New Natural History GCSE – so we are not the Last Page of the Book of Earth
With such a depletion of wildlife in the UK alone, with so many schools, cities, towns, and housing estates being built so far removed from our natural world how on earth does the next generation stand a chance to learn about the natural world and be sympathetic to it?
At the same time, we also are demanding literally the earth from our natural world, and the way we extract from the natural world is getting more intensive and damaging. As we move further away from it how do we fill that nature gap in society? We speak with Environmentalist, Producer and Writer Mary Colwell who has campaigned and devised a NEW Natural History GCSE designed to help bridge this chasm, helping put nature and the wonderment and fascination of nature into education.
“Nature is for everyone, it is there for YOU to engage with, that’s why putting it into the school system is important, making it open access and free to all, for everyone to engage with. We know from the COPs recently that we are looking at a very difficult time ahead, and those young people will have to live in this difficult time, and if they are going to make the right decisions for themselves, people and the planet, they need to be more knowledgeable, more engaged and more connected to this planet we live on.”
Research by Miles Richardson of the University of Derby’s Nature Connectedness Research department has shown that by the time children reach secondary school, there is a marked drop off in connection to the natural world. It happens at around 13, it gets crowded out, school gets very academic, and nature is side-lined, squashed into Biology, and then it’s only picked up again when we are 30.
With 80% of us in the UK living in urban environments that means only 20% of us live in anything you can call countryside. We have shifted our cultural attitudes, our language, everything has shifted away from nature. All this is creating a perfect storm of disassociation and lack of emotional response and emotional intelligence when it comes to dealing with the natural world.
Up until now, through the current education system, we are handing over to the next generation a fractured view of nature. We live in this disassociation, we are just taking what we want, and it’s not even much to pay. This is what we are passing on to the next generation and it must stop.
One of the beautiful things about Biophilic Design is that it brings nature and nature-inspired design right under the noses of everyone, it reconnects us to nature. How wonderful would it be, if alongside, the next generation learns how to identify, study, record and monitor the natural world, understanding how habitats make the nature of Britain: how the animals, plants and birds that we live with thrive, that they learn what its job is, how for instance how an Oak Tree fixes the soil, provides habitats, how it interacts with us. We are all part of the same thing, the outside world, we are nature, we are one.
The Disgupta review emphasised the importance of learning about biodiversity and ecology at all levels of education. I interviewed Dom Higgins Health and Education director for the Wildlife Trusts, a few weeks back and I was really thrilled to learn that Mary has campaigned and designed this new Natural History GCSE. “We need a nature-literate, engaged, and eco-sensitive generation, we need to start helping fill that gap”.
It’s showing up in our culture as well. In literature We use a lot fewer nature words in use of nature fiction poetry song lyrics since the 50s, use of personal pronouns, me, my, mine, has increased by 50% in the language we use on a day-to-day basis, we have become more inward and individualistic and a lot less community and open to the natural world.
Nature is everything hopefully it will encourage a general greening in the curriculum.
Let’s change that, through design, through education, through inspiration.
In this podcast you’ll also learn some interesting facts to tell your friends:
Did you know Cabbage White butterflies, migrate over the North Sea. We also see an influx of Painted Ladies from Europe, “I think it’s wonderful to imagine a whole host of Orange butterflies come skipping their way here over the grey North Sea.”
A swift never lands unless it comes into nest to breed, drink, eats, mates on the wing, rides out the storms and tempests of the planet and only lands to have its babies.
And how about the Curlew, with their most haunting and bubbling call? Did you know it can dip its bill into soft soil, the end of which moves? It acts like a pair of pincers, it feels around. It’s called rhinokinesis. The end of its bill opens independently, like a great pair of tweezers with a sensitive tip helping the bird find food on the water shore.
“Your Biophilic Design magazine is important, we need to be inspired by nature to help us live full and fascinating and very beautiful lives, that's really important because we mustn’t give the impression that the future is all about hairshirts, and not doing anything, not eating this and not going there. It’s not about that, it’s reorientating our desires and wonder towards what enhances all of life not just our own, that’s why I think your magazine is really really important, and the fact that it’s beautiful is really important as well.” (thank you Mary, ed.!)
We also discuss how schools should be designed. Full of flowers, and moth traps, when children go outside, let’s not have them just sit on concrete, but why not help them experience seasons and nature? Let’s reignite that childlike wonder and help them enjoy and learn that sitting on the grass has something beautiful to show them, something intriguing in it. The earth has so many menageries of wonder. Why not on a city level, as they walk to school, how about nature following them right up to the school door? It is essential that we are linked emotionally to nature as well as data collectors.
Mary calls on the best designers to think about school settings. That all that grey and concrete and hardness we often see in schools changes our state of mind, and this must affect kids at school.
So, this podcast is a call for designers to bring opportunities for biodiversity and also a spark of inspiration that everybody can do something… “every single person on this planet can do something, through what you buy, getting a bit more educated about things, or supporting organisations. On a personal level, just pick one thing and love it… because everything is connected to everything else… give it your all, care of it, campaign it, promote it, draw it, raise awareness, get engaged on an emotional level and you will be amazed at who comes to stand by your side.”
To find out more about Mary visit www.curlewmedia.com
https://www.curlewaction.org/natural-history-gcse/
Buy her new book, The Gathering Place, Bloomsbury Publishing, April 2023
https://uk.bookshop.org/a/6777/9781399400541
Other books by Mary
John Muir (fabulous book!) https://uk.bookshop.org/a/6777/9780745956664
Curlew Moon (just love the title) https://uk.bookshop.org/a/6777/9780008241070
Tooth, Beak and Claw (a must read for all nature lovers) https://uk.bookshop.org/a/6777/9780008354794
Credits: with thanks to George Harvey Audio Production for the calming biophilic soundscape that backs all our podcasts.
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