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Rede Paulista de Educação Ambiental - Repea

Environmental Education and citizenship

Extracted from a Pedro Jacobi* article for the 1st Hidrographic Basins Committees State Congress (SP)

Environmental education represents a fundamental means to overcome our society current problems.

The relation between the environment and education for citizenship plays an increasingly challenging role, demanding the creation of new knowledges for understanding all social processes that become each time more complex and the environmental risks, that are rising.

Environmental policies and educational programs related to awareness about environmental crisis increasingly demand new approaches, more integrated, from a reality that is contradictory and generates gaps that lay beyond the merely application of scientific and technological knowledges currently available.

The given challenge is to establish a environmental education that be at the same time innovative and critical in two levels – formal and informal. So, environmental education must be overall a political act aimed at transforming society. Its focus must search a holistic action perspective that relates and integrates men, nature and the universe, having as a fundament the concept that natural resources are extinguishable and that the main resposnsibility for their degradation is men’s.

When we refer to environmental education, we place it in a broader context, that of the education of citizens, which features as a critical element for the consolidation the concept of a very citizen. Challenge to strenght citizenship for all, and not just for a group, is accomplished by the possibility that each person be the sole bearer of rights and duties and to convert himself/herself into the co-responsible for the life quality defense.

The main way of action for environmental education must search, overall, solidarity, equality and respect towards differences, through democratic participation forms based on interactive and dialogical practises. This becomes the goal to create new attitudes and behaviors in front of the consumption patterns and standards in our society and to stimulate the change of personal and collective values.

But how to integrate environmental education and citizenship? Citizenship has to do with belonging to a community and to establish an identity with it. Environmental education, as a way to form and exercise citizenship, has to do with a new way to face the relationship between men and nature, based on a new ethic code, that demand new moral principles and a different vision on Earth and men.

Environmental education must be seen as a constant learning process that values the numerous knowledges and forms citizens with global and local awareness.

And what has been done in terms of environmental education? The major part of activities are developed in a very formal way. Main subjects discussed are: garbage, environmental protection, use and degradation of water sources and actions oriented to make population more aware about air pollution.

Environmental education developed in Brazil is too diversified and extremely bound to governamental institutions as environmental actions articulators, coordinators and promoters.

The great quality leap has been achieved by NGOs and community organizations that are developing informal actions focused mainly on informal activities with young population. These activities are endless and show innovative practises that search to strenghten people’s co-responsability in all age spans and social groups with regards to the importance of bringing about citizens increasingly committed with the defense of life.

Education for citizenship means the possibility to motivate people so that they transform the several participation ways into potential patterns for the dynamization of society and for the manifestation of a sociabilization purpose, based on education towards participation.

The complex citizenship building process in Brazil, within a context of increasing inequalities is interwoven with a series of matters that necessarily indicate overcoming the dominance and tutelage that set the basis in our society.

True challenge in establishing an active citizenship is the crucial element to build and strenghten  each citizen’s role, that as bearers of rights and duties, take over the important mission to open more political spaces for participation in our society.

Social and environmental risks management increasingly set the need to enhance people’s involvement through initiatives that allow the environmental counciousness level to be raised, assuring that information and the institutional consolodation of open ways for participation happen in a pluralistic manner.

Environmental education must strenghten increasingly, the “brown agenda”, emphasizing the environmental issues which arise from the life quality degradation within urban areas.

Once it is observable that it is each time more difficult to keep urban life quality, it is necessary to enhance the importance to assure proper environmental standards and stimulate a growing environmental awareness, focused on the citizenship application via participation and ethic and moral values transformation at the collective and individual levels, in a perspective that searches sustainable development. Environmental education as part of a more comprehensive citizenship is connected to a new relationship between men and nature.      

So being, the day-to-day dimension of environmental education leads us to think about it as the addition of actions and, consequently, understand it in the dimension of its potential expansion for the society as a whole.We understand that spreading these environmental practises will only be possible when belonging to a wider concept of different social values and even changes in day-to-day life.

Social and environmental issues question dominant ideologies at the practical and theorical levels, proposing society a democratic participation in the management of current and potential resources, as in the decision-making process to choose new life styles and the construction of an environmental sustainable and more socially equal future.   

New education standards are increasinly needed to highlight reality from other angles and this requires new references in concepts and mainly, transformation of attitudes.

One of the main challenges is to broaden the interactive dynamic between population and public power, so that this can potentialize a necessary and growing articulation among local governments, mainly on the development of practises to protect the environment.

 

Pedro Jacobi is an associated Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) Education College and also at the USP post-graduation program for environmental sciences