Introduction

"I did courses in evolution, human ecology and food politics. We ran a smallholding, kept bees, brewed our own 'Neolithic beer', built a dry stone wall and learned how to manage a small woodland. I received training in bushcraft and for my dissertation I worked with a shepherd and trained a sheepdog. I came out with a Masters degree and a new perspective on life. Of course I loved it! It changed my life." This could be YOU talking!

The concept in a nutshell

• A residential college providing environment-related Masters programmes.
• A smallholding run by a self-sufficient community of students and staff.
• An intensive year-round, seven-day-a-week commitment on the part of students, engendering an unparalleled atmosphere of engagement and participation.
• A conventional schedule of academic studies.
• A wide range of challenging activities and short courses are designed to promote learning and debate and a visceral engagement with the natural world.

The central intellectual rationale for these supplementary activities is to gain a deep sensitivity and insight into the most deep-seated characteristics of human ecology. More specifically they are designed to re-familiarise students with the quotidian activities of subsistence through which countless thousands of generations brought about a steady, but relentless transformation in the face of the Earth. In re-learning what it is like to dwell within a landscape and become embedded in the dynamics of a bioregion, students also have the chance to re-experience day and seasonal rhythms that defined all of human experience for most of our existence. Training in bushcraft and foraging ties this re-discovered sensitivity to landscape to the pattern of life experienced by Palaeolithic, British aboriginal hunter-gathers. The small-holding provides a proxy for the subsequent process of agrarianisation. Taken together these activities provide a vantage point from which to view the deep history of human ecology - benchmarks for a deeper reflection on the problem of sustainability and human futures.

Some questions

Most people who think about it are concerned about the sustainability of modern consumer societies. Underlying this immediate concern of survival, there are deeper questions about the 'natural' or appropriate relationship between humanity and nature.

• What is the nature of the evolutionary and historical relationship between humanity and the rest of the natural world?
• To what extent can this trajectory be modified and even steered?
• Is human culture and technology 'natural'?
• Is consumer society an inevitable consequence of our propensity for social development?
• Can 'wild nature' survive human civilisation?
• Is there a future for our species?

Now imagine...

• A rural eco-community providing an intensive, collegiate environment in which the learning process unfolds over each full day, seven days a week, for three hundred and sixty five days.
• A suite of Masters programmes engaging in different ways with the relationship between humanity and the Earth.
• Access to the academic expertise and learning resources of a leading University with a strong track record in establishing innovative programmes in teaching and research
• A pedagogical philosophy delivering conventional but demanding academic courses requiring a significantly greater input from students, with an emphasis on reading, assimilation, debate - and most of all - on writing.

Now combine this with a range of ancillary activities woven into the daily and weekly rhythms of the learning experience, each centred on a particular mode of engagement with the natural world.

• Participation in self-provisioning: running a smallholding, gardening, tending livestock, fishing, hunting and foraging 'food for free'
• Amateur natural history - field course in botany, ornithology, natural history
• Small scale woodland management
• Outdoor leisure activities: riding; walking & climbing, camping.
• Dry-stone walling & hedge-laying'
• British-aboriginal' bush-craft and survival training.
• Creative-writing and art

Such activities would be designed to draw students out of the abstract media of academic study, and into the lived and experiential dimension characterised by what Ingold calls 'the education of attention'. Through such an experiential learning process knowledge and emotional-ethical insights emerge from involvement in landscape and ecology as material processes. The unique learning experience offered by the institute will hinge on this fabric of extra-curricular activities through which to digest, assimilate and debate (and disagree about) the concepts, the examples and the knowledge acquired through seminars and academic reading.