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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
FIRST SUNDAY IN MARCH
Clean Up Australia Day
Picking up other people’s rubbish might not seem celebratory or festive; but the high-spirited atmosphere pervading the voluntary groups who come out each Clean Up Australia Day on the first Sunday in March certainly is.
I have been involved in this priceless initiative for many years and have witnessed selflessness of a high order by many people. I recall one tiny, frail old lady picking up hundreds of pieces of smashed glass; and then there were the 4-wheel drive bovver boys who took their vehicles into remote beauty spots to pull out old, dumped cars.
And what about the young holidaymakers who took time off to rid the bush of piles of broken asbestos sheeting?
On some occasions we would safely make a bonfire in the bush to destroy the bulk of truckloads of garbage too difficult to remove any other way. The net result of over a decade of Clean Up Australia Day effort in our area alone, where many tons of rubbish have been removed, has been the transformation of a wonderful bushland, of some hundreds of acres, from a tip to a sanctuary for the flora and fauna that happily inhabit it. This annual event may not be a celebration in the traditional sense, but one of the spirit of generosity and social conscience – absolutely.
But to go back even further in time. My main source of income as a child was to collect discarded soft drink bottles and claim the sixpence deposit. This was real treasure-hunting in the golden age of childhood (the 1950s). The scavenging habit must have been ingrained, as I still pick up ‘treasure’ on my regular morning walks, but this time it is the litter thrown away by the contemptuous and the contemptible. So, it sends my self-righteous meter into the scarlet when I hear yet again that the major drink manufacturers trenchantly resist a bottle/can deposit system being implemented nationwide.
However, it heartens me to know that this sensible anti-litter program has been successfully legislated in South Australia and the Northern Territory.
These multinationals all reiterate the old canard that such a scheme would raise the price of their – already cheap – products to the detriment of the consumer.
What price a cleaner Australia?
In the budget of most people, the addition of a couple of cents for a soft drink would not only fail to be noticed, but they probably wouldn’t even care.
It’s a worry that Keep Australia Beautiful, the body behind the Do the Right Thing campaign is sponsored by these same reactionary litter-critters.
In an exercise in creative logic, using the usual weasel words, such as “cost-benefit analysis”, one beverages company director seemed to think that the primary reason for a deposit scheme is for the consumer to reclaim some of the cost of their drink. (I would have thought so too – when I was, ten years old!) He carefully explained that this would not be the case, as the reclamation cost would be factored into the retail price, with no monetary gain for the customer. Perhaps not: but for the army of children scouring their neighborhoods for bottles and cans, it most certainly would.
Obviously this is not the point, it is not a money issue, rather a social ethics one – i.e., rubbish-free roadsides, parks, rivers, beaches, and bush. The deposit scheme is an easy way to put value on litter, assuring that, by whatever. medium, including enterprising children, this unsightly scourge is removed from the environment back to its original creators.
From social to personal responsibility: for a couple of years now I have failed to turn out for the annual Clean Up Australia Day. This shameful fact has caused me some guilt.
However, I have found a path of redemption. Instead of a big clean-up on one day of the year, I do small amounts on many if not most of the other 364.
Whenever I am in a public place (okay, perhaps not large urban centers), I collect rubbish as I stroll by riverbank, over dune, or through park. The looks I attract from my fellow Peripatetics range from smiles of approval to scowls of disdain.
But I am not alone (actually, I’m anything but alone, as more and more people do exactly as I do); this every-day-is-clean-up-day policy was adopted some time ago by a small primary school. There they never used litter collection as a punishment, realizing that children have negative associations with this approach.
If the young are penalized by having to pick up other people’s dross, they are highly likely to return the offence in kind. Instead, the school kept its playground tidy on a voluntary basis, expressed thus:
It is the responsibility of every member (teacher and child alike) of the school community to pick up papers etc., anywhere, anytime. If a child walks past a piece of trash, he or she is gently reminded, by both teachers and schoolmates, to pick it up.
The predictable, “But it’s not mine!” protest was met with, “No, but the playground is (and, by extension, the planet), and it’s everyone’s job to make it a nice place to live.”
This approach also increases the level of peer opprobrium directed at the littering miscreants. In the spirit of every-day-is-clean-up-day, the same school permanently adopted a public area to keep clean. Every few weeks a class visited the long south wall of a river entrance and, like a bevy of living vacuum cleaners, would remove a range of offensive material from one end of the breakwater to the other.
This task was not easy, as the wall was constructed of large, jumbled rocks, topped by a gravel path.
The children were unfazed by the slippery basalt or occasional sea spray shower as they enthusiastically rummaged around with the crabs to retrieve tangled fishing line, drink cans, plastic bait bags and other even more unmentionables.
Indeed, they too equated finding rubbish with treasure hunting, triumphantly brandishing, say, a discarded beer bottle, for friends and nearby cowering fisherpersons alike to admire. Then into the sack it went.
They might then have descended down a crack in the rocks to extract more bounty. On each sortie, the class could fill up to five large sacks.
Of course, all safety measures were observed, such as sun protection, gloves, sturdy shoes; and even a special container for the dreaded syringes.
One 10-year-old girl found a small, dead rock cod. Some heartless anglers had left it to dehydrate slowly and painfully on the baking black rock.
“It’s not dead!” exclaimed a friend, “Look, the gills are moving!”
What a sense of achievement these two pint-sized Samaritans had as they committed the fish back to its foamy home.
“We’re not only cleaning up the wall, we’re saying lives!”
In more ways than one, much fishing detritus is directly responsible for the deaths of many finned, furry, and feathered animals. Hooks and line often cause bird fatalities, and plastic bags, mistaken for delectable jellyfish, lodge in the gut of many denizens of the deep. This is especially true of those of a higher order, such as turtles, dolphins, and whales.
When is rubbish not rubbish?
This arcane question was answered when an irate snorkeler accosted two children demanding that his towel and other clothes items be returned.
They didn’t improve their case when they responded, “Well, they looked like rubbish to us!”
This highlights the competitive spirit in this litter collection; the winner not only being the pair of children with the fullest bag, but the long-suffering environment.
There has been an inspiriting change in the social responsibility landscape of late. As we face a future where the cast-offs of our insatiable appetite for consumer goods threaten to choke our world, even dropping a cigarette butt draws critical comment from passers-by. Butt-dropping would have been unnoticed even a few short years ago.
When children – and adults – willingly and in high dudgeon pick up other people’s rubbish, they are unlikely to drop their own. So why not suggest to your school that they adopt their own public clean-up area? It not only makes for a better world but is morally bracing for our young as well.
Recent research has found that there is a 6-layered behavioral pyramid regarding litter.
On the moral apex are the Collectors. They not only do not litter but pick up other people’s trash. The Clean Up Australia Day folk are of this esteemed fraternity.
Number two are the Responsibles, those who do not pick up others’ litter, but who responsibly dispose of their own. Then there are the Inconvenients, the third, those who, if a bin is not at hand, will surreptitiously drop their garbage on the ground, or hide it in the bushes.
Fourth are the Unawares, those who – unconvincingly – plead that they didn’t know that littering is the many-headed social and environmental ill that it is.
Then we have the fifth, the Willful, who, unbelievable as it sounds, litter simply to make an anti-social statement. Teenagers often fall into this category. It’s just not cool to look for a bin!
Those at the base of the ethical pyramid are the sixth, the Indifferents, a venal cabal who simply couldn’t care less; their conscience being totally untroubled about their defilement of the earth. Unlike most of the others, these seem to be beyond redemption. They are also people who so often are the most jingoistic, claiming loudly and proudly that,
“Australia is the best country in the world!”. Not if they have anything to do with it, it’s not.
A student of the author removing a beer bottle from the breakwater
the class adopted for their clean-up campaign, Brunswick Heads, 1996.
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