http://biocurriculum.blogspot.com

THE OTHER STORY

We humans appear unique among species in our ability to tell stories. We are neither the crown of creation nor the goal of evolution. The universe was not made for us and we are not destined to conquer and rule it. This is the story of only one culture.

Story telling is a skill developed within the context of the hunt, reading tracks brings with it an awareness of past, present and future. “This animal came from that direction back then and will be found in this direction some time later...” The first time some terrestrial primate made this connection must have been a stupendous AHA moment, “GULP”!!!!!! The desperate need to share this realisation drove mutations to drop the epiglottis lower and lower increasing the depth of vowel sounds and the ability to articulate. (Tongue in cheek)

                                             Chimp and Human vocal apparatus

Channelling Yahuay, “ 4 Cries Ache man, when I tell you to go forth and be fruitful how you could take that to mean i’s to fill up the Earth with your own kind? You is a fruit 4 crying out loud!!! You who does get vex when they tell you you is a monkey. It make me as mad as when those ones who say they is vegetarian but they does eat fish. How you think the fish go feel? Fish is a vegetable? Man when I give you dominion over the Earth and every living thing, I ent mean i’s for you to mash up the place. I give you wisdom and understanding in my image for you to make the garden more biodiverse.”

So how did this story come about? The Hebrews inherited their creation mythology, the stories in Genesis, from their Semitic pastoralist ancestors that were part of an oral tradition that had been retold for generations. It lays out the relationship between Man, the gods (Elohim) and the world and explains how things came to be the way they were. The situation that they were trying to comprehend is how and why Caucasian farmers from the North were expanding into the Arabian Peninsula and watering their fields with Semitic blood.

These nomadic herders of sheep and goats of the desert were confronting conquering tribes of cereal grain aggreculturalists* (sic) whose populations had grown beyond the carrying capacity of their home territory (bioregion). They had to imagine a story to explain, how Adam (red [sunburned?] man) came to have adopted this most arduous of lifestyles ever conceived, why he treated his women and children so badly, why he was so afraid of snakes and how he came to have taken into his own hands, the gods prerogative of deciding who should live and who should die, or in other words, “the knowledge of good and evil”. “Adam” was not the first human, he was the first farmer and city (civilization) builder and “Cain” has been killing “Abel” ever since.  Farming was the punishment and the curse. From ground zero in Mesopotamia our culture spread west into Europa and east across the Indus into Hindustan laying waste to biodiversity in order to grow their favourite foods.

               

                                      The diffusion of agriculture                          

                                          The spread of Indo-European languages

   

                                      Spread of Indo-European DNA                  

                                     The spread of the horse-drawn war chariot

The patriarchy and the population explosion are of the same root and it starts in the “Caucasus Mountains” during the last ice age. Winter adapted, white skinned people had inhabited the far north from about 40,000 years ago when the last glacial maximum retreated 11,000 years ago. During this period I imagine there may have been times when tribes were trapped in relatively green watersheds surrounded by impassable ice for generations. This became a land of real scarcity; the providential mother had forsaken her children and the rituals of regicide and blood sacrifice to the goddess were proving ineffectual.

Having become aware of the connection between sex and procreation men and women lived in fear and dread of the temptation to bring into the world another mouth to feed. This lead to the psychological stress of the conflict inherent in the love/hate, virgin/whore dichotomy of our culture. The sound of crying coming from a hungry child became intolerable and led to the first lash and, “spare the rod and spoil the child”. Competition for ever-diminishing resources led to the need to conquer their neighbours in order to survive. (Fear and hatred of snakes sensibly goes back to our arboreal primate beginnings.) When the ice retreated for the last time leaving behind the deep fertility of the razed boreal forests and ground up rock of glacial till, the vegetation that dominated the landscape were the grasses; barley, rye, oats, emmer and eventually by selection, wheat. The humans inhabiting this landscape foraged this seemingly limitless energy source and their population exploded. This was a land of plenty but the story of our cultures traumatic gestation period has never been told and the emotions of fear, rage and grief never discharged. The feeling that there is never enough to go around, no matter how rich and powerful we become as individuals, fuels our greed and other addictions to this day.    

Driven by this irrational fear of scarcity, our culture/system (where food is locked up to create artificial scarcity and people have to work, beg or steal for it) now rewards productivity above all else. It is designed for products not for people. Our economy is based on everyone having or making products, including labour and services, in order to be able to get products = food and shelter. The measure of its functioning is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The concept of material progress with an ever-increasing improvement in products and the belief in its inevitability is the secular religion of our time. It inherited from the dominant religions a deep anthropocentricism. A blinkered mindset that engenders a culture that continues to lay waste to the ecological support system it is acutely dependent upon for survival.

The concept of separation and glorification of individualism identifies our civilized cultures whose infant nurture practices are at the root of these feelings. Primate infants never experience loss of skin contact until they decide to venture out. This embodies an innate releasing mechanism that is instrumental in the development of emotionally mature adults. When babies are put down, separated from another human, a bond of trust is broken almost irrevocably. 

In cultures that make maintaining skin contact an absolute priority no matter what else is going on the story they live in is, " the world is a sacred place and we humans belong in such a place. 

*aggre-culture: a culture of aggression: waging war on biodiversity to foster humans favoured foods. Especially wheat and dairy both of which contain addictive morphine-like exorphins that mimic the body’s endorphins, reducing pain and stimulating the pleasure centre in the brain. This is an identifiable cultural attribute that defines its expanding boundaries. 

Bioregional Awareness
 "The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery -- not over nature but of ourselves." Rachel Carson 1962

 “I doubt that many people have an easy feeling about the future . . or our ability to protect and maintain the networks of plant and animal life upon which the human future ultimately depends. Nor do I believe it likely that many of us believe that the hope for the future lies in more research, or in some technological fix for the human dilemma. The research already done has produced truths which are generally ignored. We are reaching the end of technological fixes, each of which gives rise to new, and often more severe problems. It is time to get back to looking at the land, water, and life on which our future depends, and the way in which people interact with these elements.” Dasmann 1975

What is a Bioregion:
 • A distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole "life-place" with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured.
 • A geographical area whose boundaries are roughly determined by nature rather than human beings. One bioregion is distinguished from another by characteristics of flora, fauna, water, climate, rocks, soils, land-forms, and the human settlements, cultures, and communities these characteristics have spawned.
• The basic geographic unit that integrates human governance within ecological principals, the minimum area where a human community is able to achieve an autonemous, sustainable lifestyle. In the pre-conquest era identified by a particular indigenous language group.

Re-inhabitation:
Local community is the basic unit of human habitation. It is at this level that we can reach our fullest potential and best effect social change. Human communities are integral parts of the larger bioregional and planetary life communities. The empowerment of human communities is inseparable from the larger task of re-inhabitation -- learning to live sustainably and joyfully in place.

 Curriculum
 • Act together as a community,
• Learn local history and natural heritage,
• Discover the wisdom of diverse world views,
 • Distinguish their needs from their wants,
• Develop environmental literacy,
• Understand local ecosystems,
• Make ecologically sustainable choices,

 Act together as a community
• Create greeting and bonding rituals
• Choose a clan name and totem
• Learn songs and dances

Learn local history and natural heritage 
• Story telling: “How Port of Spain came to be”
• Learn hazards of nature
• Develop familiarity with local wildlife

Discover the wisdom of diverse worldviews
• Reading creation myths of different cultures

Distinguish our needs from our wants
• “How long would I live without…?”

Develop environmental literacy,
• The water cycle
• A food chain
• The compost heap

Understand local ecosystems
• Definitions
• The POS watershed
 • Explore our connections to the land, the sea and all living things,

Make ecologically sustainable choices
• Reading grocery labels
• Food miles • Import substitution
• Understand our responsibility as inhabitants of a bioregion.

Know your watershed
 • Describe where your water comes from and where it goes after you use it?
• How many days to full moon? (Give or take two days)
• What kinds of rocks or soils make up the ground under you?
• When does the wet season begin and end?
• When was the last big fire in your region?
• What foods did the Amerindian tribes of your region eat?
• Name five local herbs?
 • From which direction does the rain come?
• Where does your garbage end up?
• On which days of the year are the shadows shortest in your region?
• When are the Agouti in heat and when are the young born?
• Name five trees in your region, are they indigenous or naturalized exotics?
• Name five birds that live in your region?
• Do you know the history of development in your watershed?
• What species are already extinct in your region?
• You are sitting here reading this now, point to the north.

Activities
• Exploring the garden - learning the hazards
• Using all our senses – deer ears, owl eyes, touching, smelling, tasting
• Observing the animal and plant interactions
• Imitating animals
• Recognising bird calls
• Building a model of a mountain to show soil erosion
• Build a model of the POS watershed from a contour map using paper/clay
• Build a compost pile
• Stalking