Holistic education, biodiversity and ecotourism

One of the joys of holidays away from the daily routine is the chance it gives me to read beyond my usual genres. Especially I love the opportunity to browse the second hand books so often left on the bookshelves of hostelries by travellers who have passed that way before me. It's like a lucky dip! Their choices and preferences open up new worlds for me. And yet there is so often an enormous sense of serendipity as well.

It always amazes me how often I find titles that provide me with new inspiration, or open up new lines of enquiry within my current project, broaden the scope of my research. It can be very exciting!

I've been in La Gomera, where to be honest a little part of my heart resides. Here is paradise on earth, one of the Canary Islands where time hasn't exactly stood still, but where the powers that be are determined to preserve the ancient traditions and wonderful biodiversity of the natural environment by ensuring that future development is sustainable - to this end ecotourism is encouraged, but high rise hotels and nightclubs you will never find. That is its charm. People flock here for the stunning scenery, the walking and the bird watching, and the rather special laurel rainforest (laurisilva) of the Garajonay National Park, a Unesco World heritage site since 1986.

But I digress.

From one of those said lucky dip bookshelves I picked up a book with a rather under-whelming grey cover. But it was the title that caught my eye: La Coume Across the Years: A School that Discovered how to Live. Authors Y Grangeon and C Haller, 1993, English text J W Stubbs 1997. La Coume in Catalan, the back cover informed me, means a blind alley, having no exit at the upper end, like a combe or coomb in English. And La Coume in the book is situated in the Pyrenees - Orientales in France. An unlikely book to pick up in one of the Spanish Canary Islands, at a holiday venue. Intrigued, I opened the book to read on. The book is charmingly illustrated with many line drawings from pupils themselves, and it soon became apparent that the "blind alley" was certainly not the best of metaphors for the institution described in the book. Pitt Kruger was a political refugee from Nazi Germany. With his wife Yves Kruger this amazing German couple together found themselves in 1933 in a decrepit farmhouse high up in the valley above Mosset in this beautiful part of France near the Spanish border. The property had been provided for them through the Quaker movement and under the direction of the Krugers it quickly established itself as an educational community providing accommodation for young people, "a centre offering friendship, solidarity and a welcome" whether as a refuge for more German political refugees, a Youth Hostel, a Country Centre for Education, a school, an International Reception Centre…but always with the same aim in mind; to help children and young people develop harmoniously in all areas of life, not only physically, intellectually and artistically, but also in the moral, spiritual and social spheres.

The Krugers brought their education background and experience, their sharp intellects and their energy and conviction face to face with the harsh realities of everyday survival tactics and built a rather special community based always on co-operation rather than competition, an ethos of shared and individual responsibilities, and an appeal to spiritual rather than material values. In this respect they were way ahead of their time, true visionaries long before our very recent realization that our materialist way of life is not serving us so well. Their geographical isolation and lack or funds enforced the need for thriftiness and avoidance of waste, but this became a virtue out of necessity and a fundamental part of the ethos which continues at the Centre to this day.

Towards the end of the 1970s, with the Krugers aging, it was recognized that the Centre was nearing the end of an era and would have to reinvent itself. There was increasingly a tension with the "life of modern times, surging and turbulent, with unrest in the inner city, invasion by the media, excessive consumerism, and a conspicuous sagging in the sense of responsibility among parents…(and the)…seductiveness of a civilization of comfort and convenience." How could La Coume hold its own, its "pastoral" holistic way of life, against this tide of change?

But it has reinvented itself, and under the guidance and support of the Kruger Foundation established in 1972, it continues to this day as a centre where those values established by the initial vision of the Krugers live on. 

And I do wonder as I read this wonderful account of such a visionary community, and the values that it espouses, whether La Gomera will be able to hold its own and its ambitions against the " seductiveness of a civilization of comfort and convenience" as a generation grows up and wants to leave the island for the material world just 25 or so kilometres away across the sea in Tenerife. Because the two Canary Islands could be in different worlds, the contrasts are so great. Long may La Gomera preserve its own world unravaged by the societal ills that are all too apparent not so very far away. As long as it manages to do that, some part of my own heart will continue to beat there.

  

Reasons to love La Gomera

Just look at the uncrowded beach, uncrowded car park, uncrowded beach bar. And it's biodiverse with a wonderful climate all year round. 

Apparently La Gomera holds the European record for the most endemic species per square kilometre.

Now that's a genuine biodiversity sanctuary

The island prides itself on encouraging and supporting only sustainable development carrying on an age old tradition of its people living in perfect symbiosis with their environment. 

They are determined that they do not mortgage their future for the sake of today's touristic pleasures. They are determined to encourage eco-tourism above all else, and the island is a walkers' and birdwatchers' paradise.

Global decline of butterflies

When I was a child and my hard working farmer father had any time to spare, he would take me for walks in the woods across the road from the farm to look for butterflies and moths. He was passionate about them and recognized them all. I remember his almost child-like delight at spotting a comma, a skipper or a painted lady – then on the South Downs of Sussex he would show us the different blues – such pretty and dainty butterflies favouring the flowers and other vegetation of those chalk slopes. The names of these beautiful insects even now flood back into my memory and evoke those long summer days that to a child seem endless.

And we were brought up to love and respect all the natural world around us, based on an understanding of the interdependencies of the different plants, animals, birds, insects that were all around us.

But even then, more than 50 years ago, alarm bells were ringing – there was already concern that butterflies were in decline in the British Isles. Now this concern is much greater and it has gone global.

There has just been a conference in the UK, (Reading), organized by the Butterfly Conservation Trust, a UK charity. attended by 300 scientists. And the conclusion is that there is still a long way to go to achieve the target set by the United Nations to halt the decline by 2010 of the world’s biodiversity. Biodiversity is the entirety of life on earth, birds, animals, butterflies, worms, fungi, bacteria, and including ourselves. David Attenborough has said that halting biodiversity loss is on a par with getting a man on the moon in its complexity, and an improvement in butterfly numbers would be a good indicator that we are winning.

Clearly in the knowledge that their target was in no way achieved, the UN have had to rethink, and they have declared this year as the International Year of Biodiversity to be formally marked on 22 May.

The UN wants to raise public awareness of the importance of biodiversity, and encourage organizations and individuals to support the rich diversity of life on earth. Gardeners and farmers are clearly at the sharp end of this initiative but we do not have to live in the country to make a difference – even the smallest plots will help, and allotments, ponds, community orchards, rooftops, parking lots, hedges and ditches, all can be nurtured to encourage biodiversity.

I am trying year on year to grow more flowers that attract bumblebees and other insect pollinators, butterflies, moths and other “bugs?” Because of course these then encourage other wild life. We can all go to a big garden, for example I go to the RHS garden at Wisley at all seasons of the year, to observe which plants the butterflies and bees like best and introduce them into our own plots.

Can we all pledge to do something, however small, to make a difference to our local biodiversity? Let's have some exchange of ideas. What will you do?

The future of agriculture

The other night I watched a television programme about families who have chosen to live simple lives off the land. The first in the series follows a couple who want to swop an executive lifestyle for a "better life," farming sheep on a tiny scale on Dartmoor. This was sympathetically narrated by Monty Don, who has a wealth of farming experience behind him over 40 years. Mmmm. I wish them all the best but suspect it will be very tough for them. ("My Dream Farm, Channel 4 21 January 2010).

At the same time on BBC2 there was Jimmy's Global Harvest, where Jimmy Doherty followed a tomato "farmer" in California, and it scared me stiff! The sheer enormity of the scale of the operation, almost totally mechanised, no sign of a weed or a bird or animal, no hedgerow, no butterflies, and most importantly, no biodiversity, in fact all about profit and nothing else. Even the tomatoes are especially bred with thick skins and dense flesh to withstand the picking machines, great beasts that swallowed up and sorted everything in their path. But what frightened me most though was the dismissive way the "farmer" referred to the "dirt" that must not be allowed to contaminate the crop. That "dirt" is soil, the lifeblood of our very existence on this planet, from which all our food ultimately derives. We should show it great respect. Its structure, mineral content, humus content, water holding capacity, simply how available it is to plants for their needs, all this is so fundamentally important. And he called it "dirt!" Oh dear - is this really our future? I cannot see a future if this is what we will all depend upon for our food needs!