Let’s pretend, for a moment, that we actually had a future. We don’t, of course, but we can lay all that aside, for a moment. And let us also pretend that we had the authority to create a curriculum for a hypothetical Gaian culture in some imaginary future — as if we could wave our magic wands and start over again. What kind of schooling would we order up for our children?
Here is my take on this.
The theoretical foundation of a Gaian curriculum would be the following assumptions:
- That humanity is a part of, not apart from, the natural world (or Gaia).
- That Gaia — humanity included — is a complex adaptive system where the processes of life itself create and sustain the conditions that in turn sustain life: our oxygenated atmosphere, our climate range, our hydrosphere, our topsoil.
- That the survival and well-being of all living organisms — ourselves included — depends on the optimization of three complex variables: health, competence, and resilience.
- That we are structurally coupled with, and therefore depend entirely upon, the health, competence, and resilience of the micro-, meso-, and macrosystems that sustain us: our internal biomes, our sources of nutrition, our social networks (family, communities, economic and technological infrastructures, political systems), and, of course, Gaia and all her subsystems (watersheds, climate regimes, biomes, topsoils, etc.).
- Therefore, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality” where “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
What might a curriculum based on these (entirely verifiable) premises look like? Its major goal would be for all students to optimize their own health, competence, and resilience, so that they, in turn, can find niches (in accordance with their own unique talents and skills) that enable them to promote the health, competence, and resilience of all the larger systems that sustain them: their families, communities, bioregions, and planet.
How might this work?
Our present educational systems, whether elementary, secondary, postsecondary, or vocational, emphasize only one of these three core values: specialized competence in areas that enable students to find employment within a global market economy.
By and large, we have separate institutions to address our physical health needs, such as the medical and pharmaceutical professions or public gyms where we can work out or play sports. We tend to our mental health, likewise, by consulting specialists like counsellors or psychologists. And for our spiritual health, we go to churches or synagogues or mosques, or simply learn to meditate.
There are no institutions at all, however, that specifically promote the third value: generalized resilience, or the ability to adapt to unpredictable changes in our circumstances. For this, we are on our own.
But what might happen if we designed curricula that addressed all three core survival values simultaneously — health, competence, and resilience? And what if our learning units were also crafted based on a clear ethical awareness — that is, awareness of how our own health, competence, and resilience depends on that of our microsystems (i.e. our own internal biomes) our mesosystems (our families and communities), and our macrosystems (our bioregions and Gaia herself)?
The result, I suggest, would closely resemble, or even be identical, to the curriculum of Permaculture, which is rooted in the three ethical imperatives of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share (or reinvesting the surplus), and in a relational, or systemic view of life. In other words, the Gaian curriculum I envision already exists! But because it is so transgressive of the norms of a global market economy, most people have not even heard of it. How might that change?
The first strategic step in propagating permaculture as widely as possible is, ironically, to drop the “P” word. Any truly innovative way of thinking will quickly attract a coterie of devotees, whom the rest of the world will perceive as a cult — especially if it has a name. And this, unfortunately, has happened to permaculture. Even though it has attracted enthusiastic adherents and practitioners all over the planet who are bright, capable, rigorous thinkers, it is widely perceived by academics and the general population as a cult, and lumped together with other agrarian movements like Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamics (which definitely have cult-like attributes.)
In discourse on commercial agriculture, this renaming of permaculture has already happened: “regenerative agriculture” is a synonym for permaculture that is acceptable to the cultural mainstream — but its concepts apply only to large-scale agriculture. In the same way, mainstream academic scientists have created their socially acceptable term “Earth Systems Science” to displace Lovelock’s transgressive term “Gaia,” in order to research and discuss exact same biogenic global phenomena that Lovelock was pointing out.
So I have recently come up with another simple mechanism for propagating permaculture without invoking the “P” word — Garden Guilds. The genesis of this idea was my reading of Toby Hemenway’s superb book Gaia’s Garden in which he scales down and adapts Bill Mollison’s and David Holmgren’s permaculture principles to the needs of suburban backyard gardeners (since Mollison’s and Holmgren originally conceived of their ideas as they applied to rural, small-scale agrarian communities.)
What is a Garden Guild? A voluntary association of suburbanites or city dwellers, who live within walking distance within any given neighborhood, and who have backyards and an interest in growing some of their own food. They get together periodically for potluck dinners to exchange recipes, produce, and ideas about gardening, and they are networked together under the sponsorship of neighborhood associations and Master Gardener associations. These could become networks for quickly disseminating the permaculture principles and practices that Hemenway lays out so eloquently, and they could be propagated far and wide by a web-based registry so that anyone moving into a new neighborhood could quickly locate and join a Garden Guild near their homes.
The slogan of the Garden Guild movement is this: “Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness” — for these injunctions are entirely consistent with the three core ethics of permaculture (Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share) and like the latter, they are mutually reinforcing of one another. More to the point, they are also congruent with cultivating a Gaian curriculum from the ground up, by encouraging Guild participants to nurture their own, and their children’s health, competence, and resilience — as well as that of their gardens, community, and planet. So I would conclude with this summation of a Gaian Curriculum: Promote the health, competence, and resilience of ourselves, our communities, and our living planet by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness, through learning, teaching, healing, and creating…Gaia.
And even if we have no future, this is a curriculum we can practice right now, in the present moment, starting in our own back yards.