Teaching the ‘big picture’ of human connectedness to nature

Thinking about the earth as a system of systems is far removed from the everyday experience of most people, whether young or old. For the young, the level of abstraction of such a concept is likely to require an unusual extension of their normal cognitive grasp. However the imaginative capacity of children is prodigious and it is often said that conventional schooling crushes out of them this capacity as they are tracked through a fragmented curriculum as they progress into secondary school and are subjected to the rigours of testing and exams that check their grasp of ‘school knowledge’. Over half of the earth’s human population now lives in urban centres.  Growing up in an urban environment separates children from nature despite the presence of parks and gardens. It also makes them less aware of the movement of the earth around the sun and of diurnal and seasonal rhythms as they are most of the time surrounded by the human-constructed environment and an electronic cocoon that, at least in the affluent countries, powers the gadgets and games that distract from direct contact with nature. These distractions limit the opportunity to develop a sense that we inhabit an orbiting planet which sustains us. They also work against an understanding that we are embedded in and sustained by a complex web of life that covers the earth’s surface and is powered by the sun.

So how might people, young and old, be helped to grasp the reality of our connectedness with the natural world upon which our existence depends?  The iconic ‘Earthrise’ picture taken from the spacecraft orbiting the moon in 1968 is a useful starting point.  The blue and white planet itself seems like a space craft from that distance, a beautiful object covered by life sustaining water in the form of seas and clouds that gave rise to organic life of which we are an evolved and highly complex form. Water can only exist in its liquid form on planets that are an optimal distance from the star that they orbit. The remarkable combination of factors that have led to the evolution of life on earth, providing the stability for over 3.5 billion years to allow life to evolve are now well understood.  BBC TV series such as those by Brian Cox and David Attenborough allow us to share this understanding. Prof. Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System is indeed well-named and can be comprehended and discussed by secondary school pupils. Such programmes provoke a real sense of wonder as well as what can be called ‘global consciousness’ – the big picture, at the scale of the planet, of why life exists at all and how it now coats the planet in a single complex global ecosystem of which we have evolved as a totally dependent part. Our conscious minds and capacity for complex thought and language have emerged only in very recent evolutionary time but have given us a remarkable capacity to modify the physical earth. Developing global consciousness is an essential step towards grasping the enormity of human impact on the planet that is now threatening to become unsustainable.

Human impact is illustrated by the Suomi satellite picture of a cloud-free western edge of Europe glowing with electric street lighting generated mainly from the release of energy stored in fossil fuels. What if we visualise instead, a picture of the earth with human created energy shut down and instead imagine the glow that would come from the breathing of living organisms busy transforming the energy from the sun into the material that makes up what nature builds, aided by the process of photosynthesis and respiration?  This is an exercise in visualisation that is used in a teacher education workshop at the Centre for Ecological and Environmental Education at the Silesia Botanical Garden in Poland. The Centre is engaged in developing ‘deep education for a sustainable future’, pioneering a pedagogy that combines storytelling, ritual, scientific investigation and creative imagination to connect learners and their teachers to the ‘big picture’ of global consciousness referred to above. The 3-hour workshop centred on the theme of ‘breathing’ takes the participants through three stages:

Story-telling – the archetypal myths relating to breathing such as the creation myth in which life was created by the breath of a universal creator and how breathing provides the basic rhythm of life and illustrates the mystery of existence.

A scientific experiment – that investigates the process of respiration using simple and affordable modern equipment.

Connecting to the big picture:

1.       Visualising the global glow of breath with which nature covers the planet.

2.       Making mind maps together of the many terms derived from the fundamental idea of breathing that provide multiple threads to many aspects of human experience.

3.       Discussing what the situation would be if our only means of understanding breathing was by means of conducting scientific experiments.

This exercise in holistic, inter-connected thinking transcends ‘school knowledge’ and illustrates the power of collaborative and generative learning that draws on all aspects of the learners’ life experience. Breathing is something we all do and experience and is something that we have in common with the rest of the complex web of life. Perhaps this example from a non-formal education setting will stimulate others to share their approaches to holistic learning for global consciousness and our proper place in nature.