"The best time to plant a tree is
always twenty years ago.
And the second-best time
is always now."
LANDliteracy’ succinctly describes the ability to read the land for the purpose of assessing its ability to offer sustenance and shelter.
Clearly, if more people could detect the early signs of land degradation this would foster more affective holistic approaches to designing LANDliteracy and LANDuse strategies in both urban and rural areas.
Likewise, social and political responses to land custodianship and land stewardship would be enhanced if there were a higher levels of LANDliteracy – particularly so in urban areas.
LANDliteracy can be understood as one's ability to read and appreciate the signs of health in a landscape. By implication, this definition also implies the ability to read the signs of ill-health in a landscape. Being 'land literate' is a reason for including ‘art’ in the 'LANDliteracy equation'.
LANDuse is invariably dominated by humanity's ability to read a landscapes' capacity to fulfil the needs of individuals and groups and ultimately a network of groups. What is looked for in a 'place' is its capacity to meet humanity's four imperatives and the extent to which a CULTURALlandscape to sustain life and a cultural reality within a network of interdependent cultural realities.
LANDuse cannot afford to be anything that depletes a landscape and compromises any lifeform's capacity sustain itself within it. What is true for any one is true of all including humanity despite the myth that humans are the apex predator.
Humans are considered to be the ultimate, apex predator due to advanced intelligence, tool-making, and adaptability, allowing them to dominate all ecosystems. Unlike specialised predators, humans utilisbeste technology to override environmental limits, influencing food webs, causing extinctions, and functioning as hyper-apex predators.
Thus knowing what needs to be known about a place's resources is fundamental. As it turns out that it is those who know this best are those who are directly seeking the sustenance and shelter within a place. Moreover, in order to 'know' a place's occupants need to be literate and LANDliterate.
Ideally LANDliteracy involves a community's collaborative and cooperative effort to read a place's 'placedness' albeit that some individuals and groups will have specialist knowledge – and indeed ancillary 'readers' may well be enlisted from outside.
LINK ... https://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm0795.08.html
Typically LANDcare launches projects that allows members to submit Expressions of Interest (EOIs) outlining projects they want to deliver - from habitat restoration to weed control, dam improvements and community education. Once approved, these projects are listed on a website, ready to be matched with grants, partnerships, or new funding opportunities. It’s an effective system that helps small ideas grow into fully funded, on-ground outcomes, while also enabling members to showcase their projects and connect with others interested in similar initiatives. While all such projects are laudable they compete for funding with some (many?) falling by the wayside.
LANDlieracy might well fall outside such funded projects in that, at their best, they inform day to day LANDuse initiatives and oftentimes involve contesting the purposefulness of authority funded, TOPdown, ideologically driven, initiative that all too often serve the maintenance of the investment oriented status quo.
LANDlieracy arguably functions best, or better, when structured rhizomatically given that under such modelling there are multiple engagement and disengagement points. Rhizomatic refers to a non-hierarchical, interconnected network structure that allows any point to connect to any other, operating without a central authority or linear, top-down organisation. Coined by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it describes systems that grow horizontally, similar to roots like bamboo, asparagus, and ginger, emphasising multiplicity, change, and adaptability.
In LANDliteracy's case it refers to to 'placedness'and ultimately to aCULTURALlandscaping.
That is, where people belong to places rather than in the INVESTMENTparadigm being where 'place ownership' and fiscal dividends are paramount. LANDliteracy's speaks of social and cultural dividends!
KERALA: Geographically a leader in sustainable land use management & LANDliteracy
Resource mapping Kerala's most innovative development effort is the People's Resource Mapping Program, which mobilizes villagers to inventory their resources on maps. These homemade maps are combined with scientific maps to guide environmentally sound local planning discussions of the long-term consequences and short-term gains of resource use. KSSP activists see the project as a logical extension of the total literacy campaign: the People's Resource Mapping Program is an attempt to create land literacy.
Because they see poverty and inequality as threats to sustainability, activists are suspicious of large-scale central plans that are drawn up in the national and state capitals. They put their faith in local landowners, arguing that they know area resources best and are better able to judge which land-use practices or inputs will improve land productivity. Collective action of villagers, with input from scientists, the activists contend, offers the best hope for promoting socially and ecologically sustainable land-use practices.... continued
KERALA MODELLING
HISTORY OF KERALA CLICK HERE & HERE
VIDEOS
END NOTE: While political parties often take credit for the 'Kerala Model,' the state's success actually stems from a multi-layered history. Pre-independence, the Maharajas of Travancore were visionaries who institutionalized free education and higher learning. Christian missionaries later expanded this by building a robust network of schools and hospitals. Post-independence, it was 'Gulf Money,' rather than local industry, that fuelled prosperity. One could argue that without the safety net of the Indian Union, Kerala’s focus on welfare spending over industrial growth would have rendered the state’s economy unsustainable, like many other communist countries.
EXAMPLE OF RESOURCE INTERROGATION
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