The rationales we employ on behalf of
anything, including nature conservation, reflect
our attitudes and values. Our attitudes and notions toward and valuation of those places
classed as heritage sites are revealed in the many traditional arguments used to defend
those places. Moreover, our attitudes and values profoundly affect the manner in which
we treat something.
Many claim that heritage sites are important
to maintain because they provide inspiration
for the artistically and intellectually inclined. In the process, these designated areas add
to and help shape culture, and are the inspiration for painters, photographers, writers
and musicians find their inspiration.
They also serve to inspire those in the
intellectual arts as well. Philosophers, for
example–especially environmental philosophers–who seek a wildness experience to be
a contemplative catalyst or cognitive genesis for the really big questions of philosophy:
What is the meaning of the universe where we all came from; what we are all doing
here; where we are going; what the character of our existence is, and what our moral
place in the world is. Heritage sites are the only muses for art, but rather that they are
excellent and unique ones, and that to lose any such inspirational kindling would be tragic.
One of the central themes of conservationists
is to be a friend of the planet and to live at
peace with ecosystems. The friendship concept is embodied in 'Friends of the Earth',
the largest international network of environmental groups in the world, represented in 68
countries. Peace with ecosystems is at the heart of Greenpeace. a non-profit
organisation, with a presence in 40 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the
Pacific. As a global organisation, Greenpeace focuses on the the most crucial worldwide
threats to our planet's biodiversity and environment.
At a local level, where most people interact
with nature, a spiritual view of the local
environment emerges from trying to read and express various signs of the workings of
nature, in relation to our position in the grand scheme of things. For example, the Koran
has much to say about 'signs' which, through the imagination, point to the deeper
significance of everyday life.
- "In the creation of the heavens
and the earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the
ships that sail the ocean with cargoes beneficial to man; in the water which God sends
down from the sky and with which He revives the earth after its death, dispersing over it
all manner of beasts; in the disposal of the winds, and in the clouds that are driven
between earth and sky; surely there are signs for rational men." (The Koran 2:163)
- In a similar set of holistic notions,
St Francis of Assisi praised God "for our sister,
Mother Earth, which brings forth varied fruits and grass and glowing flowers", and ended
with praise to God "for our Sister, the death of the body." Neighbourliness on the part of
a stranger is signed, as an important element in the evolved pattern of human behaviour,
in the parable of the good Samaritan. A sunset seen above an urban skyline can be both
a scientific and a unifying spiritual experience.
Religious ideas, about origins and values
in nature cemented families in the past, but are
now lost or diluted within minority subcultures, unattached to the major world religions,
who are left to develop their place in an idiosyncratic cosmology.
Moral and spiritual teaching has always
relied heavily on visual imagery in the formation
and realisation of a society's attitudes, values, and beliefs, and their transmission, as
signs of what it is to be human, from one generation to the next. An experimental
meditation is being developed based on images of the natural world which the painter
Graham Sutherland used to compose his Great Tapestry at Coventry.
Examples may be gathered through local
appraisals of the influential role played by the
visual arts and architecture in the formation and maintenance of religious and spiritual
values in all societies since prehistoric times. However, there is no generally accepted
educational framework to use neighbourhood notions about nature to link communities
and environment to a larger scheme of spiritual values. In particular, classroom
examples are needed which highlight spiritual reasons for promoting a particular course
of local development.
Spiritual appraisals take a world view
that is rooted in the imagination and passes
beyond the limits of ordinary life. They start from the postulate that the material cosmos
in some way expresses or manifests a deeper spiritual reality, expressed through
human consciousness.
Humanists such as Julian Huxley have seen
an apparent progress in cosmic evolution
towards increasing consciousness and control. That is to say, we are part of a
development from the unconscious simplicity of the Big Bang to the conscious, diverse
and complex carbon-based life-forms of the planet earth. Our unknown future carries the
possibility of understanding and controlling the cosmos itself.
Attempts to provide biological explanations
of consciousness are far from convincing,
and are certainly not established by scientific study. The ultimate personal expressions
of consciousness are through the arts. The author Henry Rider Haggard, for example,
through his fertile imagination, kept returning to the possibility that the material universe
does express a spiritual reality. The purpose of cosmic evolution may be the emergence
of some form of conscious relationship between that spiritual reality and entities in the
material cosmos.
Science is not irreligious. It does not
entail that there is no spiritual reality, no God, and
no purpose in the cosmos. Many of the greatest scientists were strongly motivated by
their religious beliefs. The sort of highly ordered and emergent universe that science
discloses is compatible with, and almost overwhelmingly suggests, the existence of a
creator of enormous wisdom and power. Religious myths depict the way in which that
reality makes itself known in the material universe. Religious rituals establish appropriate
responses to that reality. Religious symbols express its fundamental character.
- Some religious thinkers take the view
that modern science can help to clear away some
elements of literalism, ignorance and myopia which still disfigure religion by providing a
new and better understanding of the material universe. Spiritual notions extend the this
scientific world view through ideas which define a realm of spirit, from which the material
cosmos emerges, and to which it will return. Religion has an irreplaceable role to play in
relating human life to that wider spiritual context. Our age offers the possibility of relating
the scientific and religious perspectives in a mutually enriching way.
Taking Christianity as an example, from
the beginning it attempted to present a cosmic
vision of a spiritually ordered universe, whose purpose would be somehow completed by
a future full knowledge and love of the creator.
The myths of Christianity show:-
- how God ordered the universe and produced
a conscious moral agency;
- how God expressed the essence of divine
nature as self-giving in the life of a particular
human, Jesus;
- how God disclosed the ultimate goal
of the universe in the resurrection of Jesus.
The cosmic vision of the first Christians
was that the spirit who was the creator of the
cosmos had acted in human history to initiate the liberation of human lives from pride
and egoism, and their union with the divine essence of self giving. In other words, we are
part of the whole cosmic process from the Big Bang, and have emerged as conscious
agents which can consciously unite the material to God, its spiritual source and goal.
- The cosmos and all life in it, will
eventually cease to exist. But the Christian view has
always been that the fulfillment of God's purpose lies beyond this space-time, even
though it must be approached through it. God's goal for the cosmos is that everyone who
has ever lived will have the opportunity to share in a trans-historical knowledge and love
of God in a 'new creation'. From a Christian viewpoint, this Cosmos is the place where
souls emerge in the material and temporal realm. But they were always intended to find
their fulfillment in the eternal realm, which is the spiritual reality of God.