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Back to Basics

The Global Climate Changer Who Lives on My Street

Shrinking and Greening at the Shorb Homestead

Back to the Basics—and what are the basics?

by Terril Shorb

These days, conversations about learning often focus on public education and all the fuss about "standards" and "No Child Left Behind" and the fact that students in many other developed countries of the world know math and science better than do students in the United States. I agree that the schooling of our children and adults requires a sense of what it is we are educating for. Some will say we are educating kids for math and science literacy so they can compete in the world marketplace. This may include computer skills, and a foundation on which to build engineering degrees. There seems to be an assumption that what we are educating for is an ever more highly technological future. I don’t doubt that such technologies will be a part of our future. But if technology is the answer, what is the question?

My question is this: when it comes to survival over the longer term and even to happiness, however vague that notion may be, what serves those qualities of life in ways to better assure a higher quality of life? My simple answer is that the basics of life start with providing ourselves and our families with water, food, shelter, and safety from forces that can hurt us. We also require a sense of being loved and belonging to a group that we love. Beyond all that there is the happy possibility of each of us giving back to the world something the world itself needs to thrive. It is this sense of reciprocity that I think is the root of full human health. Sadly, I find little evidence in the "standards" that we are trying to teach children, or adults, how to live as if they were connected to all kinds of other beings. Or that the good health of those other beings is important to our own health.

So I will say that I believe getting back to the basics involves learning how to sustain ourselves, our families, and the larger community of all beings, over the many generations. And that is kind of basics you will read about here.

A good start on this kind of education is to teach our children to read the libraries of two worlds—the world of nature and the world of human cultural knowledge. One way this can be accomplished is to do what our ancestors did and take our children on a walkabout to introduce them to the natural neighborhood. This begins at home, literally, and is a form of "Who Else Lives Here?" Each step brings awareness of another being and we can introduce ourselves to each kind of being as we encounter it. "This is an Alligator Juniper tree in our yard and it provides shade and beauty for us, homes for birds, beetles, squirrels, and other small creatures. Its berries make food for all of those creatures and when it breathes out it makes oxygen which we need to breathe. Hello, Alligator Juniper! We are some of your human neighbors and we are glad you are here."

This is something we adults can do, too, and I encourage my students to go on a walkabout and remind themselves that even amidst the concrete and asphalt there is much life to celebrate. Gratitude for our own lives and the lives of others in our midst is, I believe, one of the "basics" we would do well to restore to our sense of what it means to be an educated person.

What part of nature are you?

When people ask where I live, they likely expect an answer such as "in Arizona" or perhaps "in Prescott, Arizona." If I am elsewhere in the world, the answer might be "in the United States." What I really want to say is this: "I live in a neighborhood with alligator juniper trees, tarantulas, javelina, scrub jays, harvester ants, and some other human beings."

In other words, I prefer to describe where I live in terms of other beings with whom I share my space. I think of these living wild plants and animals as part of my extended family, and I like to think that I belong to their extended family. This strong sense of connection to other organisms begins to express what I mean when I talk about the "community of all beings." You will find that phrase throughout the literature on the Sustainable Community Development program here at Prescott College, and it is those local connections among creatures who call a place home that really defines what it is we hope we are sustaining in our respective communities.

I never found that when I studied ecology or biology or natural resources in my various courses in college that I felt the power of those connections. Perhaps this is because, in part, modern education places great importance on rational thinking. The emotional connections are ignored or even resisted because feelings can cloud the mind, or so it is said. I have great fun with this notion and sometimes challenge my students to express a purely rational thought that has no emotional effect inside, or to invite a feeling about something and guard it form any related thoughts. Thoughts and feelings, I believe, are related, always have been. In fact, scientists who study the evolution of the human mind and its processes, such as Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen, have written that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were equipped with a psychological response system that served them well out there in the savannah. The signals from the natural environment such as green tree-tops, waving grasses, the smell of a water hole, the movement of clouds and snakes and lions, all of those stirrings of nature stimulated responses "of ancient origin…including perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes (that) served important functions in both day-to-day survival and the long-term fitness of early humans."(1)

This effect is confirmed for me by my own upbringing in the northern Rocky Mountains where I was taught to be a hunter. The advice most often shared was to go quietly into the forest and find a spot and sit very still. Then I was told to close my eyes, to listen, smell, and to feel the presence of other wild animals. After some practice, I discovered that if I could clear my mind of the usual distractions we all carry around in us, I could begin t get a faint sense that someone else is here. With practice, I found that I could open my eyes, turn, and gaze directly at a place across a meadow or in a stand of Aspen trees and, after a moment, see the deer or elk or marmot who was already looking directly at me. Other times, I would be walking or sitting and I would feel that someone was watching me. If I gave it a moment, I could usually spot the creature who was looking my way.

My point here is that each of us is in possession of this amazing capacity to connect with other individuals with whom we share our place. This may be a very ancient gift, but it is one that has fresh meaning today because we will better achieve sustaining our communities when we feel a genuine connection to them. This fits nicely with Abraham Maslow’s ideas about the hierarchy of needs, including basic needs such as feeling that one belongs in a place, among people whom one loves and is loved by. I would add to Maslow’s notion the sense of deep connection with the other-than-human beings, as well. That also gives us an answer to what never really was a question—whether we are a part of nature. Of course we are. We complete nature, just as nature completes us. And when we both know this and feel this, we will be honestly motivated to be good care-keepers of our greater neighborhoods of all beings.