Over the past year I was attending pilot programs of The Haumea Ecoversity on Ecoliteracy, Creativity as an Act of Love and their Earth Charter course. The material we studied was of great thinkers and scientists of the environmental movement, as well as the academic work of both Cathy Fitzgerald founder and teacher & philosopher Nikos Patedakis. They were phenomenal in their breadth of knowledge, fastidious in their references and footnoting, and always insightful.
Inspired by the rigour of their scholarship, I see now a duty to tackle subjects I had discounted as being beyond my role as painter of slow / low tech tendencies who had become petrified of the all-pervasive power of the web. Thus I have become keener to learn more about endemic local phenomena, such as Cryptogamic life or in the ethnographic study of local buildings techniques..)
From this I realise we each ought to better understand the biological intricacies that support us. We need to insist upon such an education as a basic pre-requisite for our children and our leaders. We need to be more as the anthropologist, farmosopher or geologian would be in our concern with overall cosmic pattern or laws. Nature is artist before us, whose beauty and complexity should not be diminished while we engage in making ourselves a quick buck or two. Students of both economic schools of business, as well as ecology, would save a vast fortune if they could study here first and acquire the taste for the long term view on how we can define what Oikos and good housekeeping really ought to be.