Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 18

a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is
no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story .' 34 In East Anglia, home to
one of the two giants of working horses, the Suffolk Punch, horsemen
looked upon the landscape and saw it full of wild plants with vital uses.
Today, the horses have gone, replaced by tractors and combines, and the
useful plants are merely weeds. We have forgotten. Perhaps this is progress?
Or perhaps we have to find new ways of valuing, using and constructing
the nature around us?
It is sad that so much knowledge of nature, its uses and significance,
has slipped away; such stories take time to build. They arise from the
experiences of the many, from the insights of a few, and from the sharing
of such significance. When we no longer find the need or desire to tell
stories about nature, then the thread is broken. That, of course, plays into
the hands of those who would cut down the tree, or pollute the water, or
allow the soils to slide into the river. But where there are collective
connections, through farmers working together, or consumers linked
directly to a farm, or walkers strolling together across a landscape, then
it is possible to create new stories. Perhaps it is possible even to rediscover
some of those stories assumed now to be lost. The problem is that there,
strangely, still persists amongst many of us a dislocation between trad-
itional knowledge of land and nature and what we might term modern
scientific knowledge. We commonly hold apparently conflicting know-
ledge side by side without feeling particularly harmed - often, in fact,
within the same scientific discipline.
A decade ago, on a training course in Kenya for government officers,
I asked participants to list examples of their traditional knowledge of
nature. Our intention was to encourage highly trained professionals to
reflect on the value of the knowledge and insights of local people - not
to say that it was better knowledge; just that it was worth listening to and
incorporating with other, more scientific, sources. A remote community
cannot know the detailed mechanisms by which legumes interact with
rhizobia in the soil to fix atmospheric nitrogen; nor will they know the
properties of a chemical that pollutes a well. What they know will have
been built up from accumulated individual and collective experiences, fixed
in time through story-telling. In this one session, baking beneath the hard
equatorial sun, we listed more than 40 well-accepted idioms, ideas and
stories. Many were to do with trees. In some places, the bark of Acacia is
used to treat malaria, and its ash to cure milk and give it good taste. Ash
from other trees is sprinkled on crops to control various pests and weeds.
One tree, Croton , is not permitted to grow near houses because of the belief
that someone will die if roots enter the house. Elsewhere, the wood from
certain trees is never used for beds, as it is believed to make women