“Tread LightlyWithout a major program for producing widespread ecoliteracy in the community, especially, but not exclusively, in the young, human society is facing an accelerating fall into ecological disaster.”

 

THE URGENT NEED

There is an environmental emergency looming:

 

  • world population  is increasing at nearly 2 million a week;
  • greenhouse emissions are set to increase dramatically as the world increases energy use by 50% over next few decades;
  • “Peak Oil” crisis – the merging of environmental and economic crises.

 

We need to empower people to enable them to understand and to act

 

  • We must prevent and then reverse the destruction of rainforests currently being lost at the rate of more than 100 square miles per day;
  • We must minimise the potentially disastrous impact of global warming;
  • We must protect biodiversity, currently declining at a rate of between 100 and 200 species per day;
  • We must conserve and improve soils currently being eroded at a rate of more than 60 million tonnes a day in addition to growing salinity and other destructive processes;
  •  We must conserve and increase healthy water supplies for human communities as well as for the environment;
  • We must reduce, and eventually eradicate, contaminating and polluting industrial and agricultural practices.

 

THE LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT PEDAGOGY

 

  1. Current pedagogical frameworks are based on an instrumentalist, positivist, fragmented and largely functionalist set of assumptions, which often fail to achieve the learning outcomes we claim to agree on;
  2. Current schooling frequently limits learning to teacher-directed cerebral activities, often limiting experiential and student-directed learning;
  3. Universities have generally failed to provide critical learning frameworks and opportunities, preferring to chase the narrow instrumentalist courses for which government and corporate funding is relatively easy to obtain;

 

Only a major overhaul of our pedagogical theory and practice can turn our universities and schools into the kinds of places where ecoliteracy can occur

 

SOME DIRECTIONS WE MUST CONSIDER

ECOLITERACY MUST BE  CORE CURRICULUM

Ecoliteracy or environmental education must become core curriculum and no longer be merely a marginal, voluntary activity undertaken by the more aware schools

FOCUS ON ALTERNATIVE PROGRESS INDICATORS (not GNP)

Instead of doom & gloom we need to show how we can live more satisfying lives without destroying our environment.

Using the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and similar measures we can show that mindless consumption is not the only way to enjoy life.

Download a brief paper on Ecoliteracy prepared by Joe Natoli and Harry van Moorst for the AAEE Conference, 2004.