Geosystem and Family Well Being

Coco Readdick

Remarkable as the bioecological theory of Urie Bronfenbrenner is in accounting for the influence of contextual factors on developmental outcomes, a noteworthy omission is acknowledgement of the relationship of the developing person and the natural physical environment. In today’s rapidly changing, globalized world, characterized by the exchange of information, goods, and people across boundaries of space and time, is a swirling backdrop of social and environmental phenomena--rising CO2 levels, loss of polar and glacial ice, and storm intensification; the interiorization of human activity in advanced technological societies and crisis levels of obesity, diabetes, and heart failure; dwindling worldwide safe water sources along with limited natural resources challenging survival in many developing countries--that make it hard to deny the natural environment as an influence on the daily lives of children and families and communities and reckless to ignore the impact of child, family, and community on the natural environment. Posited as an additional system in Bronfenbrenner’s nested systems conceptualization, this author places the geosystem between the macrosystem and the chronosystem.

Definition 1. The geosystem is the natural physical environment that contains individuals, families, and communities. It is comprised of the living and non-living elements of the natural world and includes land, water, and air. The geosystem offers a physical place in which each individual—child, youth, and adult--develops. The relationship between the individual (and/or family and/or community) and geosystem is reciprocal: the geosystem influences the individual (and/or family and/or community), and the individual (and/or family and/or community) influences the geosystem. Accordingly, risk and opportunity flow bi-directionally. For the purposes of this paper, the geosystem of focus and explication is that of the two countries occupying one island in the northern Atlantic Ocean—Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Representative illustrations are drawn from reading, observation, and conversation.

Proposition 1. The geosystem influences the individual through the direct and indirect affordance of risk and opportunity for development, and vice versa, at all levels—individual, microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. At the level of the chronosystem, physical events or processes that shape the earth’s surface that occur at a specific point in time are assumed to directly impact the individual. In Irish history the most compelling chronosystem event is the Great Famine, caused by a soil-borne blight that abruptly and profoundly diminished opportunities for life with millions dead and fled. And just as a chronosystem event may deplete opportunity for individuals, another may provide plenty, as in the Dingle Peninsula fishing boon concomitant with the Great Famine—where natural resources were found and tapped through fishing. For decades, generous catches of demersal fish, such as sole, provided sustenance for the middle class and gentry and oily fish, such as herring, provided for the poor. Even if potatoes were rotten and wheat was being shipped out of Ireland to England, now many could eat and survive, if not thrive.

Alternately, it is assumed that actions or inactions of individuals in the specific physical environment contribute directly and indirectly to chronosystem events. How might this be illustrated with more discussion of the Great Famine? Is it possible that individuals played a reciprocal role with the natural environment to help produce such a catastrophe? Quite simply by the middle of the 1800’s the population of Ireland, particularly that of the west, outstretched the provisions of its limestone burren and scant soil. With more mouths to feed cheaply, families became increasingly reliant on the potato, to the exclusion of other foodstuffs. With only one crop in fields, when the blight struck over a series of very wet growing seasons, the soil yielded nothing but rotting tubers.

At the level of the macrosystem, the geosystem provides the setting for the establishment of patterns of social organization and influences the complexity and fluidity of social organization. The geosystem with its presence or absence of physical resources (living and non-living) is presumed to influence individual development at the level of the macrosystem to the extent that it allows for the creation and sustenance of institutions of education, faith, commerce, government, or to the devolution and destruction of systems of trade, governance, citizenship, and so on. Again, via the macrosystem to the extent that individuals espouse and act on values that contribute to environmental degradation, in the depletion of resources or the death of species, through its institutions of social organization, it is assumed that the geosystem is diminished. When the individual espouses and acts on values, by acts such as voting, being educated, living simply, allowing for the continuation of life of indigenous plants and animals and the use of renewable resources via institutions of education, faith, government, and so on, the geosystem is sustained.

Perhaps a benefit is over looked in the case of the unsettled Irish Traveller or tinker (tinsmith) family. According to the 2006 Census, there were 22,435 Travellers in Ireland, with children under 18 comprising about half the Traveller population and most living in urban rather than rural areas. The unsettled Traveller family persists in not buying and acquiring property, despite government efforts to promote settlement, occupies field or public fringe area instead, and maintains a simple way of life, using little of the earth’s resources, at one time not much more than sticks and water. During the 50’s and 60’s, Travellers made their livings making buckets, sweeping chimneys, swapping horses, collecting and selling scrap, and asking for hand outs. Today, countervailing outcomes of the Traveller life continue to include high birth rates with high rates of death by age 2 and truncated longevity.

Failure to act can have as negative an effect on the environment as a specific act. Ireland, like other advanced technological societies, has developed a reliance on oil (in addition to electricity generated by the burning of peat). Yet, oil is a finite resource with an environmental toll paid in its discovery, acquisition, and use. While solar power is not the most reasonable of alternatives to oil in Ireland, wind-generated power is. But to move beyond a single experimental wind power farm to a widely distributed and coordinated system of wind turbines on and off shore requires political will power, derived from individuals insisting on alternatives and an elected government compelled at the insistence of the electorate to make the investments necessary to bring such a system to fruition. In the absence of action, environmental degradation from increased levels of CO2 production and global warming is the geosystemic outcome.

Is it possible that the geosystem influences individual development through the exosystem? Indeed, it can be argued that the geosystem influences systems that do not directly contain the individual, but nonetheless affect the individual, through others directly impacted by that exosystem. Therefore, in a recent example in the Republic, Diageo, the parent company of Guinness Beer announced plans to reduce its brewery employees by half, closing down two smaller breweries outside of Dublin. With water from the Wicklow Mountains an hour north of Dublin, beer has been made on the banks of the River Liffey in Dublin and shipped down the river to the port to be loaded on tanker ships and transported to London and beyond, since the 1700’s. Now, the famed Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate in west Dublin, will see its workforce reduced from 230 to 65. A new more efficient brewery is planned for the suburbs of Dublin with a possibility of 100 jobs. Given the different modes of transport available today, location on the Liffey is now simply symbolic and no longer instrumentally essential for the corporation. Corporate officials cite increased competition from Eastern Europe, Russia, and China and pubgoers’ changing tastes, as the forces compelling change.

Interestingly, for centuries Guinness employed many who lived in the surrounding Dublin neighborhoods, including the residents of Fatima Mansions. Over time technological advances have shrunk the workforce from thousands to hundreds, and now few families find their livelihoods at Guinness. Clearly, children will continue to be effected by Diageo’s decision, as unemployed parents struggle to find other employment or acquire a new position at the yet-to-be-located plant in the suburbs. Doubtless, these employees/parents will find themselves spending increasing amounts of time in transit to and from work. Accordingly, parents’ jobs of parenting will be made even more difficult as the distance between home and work is increased, leaving school-age and adolescent children untended or preschool age children in alternate care for even longer at school day’s end.

How might opportunity accrue to the developing individual from the geosystem via the exosystem? Consider the following observation. In Ireland rates of breastfeeding are rising, yet while 51 percent of mothers in Dublin report breastfeeding their baby (exclusively or in combination) for the first 48 hours after birth, in Limerick that percent is only 26. This discrepancy suggests that exosystem forces, such as promotion of breastfeeding in birthing classes and encouragements in hospitals, make it more likely for the individual baby being born in Dublin, the Republic’s largest city, as compared to Limerick, the third largest city, to be offered a form of feeding known to promote parent bonding, establish infant attachment, as well as build a strong immune system. Benefits flow indirectly from geosystem to exosystem to developing child and developing mother.

Conversely, in what way might the exosystem impact the geosystem, either positively or negatively? For example, the Department of the Environment, Heritage, and Local Government provides funding in the Republic for environmental awareness projects, along with public information designed to encourage children and adolescents to be environmentally responsible. To the extent that such programming makes it easier for parents and teachers to teach their children about the environment and children more likely to engage in environmental care activities, a positive effect of the exosystem on the geosystem may be realized. The Regeneration Board, for example at Fatima Mansions, has supported families through the visioning and planning process of their revitalized neighborhoods. Supported by the Board, parents proposed community gardening and recycling projects as simple means for involving children and the neighborhood in caring for the environment.

A point of contrast and illustration of a potentially negative effect of an exosytem on the environment can be seen in the example of the recent appointment of an agri-food executive to the Livestock and Meat Commission, sponsored by the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development to assist the development of livestock and livestock product section of the agri-food industry, a further indication of how this board tilts its attentions to focus on the meat packing companies and neglects the providers of red meat, the farmers, whose numbers and incomes are declining. Remarkably, in Northern Ireland, 80% of the total land area is devoted to agriculture (as compared to 40% of the EU land area) with most of that under grass; most farms are classified as very small, providing full-time employment for one person; and the size of farms is increasing. Negative geosystem effects of cattle farming are well-known--land degradation, water and biodiversity loss, and climate change.

The mesosystem, according to Bronfenbrenner, is comprised of linkages between the microsystems that contain the developing individual. In strongly linked systems, according to Bronfenbrenner, in addition to the child, multiple significant others accompany the child from one setting to another, and ideally bonds of trust are established between participants in these respective settings. In weakly linked systems, it is the individual alone who goes back and forth. Again, if geography allows for settlement patterns in communities with opportunities for commerce and government and education and health care clustered in close proximity, the geosystem can be found affording opportunity for development at the mesosystem level. Arensberg describes such a scenario in his 1930’s description of rural family life in western Ireland. After the government decreed that family farms could no longer be subdivided into ever more tiny plots yet family sizes remained large due to the urgings of the Catholic church, the farm was taken over and passed down to only one child, usually the oldest son, who took a wife and began a new nuclear family. The old mother and father moved to the west room, ceding the operation of the farm to their son. Remaining siblings, if they were male became priests or playboys (bachelors), girls shopkeepers in nearby towns. And, thus, town-farm relations were cemented, tying together concerns of family life and commerce. In this social environment of circumscribed family roles, the toll on the physical environment made by a rural family was lessened.

When microsystems are widely dispersed, it is more likely that the developing individual will be the sole link between settings (the mesosystem) and therefore at risk. Today in Northern Ireland, Belfast in particular, it is increasingly difficult for new young families to afford to buy a home in the urban neighborhood in which their own families may have lived for generations. It is becoming increasingly necessary for older parents, who own their own home, to take out a second mortgage in order to help their children buy one. Affordable new homes are being built further and further away from the city on former farmlands. So as customary residential patterns are changing due to economic exigencies, opportunities for ongoing family relations are attenuated and traditional family roles and activities altered.

Pursuant to the Diaspora associated with the Great Depression and economic hard times, more folk of Irish heritage live without rather than within Ireland. However, given the upturn in the economy associated with the affiliation of the Republic with the EU and the abatement of the Troubles, many people are returning to the island of their own or their parents’ birth. In this social phenomenon there is the potential for a positive mesosytemic contribution to the physical environment. It is conceivable that returning individuals and families are re-establishing relationships with other members of the extended family system and community in Ireland and in so doing are creating new mesosytemic linkages. With a perspective on the geosystem and its fragility, perhaps shaped by experiences with the excesses of economic abundance and environmental degradation in the United States or England, such individuals and families may be better poised to help avert these outcomes in the land that they most love. So, in this presumed new and more strongly linked mesosystem, individuals and families have the potential to make a unique and enduring positive contribution to geosystemic health.

Alternatively, the lone parent family exemplifies Bronfenbrenner’s two legged stool analogy and is emblematic of a weakly linked mesosystem. In the absence of a supportive and customary third leg, individual family members are less likely to be accompanied from one setting to another, leaving an individual at risk. At Fatima Mansions, the disproportionate amount of such families suggests a potentially deleterious and indirect effect on the geosystem. If elevated drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, under- or unemployment, lower levels of school attendance, school achievement, and civic participation are the developmental outcomes associated with lone parenthood, such families’ use of resources from the geosystem may far outstrip their contribution to the physical environment and curtail the individual’s abilities to coordinate earth-friendly action between settings.

The geosystem also impacts the microsystem that intimate setting in which the developing person or individual participates directly—family, school, peer group, church, and so on. To the extent that the geosystem is hospitable to the family, for example, in the affordance of clean air, abundant food, fresh water, a mild climate and so on, the more likely the developing individual will be able to establish enduring reciprocal relationships that are the basis of doing more and in which the power in the relationship shifts gradually in favor of the developing child. For example, Waterford, the oldest and sunniest city in the Republic is situated on the southeast coast on an estuary of the river Suir and maintains an active commercial tradition over hundreds of years. Here, for example, the child of a Waterford Crystal Factory employee continues to be afforded the opportunity for apprenticeship and employment, following in the footsteps of relatives, should she choose. To the extent that access to any of these positive natural resources is limited, the child or developing individual is assumed to be at risk. In the long run, it is little wonder than no major population center and attendant development of social institutions has been established in the burren in northwest County Clare.

Conversely, through the microsystem, it is possible to affect the geosystem, positively or negatively. In the example of a single Irish family, such a positive example can be found. Willie Corduff, his wife, and children live in a small village, Rossport, on the Northern Sea. Off shore, Shell Oil has discovered oil. Shell Oil planned to build pipes above ground to transport oil from the continental shelf to its refinery inland, going through the village of Rossport. Despite Shell Oil’s insistence that no harm would befall the residents of Rossport or the environment, Willie Corduff and family have succeeded in drawing first village and then national and now international attention to this situation. At last report, Shell Oil is exploring alternate means of getting oil from ocean to refinery with less of a physical environmental impact, and one family’s actions are positively influencing the geosystem.

A venerated microsystem in Irish history is the Catholic Church on which individuals relied for instrumental and spiritual support. Yet, this same church could be considered complicit in the social debacle and environmental imbalance that precipitated the Great Famine. With fields and sea yielding only so many natural resources, particularly foodstuffs, and birth rates climbing at a rate disproportionate to these resources, in response to unyielding dictates of the church, environmental degradation, disaster, death, and diaspora ensued.

How is the individual impacted by the geosystem? An individual may be impacted positively or negatively by the same geosystem qualities. If, for example, a child is born today in Tir an Fhia, established as a fishing village generations ago, she or he will be unable to make a living as a fisherman or woman when she grows up. As with fisheries worldwide, catches are diminishing and making a livelihood from commercial fishing is less possible. Yet, as Connemara becomes a center for preservation of the Gaelic cultural heritage and a tourist destination with its raw natural beauty, the growing child may have other opportunities for school and work and engagement in the world—such as in ecotourism or sport fishing.

Alternately, the individual acts on and alters the geosystem directly and indirectly. On the one hand, the sheep farmer in Connemara who cuts peat for fuel from blanket bogs, and allows his sheep to graze there as well, irrevocably alters the physical terrain, damaging habitat for other flora and fauna, and contributes to global warming. On the other, the banker who travels frequently from Belfast to Dublin and back and takes the train instead of driving his own car is preserving limited natural resources and contributing to geosystem health.

In conclusion, to the extent that opportunity for development outweighs risk for individuals, families, and communities and the extent that the land, water, and air continues to support the living things in a particular physical place, the geosystem is assumed to be in balance. To the extent that risk for development outweighs opportunity and the extent to which the land, water, and air are unable to support life, the geosystem is assumed to be out of balance. In Ireland, both the Republic and Northern Ireland, the geosystem appears to afford individuals, families, and communities more opportunity than risk for development. On the other hands, as in other countries on earth, individuals, families, and communities are placing stressors on their natural physical environment that may be contributing to a geosystem that is increasingly out of balance.

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