EDITORIAL S

lously transformed into resources for rearing ducks. The ducks are left in the fields 24 hours a day, and do not need to be herded back to the shed. They are completely free-range until the rice plants form ears of grain in the field. At that point, the ducks have to be rounded up (otherwise they will eat the rice grains). They are then returned to the shed and fed exclusively on waste grain. There they mature, lay eggs, and get ready for the market.

The ducks are not the only inhabitants of Takao's paddy field. The aquatic fern, Azolla, or duckweed, which harbours a blue-green bacterium as a symbiont, is also grown on the surface of the water. The Azolla is an efficient nitrogen-fixer, and is both readily eaten by the ducks, as well as attracting insects to be similarly enjoyed by the ducks. The plant is very prolific, doubling itself every three days, so it can be harvested for cattle-feed as

well. In addition, the plants spread out to cover the surface of the water, providing hiding places for another inhabitant, the roach, and protecting them from the ducks. The roach feed on duck faeces, on daphnia and other worms, which in turn feed on the plankton. Both fish and ducks provide manure to fertilise the rice plants throughout the growing season, and the rice plants in turn provide shelter for the ducks.

The Aigamo paddy field, then, is a complex, well-balanced, self-maintaining, self-propagating ecosystem. The only external input is the small amount of waste grain fed to the ducks, and the output is a delicious, nutritious harvest of organic rice, duck and roach. It is amazingly productive. The Furunos' farm is two hectares; 1.4 of which are paddy fields, while the rest is devoted to growing organic vegetables. This small farm yields annually seven tonnes of

rice, 300 ducks, 4,000 ducklings and enough vegetables to supply 100 people. At that rate, no more than two per cent of the population would need to become farmers in order to feed the nation, and observers believe that with proper management, Japan could become self-sufficient once more. The Aigamo method also explodes the myth that organic farming is necessarily labour-intensive. "Organic farming need not be labourintensive; it is fun!" says Takao Furuno emphatically.

By using human imagination and ingenuity, and by co-operating with nature rather than re-engineering it, Takao Furuno has cleared yet another path for a safe, diverse and sustainable agricultural future. So who needs transgenic crops? •

Mae-Wan Ho heads the Bio-Electrodynamics laboratory of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.

The Ecology of Art By John Papworth

In i medieval Europe, people quarrelled, fought duels and had their throats cut. Government was often tyrannical, torture was a standard feature, and a plague such as the Black Death could wipe out two-thirds or more of the population of a city within two years. War was frequent, poverty was endemic, sanitation primitive and many social services non-existent. How, then, did the people of this period manage to bequeath to us towns and cities of such surpassing civic splendour? Or even villages which, however they were contrived, we can have no hesitation in describing as beautiful? What did those people have which today we lack?

Simply to walk about a medieval European city centre such as, for example, Siena, is to be filled with a sense of almost sublime wonder. It is a walled city, as in those times they so often were, set on a hilltop with a need for defence and fortification uppermost in the civic mind. But why were the walls and the several city gates of such stunning and imposing beauty? Why is its centre, the famous Piazza del Campo - an open area almost in the shape of a huge sea-shell, bordered by buildings which are veritable palaces with its incredible belltopped tower at one side - a work of art of such exquisite splendour that six or

more centuries after its construction it draws a sharp intake of breath of admiration from any visitor fortunate enough to encounter it?

So often the visitor visits, admires, wonders and returns home, leaving these imposing questions unanswered. This is not just a pity but a tragedy, for today the need to answer the problems they should pose has a bearing on the survival prospects of our very civilisation. For it is not simply in architecture and civic design that these people excelled. Medieval and Renaissance Europe achieved heights of superlative wonder and delight in almost every field of creative activity, and again we are impelled, not only to ask why, but to find answers. It would seem that these people survived despite their defects because they insisted on surviving resplendently. How did they do it?

There are two answers which come to mind: one is not difficult to discern, the other is perhaps more elusive. In walking about the different quarters of the walled city of Siena, even the casual visitor can scarcely fail to notice the way in which each will have a banner flying from its walls, and that each banner is different and pertains to its own particular quarter, or contrade. The banner is heraldic in design, and the design itself dates back to medieval times, and in some cases earlier.

There are seventeen contrade, and their banners are a source of immense pride. They are carried in all the civic or religious festivals, as well as in the annual carnivals and feasts. In former times they were a symbol of the government of each contrade, as well as of its particular church and of its trades and professional guilds. With the banners, there were distinctive forms of dress which, in all their medieval colour and design, are still often worn on special civic or religious feasts. Today, the banners have become a standard feature of the sports teams of each contrade and no contest (especially for football, for which Italians are not alone in having a passion) is complete without some young men engaging in the highlyskilled traditional art of a particular manner of banner-waving to encourage their team.

Evidently, medieval Siena was not a mass society, not just one amorphous entity governed from a single centre; it was an organic, multicellular body in which each cell - in this case each contrade - had its own distinctive identity and played its own vibrantly assertive role in the life of the city. Is this one major factor which medieval Europe had and which (with the tail of economic considerations today wagging the dog of political and social life, so that the vibrant cells of localised community life

340

The Ecologist, Vol. 29, No 5, August/September 1999
Distinctive medieval dress is still worn in Siena during festivals and celebrations

have disappeared - and with it their artistic and creative powers) we have lost?

To this loss we need to recognise another. Medieval and Renaissance life in Europe was small-scale; human-scale, we may say. In practice, in the vital matter of work (what Freud called "man's chief contact with reality") multitudes of small craftsmen and masters of different trades were exercising daily their creative powers at full stretch. They had to; it was not only a matter of pride, but of needing to be as good, i f not better, than their rivals i f they were to survive and prosper.

This is not a reference simply to the goldsmiths, inlayers, miniaturists, jewellers, glass-blowers, carvers, potters and others who abounded and whose skills we think of as 'arts'. We have to see it applies no less to the more mundane followings. The city was served by master bakers, master tailors, master shoemakers and masters of many other trades. Again, on this small human scale, the rivalry to achieve the creative best, to be known among one's neighbours as a top-ranking master craftsman or trader must have been intense. To establish a reputation gave its owner standing and dignity in his contrade, and it was a standing which was acknowledged with each particular guild in terms of honorifics and awards.

There is no doubt that machines could have done much to lighten the labours of the artisan craftsman of the time and that nearer to our own day, they did so. But any principle promoted to excess results in absurdity and in the

defeat of its original objectives. Machines today have been used not to lighten the labour of the craftsman but to abolish it. Instead of machines being the servants of man, man todav is the servant of machines.

But the characteristics of machines are not creativity and unique advances in quality, they are those of repetition, standardisation and uniformity. This is

The dominant place once imposingly occupied by art is now occupied by machines and mechanical procedures so that art has been marginalised, trivialised and bowdlerised one reason why cities all over the world today are tending to lose whatever individual characteristics they may have had, and to become more like each other: more uniform, more standardised and more boring and ugly.

Permeating all such considerations is the factor of control. However 'undemocratic' the government under which medieval man may have lived, he was generally in full control of his work, his community, his contrade - a body comprising all his immediate neighbours which played a vital positive role in the affairs of the city. This factor of control, on the basis of small active cells, reflected the organic nature of the natural world and society was able to live in harmony with it.

Its success in doing so enabled both

to flourish. Agriculture - what today we call 'organic' agriculture - flourished and was a partnership with the organic social and working structures within the city walls. Each complemented the other, and we should note that this was the vital seed bed from which all the great artistic achievements of the period - in architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, philosophy, drama, music and literature - were sprung. The big giants were rubbing shoulders with a multitude of smaller giants all at work in a humanscale, organically-structured order of intense creative endeavour. Have we here an explanation not only for medieval and Renaissance splendour but for the dangerous, wayward sterility of modern life? For while machines can only repeat and cannot create, they can certainly destroy. And they have not only destroyed the social basis of creative labour and made the masters of all the different crafts redundant; they are now, since they are out of control (and it is imperative that we grasp that they and those who promote them are out of control), destroying the natural organic balance of life itself.

Modern art has become tragically divorced from life. Its former achievements sprang from a close relationship between the natural order of things and organically-structured social and working relationships. The dominant place once imposingly occupied by art is now occupied by machines and mechanical procedures so that art has been marginalised, trivialised and bowdlerised. It has little to say and finds it almost impossible to say it, producing instead banality, futility and mediocrity as it struggles against machine-dominated social structures that regard it as a superfluous waste of money and which instead insists on building motorways and a global arsenal of nuclear and biological bombs, and on conducting a global rape of the planet.

There is a way forward out of this morass. It involves the deliberate insistence that we see all the elements of life, whether in work or government or nature, as reflecting the dynamic, multicellular balance and harmony of our natural environment. In this regard, an ecological framework needs to be seen as the natural basis on which we can survive, and on which our arts and crafts may once again flourish, so that the achievements of great art again begin to dazzle our senses with their splendour.

John Pap worth is editor of Fourth World Review

The Ecologist, Vol. 29, No 5, August/September 1999

341