whole is always more important than each part, and diversity is an
important outcome. 21
This leads inevitably to the idea of enclaves - social enclaves such as
reservations, barrios or Chinatowns, and natural enclaves such as national
parks, wildernesses, sites of special scientific interest, protected areas or
zoos. Enclave thinking leads us away from accepting the connectivity of
nature and people. It appears to suggest that biodiversity and conservation
can be in one place, and productive agricultural activities in another. 22 So,
is it acceptable to cause damage in most social and natural landscapes,
provided you leave a few tasty morsels at the edges? Surely not. These
enclaves will always be under threat at the borders, or simply be too small
to be ecologically or socially viable. They also act as a sop to those with
a conscience - we can justify the wider destruction if we fashion a small
space in which natural history can persist.
By continuing to separate humans and nature, the dualism also appears
to suggest that we can invent simple technologies that intervene to reverse
the damage caused by this very dualism. The greater vision, and the more
difficult to define, involves looking at the whole and seeking ways to
redesign it. The Cartesian 'either/or' between humans and nature remains
a strange concept to many human cultures. It is only modernist thinking
that has separated humans from nature in the first place, putting us up
as distant controllers. Most peoples do not externalize nature in this way.
From the Ashéninha of Peru to the forest dwellers of former Zaire, people
see themselves as just one part of a larger whole. Their relationships with
nature are dialectical and holistic, based on 'both/with' rather than 'either/
or'. 23
For the Arakmbut of the Peruvian rainforest, Andrew Gray says: 'no
species is isolated; each is part of a living collectivity binding human, animal and spirit'.
Mythologies and rituals express and embed these inter-relationships, both
at the practical level, such as through the number of animals a hunter
may kill and how the meat should be shared, and at the spiritual level, in
which 'the distinction between animal, human and spirit becomes blurred' . One of the
best known of these visible and invisible connections is the Australian
Aboriginal peoples' Dreamtimes. Aboriginal people have inhabited
Australia for 30,000 years or more, during which time some 250 different
language groups developed intimate relations with their own landscapes.
David Bennett says:
Aboriginal peoples hold that there is a direct connection between themselves and their
ancestral beings, and because they hold that their country and their ancestral beings
are inseparable, they hold that there is a direct connection between themselves and
their country. 24