#395: Hansard Debate

Thanks to Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett via the GCSE Natural History twitter feed for sending a link to this Hansard debate.

Questions were asked about the GCSE Natural History and what progress was being made towards it. Search under Natural History / Geography to find some interesting statements and quotes:

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

We have inherited a disastrous set of values and attitudes towards the environment, with thinking that goes back a long way and which we have adopted into our intellectual tradition. It includes the great chain of
being, which is the concept that human beings are some kind of pinnacle of life, and the idea that the whole complexity of life on earth—the living system that James Lovelock identified as Gaia, which has evolved over billions of years—is there for us as a species, under our control and for our exploitation.

The 21st century has exposed that for the dangerous fallacy it is, with the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the poisoning of our planet with novel entities; six of the nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded. We know that there are other intellectual traditions and other ways of looking at the world, which are attracting attention from our scientists and researchers. For example, I note that, across many African religions, there is the concept of ukama, which states that animals are part of a community with humans; it emphasises mutual dependence, a sense of unity and, at least sometimes, a moral imperative of respect.

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