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Environmental Education: The holistic point of view

 

© Yogesh Pathak

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At EcoUniv, we have started work on a comprehensive framework of environmental education for Class I to XII.

As a precursor to this, we will start sharing key elements and the foundation for such a framework. Most of this has been covered in a long Marathi article by Yogesh Pathak in Gram Mangal’s ShikshanVedh magazine in 2014.

We believe a comprehensive framework for environmental education should be based on the holistic point of view.

What is the holistic point of view? The original ideas are synthesized in an essay by Prakash Gole, titled “What can be the holistic point of view?”

 

Below is a summary and interpretation by EcoUniv.

  • Appreciating nature’s complex and cyclic nature and fragility

  • Appreciating the flows of matter and energy in nature

    • Ensuring common citizens are energy literate, matter literate, and ‘think systems’

    • Understanding the value held in nature’s ecosystems and using their services without disturbing their form, function, flows, and richness

  • Appreciating impact of man’s actions and short-termism on nature

    • Agriculture, Industry, Housing, Roads, Pollution,….

    • Realizing that the rapid erosion of natural resources due to our development model is happening much faster than what nature can replenish

  • Understanding sustainability and environmental ethics

  • Understanding the role of economics as it as and as it should be

    • Man is a part of nature and our economics should subsume to preservation of nature, not the other way around

  • Understanding nature’s diversity, it’s history and present in totality.

    • Appreciating linkages between nature’s diversity and our cultural and language diversity and vocations

  • Learning from societies that have conserved nature e.g. tribals

  • Envisioning a new economic and social order around sustainability, including land use and natural resource use, conservation, local production and use, and ecological restoration

    • g. Revisiting agriculture and food: Managing land and water use, cropping decisions, and fertilizer and pesticide at a local level to conserve nature. Improving biodiversity in our food, stopping land erosion, sustainable farming practices through constant experimentation

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