6.2 Suffolk Communities
Exemplifying Notions of Sustainable Development
A list of 21 distinct notions that categorise values of sustainable development (the headings), each of which has distinctive local expressions.
    • Communities based on cropping natural resources are transient, because people earn greater immediate benefits from exploiting resources than they do from conserving them Example
    • 'Increased efficiency' of mechanical production reduces biodiversity. Example
    • Market values of natural or semi-natural habitats expressed as 'the conquest of nature' do not always reflect their true scarcity or their aesthetic/educational/ scientific values to society. Example
    • Until the beginning of human development, 10,000 years ago, extinction was due to climate change.Example
    • Biodiversity has significant local expressions. Example
    • Sustaining production from semi natural ecosystems requires economic incentives. Example
    • Everyone can contribute to protect biodiversity. Example
    • Living things have evolved to occupy even the most transient niches. Example
    • Ethnoecology is the study of sustainable uses of 'biodiversity'. Example
    • Wildlife and power tools are incompatible. Example
    • We need to develop construction/production systems based on the use of renewable materials. Example
    • National incentives are necessary for farms to adopt anti-pollution technologies. Example
    • Biodiversity can be valued as 'landscape', 'socio-historical heritage' and as 'a stock of wildlife'. Example
    • Production for urban consumers reduces livestock diversity. Example
    • Artificial fertiliser suppresses biodiversity. Example
    • Preservation of the world's biodiversity is increasingly the task of zoos, botanical gardens and community 'seed-savers'. Example
    • Nature conservation is about managing small ecological islands. Example
    • Nature study should be promoted to involve people in checking-out the biodiversity of the neighbourhood. Example
    • 'Consumermatics' provides a comprehensive knowledge system linking social- and environmental well-being. Example
    • Soil improvement eliminates the local diversity of arable production. Example
    • We must find ways of reducing the atmospheric impact of industrialism. Example

The industrialised harvesting of fish stocks once thought to be limitless has now impacted on the community of Lowestoft that is struggling to find a new pride of place without fish.
The Peasenhall mechanical seed drill made a contribution to reducing the need for jobs in farming, as did many other local labour-saving inventions of the time. These inventions, being more 'efficient' than people at maintaining 'monocultures', also reduced local biodiversity.
Some of the most diverse habitats of Suffolk were destroyed by fen drainage at Mildenhall and Lakenheath , and forestation of coastal heathlands at Tunstall.
'Crag' cliffs at Bawdsey present a record of the mass local extinction of marine species as the Earth moved into the last Ice Age.
Small-leaved lime, or pry, is an example of a species that was locally very common in the ancient Suffolk wildwood. It is now confined to small pockets of woodland in a relatively small area of the county(Groton). Some snails also have a long-standing local distribution e.g. Ena montana (Cockfield ), Aplexa hypnorum and Azeca goodalli (Mendlesham ). A slug, Boettgerilla pallens was unknown in Britain before 1972. Since its discovery at Ixworth in 1984 it had spread to eight 10 km squares by 1992.
Woodmanship at Bradfield is a modern expression of ancient labour intensive craft that made use of self-renewing community woodlands. It illustrates the economic restrictions of operating small sustainable woodland enterprises.
Minsmere, a coastal estate in the parish of Westleton, is owned and managed by the RSPB. It contains a mixture of woodland, heath, lagoons and foreshore managed for maximum biodiversity through public subscription.
Shingle beaches are one of the most dynamic and demanding physical environments, yet paradoxically, the least affected by human activity. Orford Beach and nearby Shingle Street constitute the second largest vegetated area of shingle in Britain.
A small community of hunter-gatherers left evidence of their temporary encampment at Hoxne. These artefacts tell how they lived off the biodiversity of the local tundra on their northern migration following the retreating ice sheets.
Garrett's of Leiston grew from a village blacksmith's shop to give a farm labourer power to destroy an ancient ecosystem as part of his morning's work. Its assembly line, one of the first in the world, is now a museum of the technologies that changed the face of the countryside.
The Fressingfield families of joiner-architects were a focus for woodworking/designer skills still visible in standardised timber-framed houses and barns dating from Elizabethan times. The supply of local large-limbed oaks was exhausted in the mid-18th century when smaller-roomed brick walled buildings became the norm.
Walnut Tree Farm, Chediston was the site of the first full scale commercial biogas plant, designed to reduce local water-borne pollution from intensive livestock production. It defined the additional costs to agricultural production of adopting closed-system, pollution-free intensive farming.
The UK Biodiversity Action Plan says that we should conserve species and habitats because they are beautiful or because they otherwise enrich our lives. In other words the culture of a nation is closely allied to its landscapes and their associated wildlife. Landscape appreciation is clearly in the province of art but it is really a small step to view a landscape as an expression of the local biodiversity. The painter Gainsborough (Sudbury ) expressed the quality of his local environment by drawing and painting semi-natural woodland ecosystems. 'Gainsborough trees' can still be seen throughout Suffolk, but the local uptake of 'prairie' cereal cropping to maximise unit-area production has changed the landscape norm without changing our 'Gainsborough values' (Tannington ) . 'Trees in the landscape' provides a learning route from the poetic communication of 'place' to the accurate scientific delineation of its component species (by listing, drawing and photographing).
Farm livestock used to be bred to match specific local requirements of working practices and climate. Today there is no widespread role for the Suffolk punch, the heavy horse of East Anglia, which is now largely reared as a hobby (Woodbridge). The large barnyard turkey kept for Xmas is now a smaller animal, intensively produced continuously indoors on deep-litter, and processed in standard packages for supermarket consumers (Holton).
In the 1840's beds of phosphate minerals were discovered in south-east Suffolk, near Felixstowe, and processed commercially at Darsham for export. This discovery stimulated the local use of mineral fertilisers, a movement which has now led to a global decline in biodiversity of lakes, ponds and water courses through agricultural run-off.
Many explorers who travelled to the ends of the expanding British Empire were driven as much by the search for useful plants as scientific curiosity. Two generations of the Hooker family, maltsters of Halesworth, were represented in these endeavours. William and Joseph, father and son, were both important figures in the expanding science of botany and its commercial applications, and were successive directors of Kew Botanical Gardens.
Wink's Meadow, Metfield is one of the few surviving examples of a semi-natural flower-rich pasture. Isolated as a small enclosure of a few acres in a 'sea' of un- hedged intensive arable land, it is a tiny living genetic museum. A local site of Special Scientific Interest, it is managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, and stands for the national loss of biodiversity brought about by industrialised agriculture.
This is an extract of a letter from Charles Darwin to his former teacher John Henslow, who was pioneering the study of botany in the village school he established in the village of Hitcham.
"Now it has occurred to me that it would be an interesting way of testing the probability of sea- transportal of seeds, - to collect seeds and try if they would stand a pretty long immersion.- Do you think the most able of your little girls would like to collect for me a packet of seeds such as grow near Hitcham ? I am paying 3d for each packet: it would put a few shillings into their pockets and would be an ENORMOUS advantage to me, for I grudge the time to collect the seeds, more specially, as I have to learn the plants !"
It indicates the relatively small number of scientists who played a part in establishing the theory of evolution, and their parochial stage. Also, the general endorsement of Henslow's academic methods by the Victorian public schools and examination boards was responsible for the teaching of biological sciences being rapidly separated from its holistic social/production context. On the other hand, it shows how the recording of local biodiversity may have unexpected practical value.
The cultural system which connects social and political well-being dependent on environmental diversity, was first defined by the circle of Victorian scientists and social reformers centred on the Bunbury family of Great Barton.
Suffolk linen weavers were concentrated in the area where more flax was grown than anywhere else in the county. This district was defined in the 18th century as a strip about 10 miles wide in the valleys of the Waveney and Little Ouse. There was a particularly high concentration of flax production in the villages around Thelnetham.
Acid rain, which results from emissions of power plants driven by oil and coal, is destroying European upland ecosystems. The nuclear power plant at the tiny fishing hamlet of Sizewell is an emission-free solution to meet a part of our continuing demand for electricity.
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