Why our Kids need a Holistic Education

Education is Our Most Powerful Tool for a Better World

"As a kid at school in the early 1960′s I loved nature. No surprise then that I was drawn to the study of ecology, looking at the relationships that living organisms have with their surrounding environment. I went on to read Botany at University. There I went into the beech woods and dug up the roots of the trees, with their sheaths of fungi around them, and took them back to the lab for study. I mashed them up, boiled them, analyzed the enzymes and chemicals, came to further understand the symbiotic relationship between the tree roots and the fungi; how each received benefit from the other. I wrote a thesis and obtained my doctorate. But something big was missing. Nature is not just about chemicals. It has a soul!.... "

You can read the full article at Conscious Connection... where it appeared today. Make no mistake: Our future depends on how we educate our kids.

Ancient Oaks, fungi and mycorrhiza

As children we used to call these fungi Mabel Lucie Attwell fungi. I guess this was because she used them in her cute and nostalgic pictures of children that illustrated many of our childhood books. It is of course the Fly Agaric, and very poisonous!

But not all fungi are as attractive.

As a postgraduate student early mornings would find me grubbing around under the beech trees of Derbyshire, collecting bags of what looked like nothing but earth and roots. With my tutor we would take these back to the Sheffield University laboratory. I spent hours sifting and sorting, It doesn’t sound riveting does it? Why were we doing this? Well sometimes I did ask myself that question. And sometimes I felt that my work was not of any great relevance to the world and as such I became disillusioned and dissatisfied with what I was doing. But perhaps it did have its uses. Let me explain.

What in fact we were digging up and collecting were the fungi that grow around the roots of the beech tree, and indeed around the roots of most if not all trees. These fungi form a sheath around the roots, and their fine filamentous hyphae invade into the root tissue itself. So what do they do?

They are called mycorrhiza, and the relation with the tree is symbiotic – of mutual value. Whilst the tree supplies the fungus with sugars on which to feed, the fungus in return forms a barrier to protect the tender new roots from physical damage, and also from harmful chemicals and pathogens. But also, most importantly, the fungus enables the tree to take up water and important nutrients. Without fungi such as these, plants would not have been able to first colonise the land all those millions of years ago. They would not have been able to absorb essential nutrients from soil without these symbiotic associations.

And it was this nutritional advantage given to the beech trees by the mycorrhiza that formed the basis of my studies - from these daytrip forays and the experiments that followed I wrote a doctoral thesis for my PhD, and a paper, with my tutor David Lewis, which amazingly can now be found online!

What has all this to do with today?

I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme last Sunday morning, called Living World. And here they were discussing the ancient oaks and other ancient trees that form such an important part of the English landscape. And they are under threat. Farming methods are damaging this vital symbiotic association between tree and fungus, both from physical trampling and ploughing too close to the trees’ root system, but also from fertilizers and the high phosphate and nitrogen content of animal waste, as cows are allowed to graze around the base of the trunks. We are also introducing new bacteria and other pathogens into our finely balanced ecosystems through the importation of plants, particularly those in pots, which can bring infected soils into an area. Bacteria introduced in this way can be a threat to indigenous fungi and trees, and are responsible for the Acute Oak Decline that is threatening some of our most beautiful trees – a centuries old oak tree can be killed within two years with this infection.

On a plaque in the gardens at Wakehurst Place I found the following inscription attributed to the naturalist Francis Rose: “nature is very complex. When you start to interfere by thoughtless introduction of alien species, you do so at your own peril.” How very very true.

And perhaps my work at Sheffield all those many years ago was not so irrelevant after all. Perhaps it has increasing relevance again with our current concerns on ecology and man’s harmful effects on the environment. But I did always prefer the forays for “real” fungi that we could take home to eat! (But NOT, please note, the Fly Agaric!) We were botanists and we had the expert advice of our lecturers and tutors on what was safe and which would make us ill!

Climate Change and Global Warming

I don't know what triggered my mind to do this, but yesterday I googled my scientific paper that I wrote with my supervisor on, wait for it, The Surface Phosphatase Activity of Roots of Beech Mycorrhiza. I was amazed that something I wrote in 1973 (in my maiden name) was now floating around in cyberspace, and just a little flattered that quite a few scientists still see fit to cite it in their own works! This was after all my subject for my PhD thesis, and for a long time afterwards I felt disillusioned as to the usefulness of this work in the grand scheme of things!

Perhaps I should not have been so doubtful!

The lesson from this small exercise in narcissism is that science is an art! There is a misunderstanding prevalent among many in the general non scientific public that scientific experiments categorically prove something to be true or false. This in many cases is simply not so. Scientists devise experiments around hypotheses and conclusions are made around probabilities and relative weight of evidence one way or another.

All this is very relevant to the current debates on climate change.

A Times poll in 2009 found that only two in five Britons believed that this current and visible problem was largely man made. But those that still harbor any doubts that we are in any way responsible for climate change should heed the report to world leaders by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following its meeting in Paris at the start of 2007. This report concludes that it is very likely (and that means a 90% chance!) that the activities of man are responsible for the increased greenhouse gases and the resultant problems of climate change now being seen and predicted for the foreseeable future. As a consequence average temperatures are likely to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. This is the consensus of opinion from the combined efforts of more than 800 contributing authors and more than 450 lead authors, with more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers involved in the two-stage scientific and technical review process. So what is there to doubt?

For the continuing cynics why not use an adaptation of Pascal’s Wager? Pascal reasoned that whether or not one believed in the existence of God, it was a safer bet and one had nothing to lose by supposing that He existed. So it is with the global warming debate. If we allow ourselves to become more spiritually aware, more sensitive to our finely balanced place in the world, more compassionate towards the plight of our brethren across the globe, more simple in our needs, more at peace with ourselves, more in tune with our own souls and the soul beneath our feet, then are we not alll enriched? We will certainly be happier, and we will be leaving a better world for those who come after us. What do we have to lose?

There are bound to be some controversies and debates surrounding the details of the IPCC report and the scale of its significance. Much of our best scientific research effort is being directed towards gaining a fuller understanding of all the issues involved, and what actions we can take.

We saw the distress that extreme weather can inflict in the 2005 devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Even those who cannot quite believe or accept the evidence for the part humankind may be playing in climate change cannot deny the extent of human suffering now seen on a global scale. This then becomes more than a debate on climate change. It becomes a matter of human compassion and justice. These injustices brew a potentially dangerous potion of civil unrest and worse. There is a social and moral imperative for us all to share everything, to watch out for each other, to work for global healing. I believe we can no longer ignore our global responsibilities.
These photos by the way are from the Nun's Valley in Madeira when there annual chestnut festival was washed out by the most extraordinary rain in November 2008. The capital Funchal of course suffered even more from freak weather in February 2010.