by Wes Jackson
Good education begins with questions, usually close-to-home questions that prepare the way for expansion. In starting with a reality observed by all, we start in agreement. "Why does the creek stink?" "Why can't we drink out of the river as the Native Americans did?" "Why are there gullies in the field?" "Why are there scars in the woods?" A 10-year-old farm kid may know the history of a field going back four years and more. This is not experiential learning, a term too often reserved for professionals (because it is usually unadopted by everyone else), this is thinking. The point is, around such questions a teacher can introduce the ecological principles without teaching an ecology course.
It would be silly to imply that all imparted information be verifiable by direct observation. It is a climate of inquiry we want, the building of expectation that verification has happened or is under way. We want a climate in which a student has both a license and an obligation to ask for verification or at least to ask how something has been found out. Many scientific observations require instruments unavailable to most. Historical "facts" are hard to check.
A climate of inquiry which pushes for verification won't stop with such parochial questions as "Why are there gullies in the field?" It is a school where it is legitimate to ask "How did this world of satellites and cellular phones come to be?" which involves principles at work beyond the earth. This question takes them into the history of science to some 400 years ago. Here they can learn about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton. They can learn that Copernicus thought that the sun rather than the earth was at the center of our family of local celestial bodies. Galileo proved it and in 1609 Kepler published that the orbit of each planet is an ellipse, not a circle, that the radius vector drawn from the sun to a planet, like a hand on a clock, sweeps over equal areas in equal time, that the square of the length of time for a planet to orbit the sun is proportional to the cube of half the longest length in the ellipse. These are the shoulders Newton then stood on to work out the laws of gravity and motion which made it possible for satellites to be placed in predictable orbits and sending men to the moon and back. That is an important part of how this world of satellites and cellular phones came to be. There were also a social, political, and economic forces which converged to make this possible.
Rather than be dazzled by the technology, the important point is that with the right equipment and the right kind of giftedness, people can check out Kepler's and Newton's insights for themselves if they want to. At this point, a good history teacher and a good physics teacher can collaborate. For here a student can begin to understand how a
dominant side of our culture arose, how a growing dependency on the products of the
thinking of people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton came to be. Without commenting on whether such a technological intrusion into our lives is good or bad, the
lesson is that the process began with verifiable observations that were testable, adaptable, and capable of being extended.
Once it is clear that the modern world is dominated by the implications of these old insights and discoveries, there is little stretch toward realizing that the features are clearly technological where math, physics, and chemistry inform our engineered products and possibilities. The social, political and economic institutions of our society lent adequate support to make these technological events possible. The material world featuring modern consumerism with a plethora of objects comes out of the possibilities generated by this interest.
Teaching the Downside of Successes
While recent successes can be traced to scientists and technologists trained in well understood disciplines with firm boundaries, ironically it is the very firmness of the boundaries that has served to create many of our modern problems. To suppose that history and chemistry would have much to do with one another beyond the history of science considerations may seem to be a stretch. But we live at a time where history and chemistry have converged with increasingly toxic consequences involving both our food and drinking water. Could these consequences have been avoided? Did not the experiment have to be run?
We at The Land Institute believe that it was probably unavoidable or, stated otherwise, could have been avoided only if the implications of an evolutionary ecological world view had seriously begun to permeate our culture a century ago. Only then would it have been possible to keep the disciplines free of their categories. The world "ecology" implies a complex of life forms interacting with one another and with the non-living world in ways which lead to unforeseen and often unforeseeable consequences.
Keeping Knowledge Out of Categories
Our challenge is to keep knowledge out of its categories in the face of the successes which have come from keeping mostly within categories. Imagine for a moment that history and chemistry were taught in a culture or atmosphere where evolutionary ecology informed us in a deep way. How would that world view inform our agricultural and industrial worlds? For starters, our sense of ecology would tell us as a people that we don't place chemicals into the environment with which we have not evolved without regarding them guilty until proven innocent.
There are many areas about which we can afford to remain ignorant. We could even get along without knowing that the sun is at the center or even the laws of gravity. But for our long-term survival, we can no longer afford to be ignorant about the implications of ecology.
How can verifiable observations coming out of ecology be of practical use to a teacher? A study of nature's ecosystems from the poles to the equator is that they feature material recycling and run on contemporary sunlight. Nature's economy is the best example of a renewable economy, at least on the time scale of interest to most humans. Human economies, especially in the industrialized world, are extractive economies. The principles which govern these two economies are quite different. Let us imagine that a rural high school class or a rural community were presented these two observable "facts," or realities. What are the implications for a student in a history class, in a business class, in an agricultural class, in a chemistry class, even in the drama and art departments, in biology and English literature?
There is no need to teach "environmentalism." Teaching all of the disciplines through the lens of ecology with the modern molecular synthesis (the genetic code and the 20 amino acids are common to all, be they humans, hamsters, heather, or hunta virus) reminds us that we humans are at one with all life forms, in spite of being a special creature of culture. Looking through such a lens does not necessarily imply no satellites or cellular phones, although the questioning student or skillful teacher might raise that question, for it invites a discussion on everything from the two laws of thermodynamics to the potential threat to the ozone shield. The technological era dominated by math, physics and chemistry have benefited from the precision mathematics offers. We have yielded the world to those who possess great quantitative and computational powers. But why, we may ask, have rural people and the supporting landscape been largely ignored?
Down on the Farm
Well, after Sputnik in 1957, the US had to "catch up with the Russians." The National Science Foundation, NASA and countless educators accelerated the creation of a culture to help insure our survival as a nation with high prestige and weapons capability. When John F. Kennedy ran for President, he warned the American people of a missile gap. The laws of motion and gravity, the nature of power and fuels become our agents. Who cares why we can't drink out of the creek or even why it stinks? Who cares that some were predicting an exploding global population and a declining resource base in agriculture? Who cares that there are gullies in the field, especially when chemicals can offset the loss of eroded fertility? Who was paying attention to the draw-down of fossil carbon which currently sustains our high agricultural output?
Ecology is the discipline most suited to force knowledge out of its categories. People in rural areas are the best positioned to act on their ecological insights. Being next to the source and either working the source or being close to those who do makes them the most important target of educational reform featuring ecological literacy and the cultural context behind food production.
We believe that we need to prepare for a time when industrial agriculture begins to decline due to its own short-run successes of less than a century. But our case does not rest on that premise. Rural schools are our constituency because rural people and their management of our source are the foundation of our national security. That foundation is at once cultural and ecological in nature. With that in mind, we don't want to see any farmer go out of business. Most of the worst farmers would still have a head start on countless thousands who want to begin farming but have no experience. We want what there is of the best of rural culture to continue. We see the rural culture as providing know-how in the discipline for managing the source to be called on for a coming era of billions of hungry mouths. To feed people using the current dominant paradigm is sure to burn our options, sure to bankrupt our soils. With the ecological paradigm we have a chance in a world with a sufficiency of people and declining capital stock.
Noted agronomist Wes Jackson is director of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
Recent OpEd Articles:
Archived 5/22/98 - Brian Goetz, "I Have Seen the Future..."Archived 3/16/98 - Michael Lerner , "Multiple Chemical Sensitivities: No Joke"
Archived 3/16/98 - Bill Belleville , "Cuba: Umbrella Drinks and Ecology"
Archived 2/9/98 - Leonie Haimson , "Head Lice and Civilization"
Archived 1/16/98 - Fred Hapgood , "Surfing for the Sublime"
Archived 1/16/98 - Joel Grossman , "The War on Weeds"
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