International Support for Environmental
Education
A Brief History of Environmental and Sustainability
Education:
The Oldest Education … and the Newest
Environmental education
is not new. It is not, in fact, an exaggeration
to say that it is the oldest form of human educational
experience. Early humans depended on environmental
literacy—an informed reading of nature—for
their well-being and for their survival. Every
society and civilization, from pre-history to
our contemporary scientific age, has had nature
as a reference point for learning. Teaching and
learning, in and about nature, have made it possible
to provide for humanity’s most essential
needs, including shelter, resources, sustenance,
spirituality, philosophy, aesthetics, health,
and scientific understanding.
Today, despite the fact that
the meeting of essential human needs is in many
ways enhanced by advanced technologies, environmental
education is not limited to the observation, appreciation,
and enjoyment of nature. It is more than a way
to offer hands-on contact with living things as
a laboratory for scientific observation. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, environmental
and sustainability education is not only designed
to foster learning in and about nature; it is
equally a mode of learning for nature—for
the preservation of nature and the natural processes
and systems on which all life depends.
Environmental and sustainability
education today is an evolving tool which will
allow advanced societies to add ecological literacy—the
ability to read and assess the needs of nature—to
the other forms of literacy which contribute to
human health and well-being. |
Environmental education as we know it today can be
traced back to its antecedents in the late nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth century.
These included a range of learning opportunities such
as nature study, conservation education, outdoor education,
agriculture education, progressive education, and ecology.
Conservation education arose from the wish to preserve
selected species, and from the “dust bowl”
conditions of the Prairies in the 1930s, which awakened
people to the importance of conserving natural resources,
including soil. Ecology, which emerged as a scientific
field in the 1920s, moved from a conservation focus
on species to an emphasis on the relationships and interdependence
among living and non-living components of nature. Outdoor
education came to be promoted as a means of acquiring
knowledge about nature through direct experience. Progressive
education added a holistic, integrated, interdisciplinary
approach to education and “learning by doing.”
The term environmental education
(EE) came into common use in the 1960s. The need for
new knowledge and solutions was evident as public attention
and concern became increasingly focused on such issues
as world population growth; the contamination of land,
air, and water; the depletion of natural resources through
industrialization and urbanization; and the growing
alienation of people from the natural environment. This
focus was intensified by the thinking of environmental
writers such as Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and Rachel
Carson, the author of Silent Spring.
Carson wrote, “the public must decide if it wants
to continue on the present road, and it can do so only
when in full possession of the facts.” The aim
of environmental education is to bring about awareness
of critical ecological facts.
In the 1960s the world saw the first NASA photographs
of Earth from space, with the planet’s fragility
reinforced by Adlai Stevenson’s reference to “spaceship
Earth.” Concern for and consciousness of environmental
quality gave new direction to a movement in support
of education in, about,
and for the environment
that included responsible environmental citizenship.
In 1968 a UNESCO conference entitled Conservation and
Rational Use of the Biosphere was held in Paris, France.
This event spurred the creation of environmental departments
in governments around the world, including Environment
Canada, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, and
the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.
The 1970 National Environmental
Education Act in the U.S. led to the establishment
of a federal Office of Environmental Education and legislated
support for the environmental educational work being
done by many individuals, organizations, and states.
From its beginnings, environmental education included
a definition of humans as an inseparable part of nature,
in contrast with the “objective observer”
standpoint espoused by the mainstream scientific community.
Environmental educators set out to advance knowledge
of human-environment relations, and of the problems
that arose from those relations. Their goal was to seek
solutions to environmental problems, and to develop
attitudes and the motivation to work towards solutions,
as well as preventing future problems.
In 1972 the United Nations’ Conference on Human
Development in Stockholm, Sweden, identified the development
of environmental education as “one of the most
critical elements of an all-out attack on the world’s
environmental crisis.”
Dr. William B. Stapp of the University of Michigan
is recognized as one of the most influential players
involved in developing a rationale and principles for
environmental education. These principles were formalized
in the Belgrade Charter,
a document produced in 1975 at UNESCO’s International
Conference on Environmental Education. A further product
of that same meeting was a ten-year plan called the
International Environmental Education Program. A follow-up
Intergovernmental Conference on
Environmental Education was held in 1977 in Tbilisi,
Russia, to establish the five broad objectives of EE—awareness,
knowledge, attitudes, skills, and participation—and
to seek a commitment from government leaders to build
environmental education into national policy.
The term “sustainable development” was
introduced in the early 1980s and advanced by the 1987
Report of the World Commission
on Environment and Development, more popularly
known as the Brundtland Report after the Commission’s
chairperson. This report stated that “humanity
has the ability to make development sustainable—to
ensure that it meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.”
International commitment to environmental education
took another step forward in 1992 at the UN Conference
on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. At
this historic environmental event 179 heads of government—including
the prime minister of Canada—signed on to Agenda
21: The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,
a global environmental guide for the twenty-first century.
Chapter 36 of the document is entitled “Promoting
Education, Public Awareness, and Training.” The
Rio World Summit was followed by other international
environmental conferences in Montreal and Thessaloniki,
Greece, in 1997, and by the 2002 UN World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Each of these
forums invited and promised further commitments to environmental
education.
Agenda 21 had emphasized the importance of improving
the environmental literacy of all citizens through formal,
non-formal, and informal modes of education. Following
the Johannesburg “Rio+10” conference, the
UN declared the period from 2005 to 2015 as “a
decade of environmental learning.”
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