Education

Environmental Education and Sustainability

The fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in February 2007, confirms the reality of global climate change. Some scientists have pointed to the uncertainties and the inevitable limits of the climatic modeling, and other researchers question the ascendancy of scientist's analyses of the question in the public sphere. They assert that sociopolitical analyses should lead scholars to question the neo-liberal model of society, with its faith in technical progress, as well as the inequitable sharing of the wealth which ensues from it, according to Scott Lash, et al. The consensus of the IPCC experts has strengthened over the years, and concludes that the production of greenhouse gas of human origin is an important cause of global warming.

For more than 30 years, various arguments have fed the debate: scientific, economic, ethical, and sociopolitical. From the 1970s, environmental edu-cation became the subject of a succession of international conferences of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). It began with the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, followed by the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002. The shift from environmental education to education for sustainable development is clear in the titles of these conferences.

The defining principles and orientations of environmental education found their inspiration in this type of consensus and the reports that followed, such as Tbilisi's in 1977, following the Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education that took place there. Such reports underline the necessity of lifelong learning, which prepares individuals for the analysis of the fundamental problems of a contemporary world in constant evolution. The complexity of the environmental question and the importance of interdisciplinarity require analysis of the environmental questions using social, political, economic, and scientific dimensions, while underlining the necessity of redefining our value system to renew the relationship between nature and human beings.

Since the early 1990s, environmental education has been defined as education for sustainable development: UNESCO launched the International Decade of Education for Sustainable Development in 2005, which will last until 2014. This is contested by many academics. Some see a legitimate proposal to reinforce the institutionalization of environmental education, and recognize some of the principles of deep ecology. Others, notably the team of Lucie Sauvé from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), point out that education for sustainable development is defined in an instrumental way, as being at the service of a development for economic purposes, as the key to solving environmental problems. The idea is above all considered a resource to exploit for economic development. Education seems miles away from the initial critical aims of social transformation that should characterize environmental education, according to many authors of the domain, such as: Joel Spring, Ian Robottom, [Page 355]John Fien, Noel Gough, and Annette Gough. These critical goals should also be considered and provide a direction for global warming education.

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