Natural economy

Natural economy is a navigation system to voyage the relationships between people and the processes they invent to use local natural resources for survival, social cohesion, and economic development. It was developed by a team of teachers in association with the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate as part of their International GCSE.

It is a synoptic model of the development and spread of culture that focuses on location and land-use decisions. These decisions are specific to certain times and places, involving the learning of skills and technologies to make a living from processing local materials and energy flows.

Particular local cultural models are defined in terms of:-

    • the resource base providing food, energy and materials;

    • the processing skills for getting food, and crafting objects and constructions;

    • the cultural area;

    • the family and group customs.

In this sense, natural economy is an educational development of the Sauer/Harvey 1963-67 model of principles that govern human organisation over space, and the management of natural resources for their sustainability (Fig 6.02). The model has been generalised to include native pre-industrial, non-monetary economies from which there are lessons to be learned about living in ecological harmony with the local resource base.

Examples of recent monetary economies categorised by their dependence on particular natural resources, are fisheries, pastoralism and woodcraft. These may be taken as a natural analogue models of world development because:

    • they represent the development of ancient cultural uses of natural resources that are becoming extinct in the modern world;

    • they each express a management system, based on ecological cycles and climatic fluctuations, with yields that have to be coupled to the linear processes of economic growth;

    • - they have a long tradition of applied research into the mass cropping and competitive use of natural resources;

    • they involve the continuous cropping of ecosystems that are losing diversity and are under threat from industrialisation;

    • they allow global spatial comparisons to be made in all of their dimensions.

People and Place

Natural economy is the human behavioural superstructure that governs the use of 'natural', or day to day local living space. People and space are integrated through a cultural emphasis on production systems which use locally evolved, idiosyncratic symbols, facilities and tools. In contrast, the monetary economy operates in the global space of national and international politics, which emphasises the standardised methods of mass production, commercialism and monetary flows. We need to distinguish concepts that define the cultural ordering of space from those that define the monetary ordering of space, because the cultural and economic maps cannot always be superimposed, and cultural heritage, as a local cultural stabilising force, predates the world economy.

Natural economy defines the behavioural evolution of localised social groups from the small vernacular theatres of pre industrial economic units to the international arena of communities dependent on industrial mass production. The beginnings were the primeval technological expressions of localised social systems which tapped natural resources to supply human needs and wants. This produced the first local impacts which turned 'ecosystems' into 'landscapes. Natural economy is now expressed historically through the dynamic biophysical mosaic of complex landscapes that have been produced by abstraction of natural resources by past and present developments of local economies.

The economising techniques of industrialism are:-

    • intensive research;

    • financial capital;

    • sources of cheap power;

    • invention of machines for specialised jobs,;

    • education and training for jobs, rather than crafts, among the working population;

    • and construction of infrastructures of transport and communication for circulation of people, goods and ideas.

These outcomes of technological invention have produced the typical features of the modern commercial world.

Flows in a Natural Economy

The natural economy model defines landscape dynamically as a cultural base resulting from the interaction of the following basic flows;

    • flows of natural resources into human societies, supported, and influenced by:--flows of carbon through biological systems;

    • flows of climatic energy, which impact locally as heat, wind, rainfall/ice, tides and ocean currents;

    • flows of planetary energy, from the earth's inner structure and its molten core, expressed in earth movements and local geological hot-spots, where heat, and/or magma reaches the surface.

The different flows are characterised as follows:-

    • flows of natural resources are expressions of the human economy;

    • flows of photosynthetic carbon and climatic flows of air and water are expressions of the solar economy;

    • geological flows of materials and energy arising from processes in the earth's crust and core are expressions of the planetary economy.

The three distinct economies set the conceptual boundaries to every natural economy.

The main local inputs to any system of natural resource utilisation are:-- land (for obtaining the resources, and for living and processing them);

    • technology (the outcome of local inventiveness and construction skills);

    • labour (the availability of people to make a worthwhile production system);

    • management (the organisation of human skills to make a production system);

    • and capital (some form of local wealth for investment in labour and technology, that can be augmented by trading products).

Social Production Systems

Scientifically, natural economy delineates the inventions and technologies by which the earth's biophysical economies are drawn into the human economy to generate wealth. The creation of wealth allows financial investment in the exploitation of more natural resources. This in turn increases wealth still further. World development has so far proceeded on this basis. It is an example of positive feedback because use of natural resources stimulates their increased use. A more effective management of flows of natural resources into the human economy creates a demand for the consumption of ever more and more natural resources.

This positive feedback system of consumerism is illustrated in the development of two kinds of social groups which drive the economic transformation of materials and energy flows into goods and services.

Modern production systems are characteristic of 'constructive groups' who construct a landscape to serve their economic aspirations, populating it beyond the limits of the local natural productivity, importing goods and services from elsewhere, thereby destroying its ecosystems. Ancient production systems on the other hand are characteristic of'inscribed groups', who organise their society for the sustained exploitation of local

natural resources. They are inscribed, or embedded, into local ecosystems by being linked to the productivity of local biophysical flows. These links limit the number of people who can partake of the local resources.

The natural economy of inscribed groups involves each unit taking in and processing commodities right to the point where they are ready for the consumer as final products. The products of these consumer-economies are intended for permanent or terminal use in the form in which they are acquired. They are not for incorporation by other producers into more developed and complex products, and are not subject to further exchange. Strong folk arts and traditional crafts are a feature of consumer economies.

In contrast to the economies of inscribed groups, the systems of constructive groups express producer-economies. They are organised to effect a transfer of goods from one producer to another in unfinished form. The consumer is at the end of a long line of producers each of whom has added something to the final product. Industrialism and agrarianism are examples of production systems of constructive groups Agrarianism is now dominated by the mass production of crops through agriculture and plantation forestry, which are sold on for others to 'add value'.

World development has progressed as 'consumer-orientated' craft production has given way to producer-orientated mass production systems. Mass production is the characteristic of industrialism. The inputs of natural resources are managed to supply markets and exchanges with goods and services to meet demands of wage-earning urban peoples who now dominate population structure throughout the world.

The constructive group system is an expansion of that already discussed. It is driven by the widespread desire to generate wealth.

Industrial wealth capitalises the application of new ideas, technological inventions, and mass advertising to increase the output of cheaper products and boost demand for the 'new and better'.

Now that agriculture and forestry, the two modern dominant expressions of agrarianism, have developed in this direction, 'industrialism' and 'agrarianism' are interchangeable concepts. The main difference between a map of manufacturing industry iand that of modern agriculture is the concept labelled 'industrial urbanism' would be named 'rural depopulation/deprivation'.

Ethnoecology and Ecomenes

Modern industry and agriculture are the production systems of constructive groups. They are organised in production lines and the conservation aspect of self-sufficiency characteristic of early inscribed consumer economies in town and countryside has virtually disappeared. The production systems of ancient pre industrial inscribed groups bound ethnic development to the local ecology. Ethnoecology has been defined as the subject for studying these groups, which are characterised as being either completely, or mainly, self sufficient.

For inscribed groups bound to a particular ecological flow of natural resources yet operating a market economy, the term ecomene was coined by early French geographers. A 19th century European coastal community based on the sustained exploitation of a local fish stock, is an example of an ecomene. An ecomene is a unique combination of people, topography, ideas, skills and capital. The term is still useful today. Various criteria may be used to distinguish an ecomene- language, customs or culture, ideology or religion. Not all of these are applicable in every case but a permanent essential character of an ecomene is the personal recognition of each individual that they belong to a group different from others. They either consume the fruits of their labours themselves, or trade them for immediate use by other groups.

The Conservation Culture

Ethnoecology is the study of groups that are now extinct, and there are few examples of ecomenes in our uniform industrial world. The modern expressions of inscribed culture are the conservation groups and organisations which define the urban 'green culture'. Conservationists insert the existence value of nature into their industrial economic system in order to sustain the supply of natural resources in the face of our ever increasing demands on the environment. This approach is needed, not only to sustain supplies for our material wants, but also to meet our spiritual needs. The latter come from contact with 'wild nature' and 'scenic beauty'.

This third element in modern natural economy is really an up to date expression of the behaviours which characterised early inscribed cultures whose needs were sustained by cropping self-renewing seminatural ecosystems. 'Greens' may therefore be viewed as contemporary expressions of the old inscribed cultures. Indeed, many nature reserves can only be maintained by adopting the ancient, uneconomic agrarian production systems which were abandoned in the face of the economic gains to be had from adopting mass production. Conservationists attempt to preserve wildlife and heritage, and place a monetary value on seminatural ecosystems for the various classes of 'natural goods' we can derive from them. For this purpose, individuals, voluntary groups and government agencies promote the conservation of natural resources using some of the wealth of a global mass production economy.

Conservation management is a response to the problems, issues and challenges of natural resource utilisation. It may be visualised as the negative feedback regulator of consumerism activated by the values people place on the resources.

People value stocks of natural resources that are attached to particular supplies of materials and energy that provide 'goods' in the following ways:-

    • 'user values', or 'user benefits', derive from the actual use of the stocks, whether for survival or pleasure.

    • other kinds of values are expressed through options to use the stocks and 'optional values' are the values of natural resources as potential benefits for future use.

    • the third contribution to the economic value of the environment is the existence value of one or more of its elements; 'existence values' are intrinsic and embedded in the actual elements, and are unconnected with their actual or future use; they have been equated with a conservation ethic; this ethic embraces our duty to sentient beings, and ecosystems, and our concern for future generations.

Sustainable Economic Development

The conservation movement developed as a response to local perceptions that some features, upon which members of the local user-community place a value, were being destroyed or eroded through the economic transformation of a local resource flow. Until the last decade, care for the environment was expressed mainly in the context of managing local landscapes for their aesthetic value and nature reserves because of their rare species. The notion that global conservation of all natural resources should go hand in hand with industrial development has recently taken on a new urgency. It has become apparent that renewable resources are being exploited beyond recovery, and conservation can no longer be seen as peripheral to our quest for social and economic welfare.

A global strategy for conservation based on the view that development depends on conservation, and that conservation depends equally upon development, was promoted by the United Nations Environment Programme in the late 1970s. The strategy aims to advance the achievement of sustainable development through the conservation of natural resources linked with economic growth. Now, after the Rio Environment Summit, nations that were signatories to it's Agenda 21 and Biodiversity Convention, are creating their action plans for sustainable development. All these conservation responses, local and global, must take place through the application of designs, plans, regulations, or social pressure. The responders may be governments public agencies, individuals, voluntary bodies, and the private sector. Every conservation programme requires some form of management/ monitoring system, and special skills and professions to implement it.

Environmental care in this sense depends on industrialism because salaries of the professional staff have to be paid for directly or indirectly (e.g. profits forgone) from the wealth generated by those countries operating profitable economies. This conceptual structure of a world conservation strategy embodies the option values and existence values of particular environmental features.

Focus on Landscapes

In summary, most primeval landscapes have been greatly altered by the development of interdependent human communities operating market economies. Development of the British economy has involved clearing the natural woodlands, reclaiming marshland, fen and moor, digging mines, making canals and railways and creating country houses and their parks. All of these activities have made a contribution to the local character of the British countryside.

Natural economy is a conceptualised materials and energy flow model of natural resource utilisation which focuses on various features of these local landscapes. Landscape may be conceptualised as being made up of a physical geological layer, upon which is superimposed a biological layer. Human settlement and land use give rise to a third, constructed layer. Finally, there is the notional layer defined by the mental constructs we place upon the area in art, legend and literature. Each landscape element within each of these layers is either a window (or entry point) into a rural, urban or global model, where it is the biological or physical expression of one of the concepts of world development. Each concept is also a containment cell for the information and data which defines it. The self-assembly of these concepts by linking each one with others to which it is closely related provides a multi-dimensional learning experience. The end result is the delineation of a personal body of knowledge about the management of local materials and energy flows.

This exercise has a practical value in that every feature of a landscape is the tip of a knowledge 'iceberg', with a base bumping against others. For successful management of local natural resources these icebergs have to be delineated for successful navigation through the multi-dimensional issues facing resource managers.

Knowledge Maps

Natural economy has been presented as a model of human development in the form of a progression of figures that may be described as 'learning frames'. Each frame is an arrangement of key concepts of human social organisation as a 'map' or 'field of action'. It has been explained that this conceptual system offers advantages in presenting cross-curricular knowledge about world development as a self-contained structured whole. Together, they make a knowledge navigation system that can be used by a learner to place a particular topic in a broad context of other topics to which is related. Research into the way learners perceive cartographic maps as a system of communication indicate that children cannot orientate themselves spatially within an areal unit until they are 13 or older. On the other hand the ability to assemble picture jigsaws is evident at a pre-school level. This suggests opportunities to stimulate conceptual learning about world development at an earlier age by assembling concepts identified with clear pictographic descriptors.

Tabulation is the usual method of presenting a cross-curricular theme. A table of contents approach is a simplification which reduces the number of variables. It does this by confining the learner to compartments. In contrast, a conceptual array addresses the need to develop a capacity to handle effectively a large number of variables.

Natural economy has now been incorporated into a broader framework of cultural ecology. A knowledge map of cultural ecology is available.