trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Feeling for StonesAs I began working with SID in 1997/98, I started to write a book that explored how we might inventecological societies. First, what could be learned from the experience of those developing countrieswhich had made a rapid shift from agricultural to industrial systems? Second, what could be learnedfrom the pre-industrial history of England? How had the English invented industrial society when therewas no model to follow? Third, why had African societies been so rich in biodiversity when Europeancolonization began in the late 19 th century? Had African cultures supported high biodiversity? If so,what might be learned from that legacy?In 2004, I printed Feeling for Stones: learning and invention when facing the unknown (Heinzen,2004). The pre-industrial English history identified important drivers of systemic invention. First,extremity (wars, famine, epidemic disease), shook up existing interests, creating room for new players todiscover new ways to meet new necessities. Second, people experimented with very local solutions: newsources of fuel, new agricultural techniques, etc., often using ideas gained from new education. Third,these local experiments engaged people across social boundaries of skill, wealth and knowledge – askilled carpenter, for example, would work closely with a pioneering landowner who wanted a windmill.The arts were another experimental space, rehearsing important ideas before they were tested in reality.Decades before the English Civil War beheaded Charles I, Shakespeare’s history plays asked when it waslegitimate to overthrow a king.These three pairs – Extremity & Necessity, Experiment & Education, Engagement & Aesthetics –became a mnemonic for how English society had invented the Industrial Revolution. Similar drivers –extremity, necessity, experiment and engagement – exist in East Africa today. They offer a vitalopportunity to create ecological societies without industrialising first, building on evidence that Africa’shigh biodiversity has, at least partially, been a product of African cultures themselves. Arguably, EastAfrican societies could become centres of systemic invention leading to modern ecological societies whileoffering new models to more industrialized societies.African knowledge & ecological societiesThe clearest expression of what might be learned from African societies does not exist in any particulartechnology or ecological insight. Instead, it is embodied in a system of customary property rights thatthe founders of the Barbets Duet have labeled “Mosaic Rights”. Under a mosaic rights system, no oneowns the land, but everyone has rights to some benefit of the land under specified conditions.Throughout Africa, different areas have had different systems of mosaic rights depending on the localecology and the culture that lives there.Mosaic rights can be contrasted with “column rights” which are most radical in the United States.Here, whoever owns a hectare of land owns the air rights and the mineral rights underground as well aseverything in between – a ‘column’ of rights. These ‘exclusive’ rights use fences to keep others out. Amosaic rights landscape is crisscrossed by footpaths, because these rights are ‘inclusive’, offering99