Intermediate means, the next level up, are ultimate means that have been refined and processed by human beings toward human goals. They include productive equipment of all kinds, tools and machines, processed raw materials, tapped and usable forms of energy, and organized human labour at every level of skill. Intermediate means are generated from ultimate means through knowledge, technology, and social organization. When we say that more know-how allows humanity to “create more resources”, what we mean is that the ultimate means can be converted more easily or cheaply or thoroughly into intermediate means.

Intermediate means are what economists would call inputs to the next level up the pyramid, the intermediate ends. These are the things societies usually measure as outputs and achievements health, wealth, production, education, transportation, communication, gross national product. The conversion from intermediate means to intermediate ends is governed by political and economic systems. These systems are more effective and efficient if they allow intermediate ends to be achieved more easily, with fewer intermediate means.

At the top of the pyramid are the ultimate ends whatever human goals are good in themselves and not as a means toward any other end. Ultimate ends are not concrete, not easy to measure or define, but they can be suggested by abstract words such as enlightenment, fulfillment, happiness, love, harmony, community, identity, satisfaction, quality of life. Intermediate ends are transformed into ultimate ends by the precepts or insights of philosophy, ethics, religion, culture, individual inner wisdom.

The attainment of ultimate ends depends on every part of the pyramid and on effective processes at every step: Having plenty of material goods, health, and education does no good, if one does not know how to turn them into happiness and fulfillment. Having land, labour, capital, energy in abundance does not help, if the political and economic systems use them wastefully or inequitably. Having a bountiful earth is not enough, if there is no effective technology for harvesting the bounty. And, of course, having technology, politics, economics, and ethics all in place does not help, if the foundation of the pyramid, the earth’s material, energy, and biological systems are not healthy.

Real development means improving the operation of the entire pyramid, at every stage of conversion, while preserving the integrity of the ultimate planetary means that are the foundation of it all. And there should be no doubt about it; sustained development is simply impossible if environmental degradation is allowed to continue.

2. The earth’s resources are sufficient for all living creatures’ needs, if they are managed efficiently and sustainably.

There is enough food raised on the planet every year to provide every person with a full, varied, and healthy diet. There is enough clean water to support at least one more population doubling. The solar energy falling on the earth’s (and area each day averages eight thousand times as much energy as our current worldwide civilization uses from all other sources.

Gandhi said: “the earth is sufficient to provide for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.”

Numerous studies have attempted to measure the quantity of fresh water, soils, minerals, fuels, and arable land on the planet and to calculate whether these resources are sufficient to support the earth’s present and future populations. None of these studies can be said to be definitive; there is much we don’t know about the earth’s capabilities and about future human requirements. But all the studies conclude that, as far as we know, and except for some local cases, there is as yet no absolute resource scarcity. There should be enough soils, waters, materials, and energy to meet the basic needs of at least one more population doubling on earth, if those resources are wisely managed an equitably distributed.

The human mind seems to perceive the earth’s resources either through a context of scarcity– there is not enough to go around- or a context of abundance– there is so much that it is inexhaustible. Neither of those perceptions agrees with the facts as we know them, and neither leads to good management.

A context of scarcity leads to frugality and conservation, but also to hoarding and injustice. If there is not enough, then I have better get my share and hold onto it, no matter whether you have enough.

A context of abundance permits generosity, creativity, and playfulness, but also waste and squandering. If we will never run out, there is no need to use what we have efficiently or wisely.

In between the two extremes of scarcity and abundance is an intermediate range called sufficiency: there is enough to satisfy the needs of everyone, but not more. Generosity can be supported, but not wastefulness; frugality is in order, but not miserliness. Sufficiency best expresses our actual knowledge about the fruitfulness of the earth, and it is clearly the best assumption to make to guide wise management.

3. Both poverty and affluence can cause environmental problems.

In the industrialized countries at least 3,000 km2 of prime farmland disappear every year under new buildings and roads.

In the non-industrialized countries the rural poor, because they have no other fuel source, burn 400 million tons of dung and crop residue every year, material that should go back to the soil to restore nutrients.

In the world’s rich countries about half the surface water and a significant amount of groundwater has been polluted with industrial wastes.

In the world’s poor countries, 60 per cent of the people have access only to water that has been contaminated with human and animal wastes.

Environmental problems do not occur exclusively where people are rich or where people are poor; they occur everywhere. Becoming rich and industrialized does not automatically solve environmental problems: rather it generates a whole new set of them.

The environmental problems of the poor usually come from a high dependence on nearby resources, and a lack of choices. Simply to survive they must strip forests for cooking fuel, overstock grazing ranges, cultivate hillsides where the soil washes away in the rain, overhunt or overfish. They often know that they are destroying their productive base with these activities, but they have no alternative.

Education and wealth can solve these environmental abuses by offering more choices. For those who can afford them, kerosene or electricity or more efficient stoves can cook the food and save the forests. Higher yields using modern agricultural methods on flatlands can reduce the necessity of cultivating hillsides. Other productive activities can replace the need to overharvest forests, animals, or fish.

But economic development brings with it a much higher demand for the earth’s resources. The 25 per cent of the world’s people who live in the industrialized world consume 80 per cent of the resources mobilized each year. Furthermore, development tends to put a large physical and mental distance between production and consumption. A person can turn on an electric appliance without thinking that that electricity requires coal to be strip-mined, to be trucked to a generating plant, to be burned with the release of acids and heavy metals into the air. The environmental problems of industrialization come not so much from lack of choices as from lack of awareness, lack of regulation, lack of information, lack of an attitude of stewardship, lack of a holistic perspective.

The simultaneous presence of poverty and affluence on our planet creates not only the distinct kinds of environmental problems resulting from poverty and affluence, but also some problems that come from linkages between the two. If a rich person owns all the good land in the valley, then the poor people will be forced to farm the erosion-prone hillsides. If a rich country offers good prices for imported beef, a poor country will cut tropical forests to graze cattle to produce that beef.

Just as environmental problems are not a simple function of wealth, neither are environmental solutions. Some societies that are poor in material terms have evolved sophisticated ways of protecting their environment and using it productively and sustainably. The natives of the South Pacific island of Tikopia, for example, had strong rituals that controlled their birth rate, so that the island would never be overpopulated. Traditional homesteads on Bali incorporate complex systems of intercropping, aquaculture, and animal care that recycle virtually all organic matter, never leave the soil bare to erosion, reduce pest infestations, and maintain high productivity. The Native American societies carried out hunting, fishing, and agriculture for many generations with no known degradation of the ecosystem.

Similarly, some highly-industrialized societies are finding ways to use their technical sophistication to solve environmental problems:

• Several small cities in Japan have clean, mechanized waste-recovery centers that return every form of urban waste to a useful purpose organic matter is composted into ‘fertilizer, bottles are washed and refilled, metals are reclaimed, paper is either recycled or burned to produce heat and electricity for homes.
• The German Democratic Republic uses careful pest monitoring and a computerized information network to reduce pesticide spraying only to times when there is an actual pest outbreak (and in the process has reduced use of some pesticides by 80-90 per cent).
• Israel has pioneered water-conserving technologies so efficient that over the decade 1968 to 1978 it doubled agricultural production while water use per hectare of irrigated land fell 21 per cent.
• The average new car produced in the United States in 1987 traveled 90 per cent farther on a litre of gasoline than the average new car of 1973. The average new refrigerator now uses only one-third as much electricity as the refrigerators of 1972. Between 1973 and 1986 the United States saved, the equivalent of 10 million barrels of oil per day through more efficient energy use, thereby producing less pollution and saving $30 billion per year in oil imports.

Economic development in itself is neither the cause nor the cure of environmental problems. It can help to solve those problems, but only if it is accompanied by an attitude of responsibility and stewardship for the earth.

4. Economic development and care for the environment are compatible, interdependent, and necessary.

Too often environmental protection and economic development are seen as conflicting goals. Our un-systematic minds perceive a separation between nature and humanity and tell us that we must choose one or the other, defend one against the other, or sacrifice one to preserve the other.

Of course that apparent trade-off between man and nature is nonsense. Human beings are part of the environment. The economy is derived from and sustained by nature. To be stewards of the planet means not only to care for other species, not only to care for the planetary cycles and processes, but also to care for each other. To be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, to love and serve, feed and clothe humanity; also means to love and serve the planet that sustains humanity. When we see the system whole, that becomes obvious.

Nevertheless, in the short term, there are very real trade-offs. A new hydroelectric dam will flood farmland or wilderness. If the tropical forest are not turned into grazing land, income from beef exports will be lost. If nuclear waste materials are not dumped into the ocean, the cost of nuclear energy will be much higher. If the fishing fleet stays within sustainable catch limits, less fish will be caught.

Sometimes there are indeed stark and difficult sacrifices of environmental resources for economic resources, or vice versa. But many apparent dilemmas of this sort come from looking at the problem with too narrow a focus, over too short a time horizon.

Catch limits can cause some fishermen to be unemployed, but if overharvesting destroys the fish population, all of them will be unemployed. Just as a manufacturing industry is not economically healthy if it is letting its productive stock of machines deteriorate, a fishing industry is not sound if it is using up its basic productive capital, the breeding stock of fish. A total- system long-term view makes it clear that fish catch should be limited to sustainable levels, and that some compensation or retraining may be needed if there ate too many fishermen.

Improper disposal of nuclear waste may make nuclear-generated electricity seem less expensive than other energy sources, but that is bad accounting. Damage caused by wastes is a real cost, though it may occur in some other part of the economic or ecological system. To make rational choices among alternative energy systems, we have to take all costs into account. That may make some undertakings look more expensive, but the truth is that they are more expensive. When that truth is revealed by proper accounting, better decisions are made about what technologies to adopt.

Even the most destructive economic activities can be carried out in a way that respects the environment, and often doing things in an ecologically-conscious way, which always pays in the long term, pays in the short term as well:

• A deep molybdenum mine has been opened in the middle of a beautiful national forest in the mountains of Colorado. It was designed with the consultation of local environmentalists. Great care is being taken so that the forest will not be disturbed. The tailings and waste water will be disposed of through an underground tunnel into a containment area far away. When the mine is finally exhausted, it will not be possible to tell it was there.
• In Hungary soft coal is strip-mined from under prime agricultural fields. The topsoil is saved and returned to the site, drainage patterns are restored, soil fertility is carefully rebuilt. A few years after the mining is finished, the area is growing wheat again.
• In mountainous, rainy Costa Rica the building of a road usually means landslides, a clogged or flooding stream, and severe disturbance of a whole watershed, not to mention a continuous need for expensive repairs of the road. A group of hydrologists and watershed experts has worked with engineers to lay out roads with the water flow patterns in mind, so as to disturb the streams as little as possible. As a result there is less silt and flooding downstream, and much less road maintenance is required.
• The 3M Corporation in the United States re-designed its manufacturing processes to eliminate each year 90,000 tons of air pollutants, 10,000 of water pollutants, 1 million gallons of waste water, and 15,000 tons of solid waste. As a result the company also save $200 million per year in operating expenses.
• While financing a large hydroelectric dam on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, the World Bank also included enough money to protect 300,000 hectares of forest in the watershed above the dam. The trees regulate water runoff and prevent the dam from silting up and losing its storage capacity. The forest also protects many endangered species and is becoming a research station in tropical ecology, bringing in foreign exchange from visiting scientists.

High productivity, modern technology, and economic development can co-exist with a healthy environment. They must co-exist, or the development will not be sustainable. In fact it will not even be real development, unless it integrates all, parts of the triangle, from the resources of the planet to human satisfaction and fulfillment.

F. Socially Sustainable Development

If the people are to be able to develop they must have power. They must be able to control their own activities within the framework of their village communities. The people must participate not just in the physical labour involved in economic development, but also in the planning of it and the determination of priorities. At present the best-intentioned governments-my own included-too easily move from a conviction of the need for rural development into acting as if the people had no ideas of their own.

Julius K. Nyerere.

E.F. Schumacher points out in Small is Beautiful that at the end of the Second World War both Europe and Japan had greater political and social disruption, less capital, fewer functioning factories, fewer natural resources and less wealth than many Third World countries did. Yet in the forty years since, Europe and Japan have experienced astonishing economic recoveries. The essence of that development could have had nothing to do with initial material advantage. Rather, it must have sprung from a history of education, motivation, and organization of the people.

“Organization, education, and discipline” are the characteristics Schumacher identifies as essential to development. We might add to that list unity-the cultural habit of emphasizing commonalities rather than differences-and empowerment-the idea that problems can indeed be solved and that people are capable of solving them. Schumacher elaborates:

Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organization, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self- reliance. It cannot be produced by skilful grafting operations carried out by foreign technicians or an indigenous elite that has lost contact with the ordinary people. It can succeed only if it is carried forward as a broad, popular movement with primary emphasis on the full utilization of the drive, enthusiasm, intelligence, and labour power of everyone.

Sustainable development is not production-centered but people-centered. It assumes that the primary resource for development is the creative initiative of the people, and that the primary purpose of development is their material and spiritual well-being. It knows that in functioning communities, even where there is poverty, there are also ingenious survival strategies. People-centered development respects those strategies, and asks how to enhance the ability of communities to solve their own problems. It assumes that if people are not meeting their own needs, or if they are degrading their environment, there must be formidable obstacles preventing them from acting more effectively. It focuses on removing those obstacles.

For example, Jaya Arunachalam of the Working Women’s Forum in Madras, India, noticed that the poorest women of Madras had evolved a number of small businesses-laundries, butcher shops, mat weaving-but that these women were in debt to local money-lenders and paying usurious rates of interest. Jaya arranged small, low-interest loans from the Bank of India for these women, so the profits from the businesses could go to family welfare, rather than to interest payments. The women organized themselves in small groups to support each other in repaying the loans. The result was a doubling of family income, expansion of businesses, and a growing organization, now 20,000 strong, of women who have set up their own credit, educational, and political network, and who are helping each other help themselves.

Lack of reasonable credit is one obstacle to self-reliance. Others may be lack of knowledge- how to treat the blight on the cacao trees or how to avoid schistosomiasis- or lack of access to critical resources such as land or water, or a deep and debilitating lack of self-confidence. When these obstacles are removed and people pull together to solve their problems, miracles can happen.

The Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, a village self-help movement that began among the nation’s poorest people, in one year built eight times as much roadway as the government, at one-eighteenth the cost, while it was also building schools and houses and irrigation canals. Here is a glimpse of how it was done:

A village joins the movement by inviting a team of Sarvdaya organizers to visit (there are now 27,000 full-time organizers). A meeting is called in the temple, church, or mosque, and the people talk about what the village most needs. Then the planning begins, with everyone participating.

“You say you have waited two years for the government to clean that canal? You can keep on waiting while your fields bake. But where is your own power? Your power is not in Colombo, it is in your heads and hands.”

“How can we clean the canal? We have tools but no pans to carry away earth. Is there a substitute for pans? Yes, we can use sheaves of leaves. How many people to do the job? Two hundred, working four days. How many volunteers can each one bring one other? Right, who will feed them?” A landowner volunteers to supply food. The canal is finished, not in four days but in the afternoon of the first day, and the people are ready to take on the next job.

Through processes like that one, in many parts of the world, forests have been planted, check dams have been erected to prevent erosion, clean water systems have been created, industries have started, all with little money and few resources except the crucial resource of organized, empowered people.

2. Sustainable development must be appropriate not only to the environment and resources, but also to the culture, history and social systems of the place where it is to occur.

Forty years intensive effort toward economic development have produced many case studies of both success and failure. Unsuccessful projects can usually be seen (sometimes only after the fact) as in some way inappropriate to their setting. Ideas, technologies or processes that have worked well in one part of the world are grafted hastily onto another part, where they may not fit at all. Temperate-zone agricultural methods are applied unthinkingly to the tropics. Hydroelectric dams are constructed on a scale too large for the region’s electricity needs. Machinery is installed that requires more skilled maintenance or spare parts than are available. Export-based industries are started where what is really needed is basic subsistence for the local population.

Many successful projects, on the other hand, have been uniquely fitted to their circumstances. They have been based on a thorough-going knowledge of and respect for the people, the ecosystem and the indigenous natural resources. Often they are originated by the people themselves, who are, after all, the best experts on the local situation. The following are characteristics of these appropriate development projects:

• They are based on renewable and local resources rather than non-renewable or distant ones,
• They sustain and increase the yield of natural resources and they use resources efficiently, rather than exploiting them for short-term increases in production,
• They are undertaken on a scale small enough to permit diversity, flexibility and resilience against mechanical or social breakdown, rather than on a scale chosen for purposes of international comparative advantage,
• Ownership is broadly-based rather than concentrated, and owners are local and directly involved, rather than far away,
• Projects occur where the greatest numbers of people and the greatest needs are, which in most places means rural and agriculture-based development, rather than urban and industrial based,
• The projects produce basic foods and goods for the local population,
• They build on the strengths and skills already present in the population, but they also encourage the development of realistically attainable and useful new skills; they permit individual and social growth and evolution; they use not only human muscles, but also the human mind and human creativity,
• They respect and enhance the variety and productivity of the local ecosystem.

Some examples of appropriate technology have become world-famous. The barefoot doctor system of China departs from the curative and machine-intensive Western medical system and utilizes village health workers trained in the most basic (and largely preventative) first-aid hygiene techniques that were the most urgently needed by the population.

The system of “stone dams” in Africa reduces erosion and flash floods with the simple device of stone walls laid out along the contours of the land-and the contours are surveyed with great accuracy by watching how a drop of water runs along a string tied between two sticks. It is a system that can be adopted by anyone, with little training and with resources near at hand.

The oral rehydration therapy saves the lives of children suffering with diarrhea not with expensive antibiotics, but with a sugar/salt solution that any mother can make.

The interplanting of coffee fields with Eryhrina trees-a trick long known to Central American farmers-shades the coffee, holds down erosion, and provides nitrogen-rich leaves either as a mulch for the ground or as feed for the animals.

Appropriate technologies like these sound simple and are relatively simple to execute, but they are based on sophisticated understanding of local needs and resources.

3. Development must be equitable.

No social system can be sustainable over the long run when the distribution of goods and bads within it is grossly unjust, especially when some pact of the population is consigned to chronic debilitating poverty. Whatever the allocation system is, it does not need to produce absolute equality, but it does need to produce equity, meaning fairness. People need to understand the reasons why some have more than others, they need to approve of those reasons, and they need to feel included, motivated, and fairly rewarded by the economic system. If there is no way, even by the hardest work, that people can provide decent lives for themselves and better themselves, they will eventually drop into sullen non-co-operation or rise in outrage.

“The rich get richer” is an old saying with a real grounding in the way social systems work. If a little bit of wealth or power gives a person even a slight advantage to gain more wealth and power, a vicious circle is set in motion by which the rich do get richer and the poor get increasingly disenfranchised. It is like a game in which the winners gain the power to win more, but the game never ends, the cards are never shuffled and re-dealt, the playing field is never leveled, the sides are never changed, some people have to play all their lives with the sun in their eyes and the wind against them.

Some social practices have evolved to interrupt or counter the vicious circle of accumulating wealth and power. Some native American tribes had ceremonial occasions in which wealth was formally redistributed so all had an equal share. More modern redistributive arrangements include universal education; inheritance taxes so that each generation starts afresh; progressive taxes that put the major burden of government funding on the rich; public subsidy of basic needs like health care and transport; anti-trust regulations; democratic elections; removal of discriminatory hiring practices; various kinds of welfare and income-transfer programmes; famine relief systems.

Like technologies, mechanisms for social equity have to be appropriate to the culture and history of the people. But some means of establishing and preserving equity must be present, preferably a way that does not demean recipients, a way that does not raise the question of the worth of any person in society but rather that affirms the large social purposes of equitable distribution. Without such an equity restoring mechanism, the economy is likely to become grossly inefficient, because so many people are unengaged from it. It is also likely to become unstable and subject to violence.

4. Development involves the continuous balancing of opposites and the breaking down of barriers and separations between freedom and order, groups and individuals, work and leisure, settlements and nature.

G. Knowledge and Uncertainty

Knowledge alone or ignorance alone leads man into darkness. The union of fitting knowledge with fitting ignorance is the nectar of eternity.

Vinoba Bhove.

Sometimes when we see the stars on a dark night, or look into microscope, or hear physicists talk about sub- atomic particles, or touch a newborn baby., we remember what mystery we live within. Sometimes when we see a dog respond to a wavelength we can’t hear, or a honeybee navigate by polarized light we can’t see, or watch a flight of birds on a migration across continents, we realize there are powers we do not have and whole throbbing bands of radiation around us and within us that we do not perceive.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

H. Sacredness

In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe. The conviction came that that rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance-that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was a part of that whole and not an accidental off-shoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man’s despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and night.

1. Nature has its own value, regardless of its value to humans.

Human societies could not exist without natural systems. Human being are themselves a part of nature. But the dualistic human mind likes to distinguish its own “humanness” from “mere nature”. Having made that distinction, we then fall into the trap of having to defend “nature” because of its perceived value (usually economic value) to “humanity”. If we can’t see the immediate economic value of an insect, or forest, or wetland, or prairie, we feel that we can interfere with or destroy it.

That thinking is wrong from beginning to end. First, the line of distinction between nature and human beings is harder to find the closer you look. Second, the assumption that we know the role of a species or a wetland in the ecosystem and that we can assess its utility to us assumes more knowledge than we actually have. Third, economic value is only the narrowest kind of value. And fourth, even if there were no perceivable value, direct or indirect, economic or spiritual, to some part of nature, our human responsibility, our role as stewards for the planet, does not allow us to declare it worthless.

Our attitude toward anything created on this planet ought to be (and is for many people) an attitude of reverence. Though we may not perceive its purpose, we cannot assume it has none. Though we cannot account its value to us, it has value in itself. Nothing in nature has to justify itself to us in order to have the right to exist.

The great ecologist Aldo Leopold put this principle into a moral statement he called the “land ethic”:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

2. A healthy, beautiful environment is not a luxury, it is a basic human need, both materially and non-materially.

The people of the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement have listed the ten basic human needs in the following order:

1. A clean and beautiful environment.
2. A clean and adequate supply of water.
3. Simple clothing.
4. Food.
5. Health care.
6. Communications.
7. Simple housing.
8. Energy requirements.
9. Total education.
10. Spiritual and cultural needs.

To some it may be surprising that a clean and beautiful environment is listed as the first priority by poor people who can satisfy so few of their material needs. But poor people are more likely than most to know that a healthy environment is an essential source of material needs, such as food and clean water and air, and also that material needs are not necessarily more basic than spiritual ones. To suggest that cleanliness and beauty and a healthy environment are luxuries, not needed by the poor, is to misunderstand not only the poor, not only the essential role of the environment in material production, but also the whole meaning of being human.

Material needs are basic, of course. Their absence threatens survival, and without survival no higher human goal can even be considered. But the moment that survival is assured, the next question becomes survival for what? That is a question about the quality of life, that ultimate end of human existence. Those ends are not material. They are also not luxuries, not trivial, and not unimportant to the poor or to any human being.

A modern philosopher named David Spangler talks about human needs in terms of a number of different kinds of “hungers”, some of which are hungers for higher meaning, for wholeness, and for unity between man and nature:

The first level of hunger is biological. The key need here is SURVIVAL as a physical entity. Hunger can be for, nourishment, for food, for shelter, for protection from disease-for anything that enables us to function well as biological, physical organisms.

The second level of hunger is emotional. The key need here is for CREATIVE, MEANINGFUL IDENTITY. Hunger on this level is for emotional affirmation, for a sense of personal power and esteem-for everything that affirms and identifies us as sensitive, feeling human beings.

I. Conclusion

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.

Werner Heisenberg.

The material object becomes… something different from what we now see, not a separate object on the background or in the environment of the rest of nature but an indivisible part and even in a subtle way an expression of the unity of all that we see.

Sri Aurobindo.

If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say “no”; if we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say “no”, if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say “no”; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say “no”.

Robert Oppenheimer.

It moves. It moves not.
It is far, and it is near.
It is within all this,
And It is outside of all this.

The Upanishads

They can be found in the writings of spiritual leaders and of modern physicists, as the quotes above indicate. The latest findings of science confirm them, as do the teachings of every religion. They do not contradict the practicality of economic thinking, especially when that thinking is expanded to encompass complete systems. They affirm the wisdom of every academic discipline and show how those kinds of wisdom can be integrated. They also affirm the wisdom of ancient traditions and of the folkways of many people. Above all, they affirm the common sense and the deepest values within every human being.

That must be so. If environmental education is to draw its concepts from the basic laws of the planet, as far as we know them, and from fundamental human nature, as far as we understand it, it cannot be at odds with any branch of human knowledge. If environmental education involves the search not just for truth but for whole truth, it must be able to encompass all the partial truths of the many different ways of seeing. If it is to help human beings survive, flourish, and do work on this earth, it must square with the practical views of disciplines like economics and engineering. And if it is to help human beings realize meaning, happiness, and transcendence in their lives, it must embrace spiritual wisdom as well.

The continuous re-discovery and re-articulation in many parts of the world of the concepts listed here indicates that, though they may be incomplete and though our understanding of them may still evolve, they are close to fundamental.

Yet in many parts of the world people do not live by these concepts. Too often we live:

• as if human beings and nations are separate and unconnected, instead of rising or falling together,
• as if we could assault the environment without assaulting ourselves,
• as if we could escape the physical laws that govern the earth,
• as if there were an endless treasury of resources to draw from, and an infinite and far-removed sink into which to throw our wastes,
• as if our economic existence were independent of the sustaining processes of the planet,
• as if economic development were a mechanical and economic process independent from the needs and the talents of people,
• as if one group of people know how to “develop” another group of people,
• as if our material needs were the only ones we have,
• as if we knew what we were doing.

Environmental education is about exposing these misconceptions, and encouraging people to live their lives and design their societies according to the laws of the planet and according to their own inner wisdom.

V. Methods and Tools of Environmental Education

If the key concepts of environmental education include ideas of whole systems, of the integration of physical science and spiritual values, of decision-making under uncertainty, of widespread participation in problem-solving, then insofar as possible the process of environmental education should let learners experience those concepts by doing as well as by hearing and seeing. That is why the methods and tools of environmental education are often so varied and imaginative- and so activity-oriented. They rely on considerable hearing and seeing, reading and repeating, but above all they rely on doing.

Of course environmental education can and does use the classic methods and tools of any kind of education-classrooms and teachers, books and blackboards, films and posters, lectures, tests and practice exercises. But it supplements these tried-and- true devices with much more. Weeds from the schoolyard. Puppets. Field trips. Songs, dances, and poems. Debates. Role-playing and games. Interviews with local citizens. Student-run tree nurseries or gardens or recycling centers. Involvement in real community problems, where there is no simple answer at the back of the book.

Above all, the learning environment itself, the school or the camp or the workshop, becomes a working example of the principles of environmental education. In the very course of their education students can learn to be careful with discarded materials, not- to waste energy, to do more with less, to respect nature, to respect each other. Paper can be recycled. Kitchen wastes can be composted used to grow seedlings (there is even a compost heap and a box of growing cabbages on the roof of a school in the center of a poor’ neighbourhood in the middle of New York City).

Even when there is straightforward factual material to be taught, it can be conveyed in a memorable, experiential fashion and it can transcend the basic facts to raise questions of ethics and values. For example, one could simply deliver a lecture about the formation of the earth, its geological and biological history, and the relatively recent advent of man and of recorded history. Or one could physically walk a geological time-line, as suggested by Michael J. Caduto, an international consultant on environmental education and an instructor at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science.

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EXAMPLE. Walking a Geological Time-Line.

Outside on the school grounds or along a road or trail mark a line at least 30 meters long. Do this by driving stakes into the ground at the points indicated in the accompanying diagram and then stretching a string or rope between the stakes. You let the line extend well beyond 30 meters, to indicate the future.

At each historic point, position a sign or attach a card to the line, indicating what major event took place at that point in the earth’s history. As you walk along the trail with the children, stop at each point and have one child read what events happened at that point (help with the reading, if the children are very young).

The beginning of the line signifies the formation of the solar system and the earth 4.5 billion years ago. After about 6 meters comes the first appearance of microscopic life in the sea, 3.5 billion years ago. At 2.5 billion years ago, or. 13 meters along, the earth’s atmosphere becomes filled with oxygen. It then takes 14 more meters (450 million years ago) to come to the first appearance life on land. The things begin to happen fast. One more meter brings the appearance dinosaurs, and a little less than a meter later the dinosaurs become extinct. The first human being appears within .2 centimeters (3,000,000 years) of the present. Farming begins within .006 cm of the present, and the industrial revolution within .00006 cm.

Standing at the point representing the present time, let the children discuss how long it has taken to evolve all the kinds of life there are on earth, and what a recent newcomer homo sapiens is. You can also discuss some of the enormous changes human beings have made on the planet, especially since the industrial revolution. Then you can look down the line into the future. Ask the children what they think we will bring to future generations as a result of what we are now doing on earth. Ask what they would like to have happen in the future. Point out that the smallest actions each of us take, when they are all added up, can have enormous impact on what happens to the earth and its creatures from now on. Ask what actions they might take to help the future go in the direction they would most like.

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At a more advanced level the lesson about the relative newness of industrial civilization can involve students in a research project, like this one, which also offers a wonderful opportunity to learn about people, history, and ecosystems all over the earth. It is adapted from an assignment used by Professors Kenneth and Elise Boulding in an introductory social science class at the University of Colorado, USA.

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EXAMPLE – Sampling Human History

Get two bowls from which students can draw slips of paper. Fill one bowl with slips on which are marked historical dates, beginning about 4000 B.C. and going in 100-year increments to the present. Fill the other bowl with slips on which are written the present names of the countries of the world. Ask the students to work in groups of two or three; ask each group to choose one slip from each bowl. One group might end up with Thailand, 500 B.C., for instance; another might draw Colombia, 1400 A.D. or Poland, 400 A.D.

Ask each group to go to the library and learn all they can about the country they have drawn at the time they have drawn. Suggest that they consult not only history books, but books of anthropology, natural history, climatology, geology. The students may have trouble finding anything about their designated place and time; encourage them to speculate from whatever information they can find, and to label their speculations clearly, to indicate their degree of uncertainty, and to describe what information led to them- that is, conduct a small lesson in drawing conclusions with integrity from insufficient information.

Ask each group to prepare both a written and an oral report describing what the landscape was like, what natural ecosystems were there, what the peoples’ lives were like, what technologies they used, what kinds of government and religion they had, what historical events, if any, took place.

All the reports together will add up to an impression of human history quite different from the impression one gets from history books alone. With this truly random sampling through time and space, students are unlikely to draw a place for a century in which “historic events” were happening. Most of human history has in fact been “uneventful” and unrecorded. Life has been simple and strenuous and relatively peaceful. Cultures have evolved very slowly, civilizations have risen and fallen. National boundaries and place names were generally. ‘different from the present ones, and ecosystems were often very different. There is a very low probability that any group will draw an assignment that covers any country in the industrial age.

Let all these points come out in the discussion. Go on to discuss the reasons why civilizations rise and fall,

the interactions of those civilizations with their environments, the slow adjustment times of cultures and social mechanisms, the different rates of change of ecosystems, social organizations, individual human beings, and technologies. Ask the students to comment on the accuracy of aphorisms such as, “Forests precede civilization; deserts follow,” and “He who does not understand history is destined to repeat it.” Ask the students what the term “sustainable development” might mean, whether it is possible, what it would take to attain it.

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Because of its problem orientation and orientation toward whole systems, environmental education is naturally and easily interdisciplinary. Real problems and real investigations of the holistic nature of the world almost never can be confined neatly to one discipline. Environmental education uses the resources at hand, including the school itself; the school grounds, the community. It often involves activity in groups, group discussion, drawing good ideas from the group; both because group activity illustrates the key concept of development through peoples’ participation, and because it is useful to give students training in teamwork-so many activities in life require group skills. Environmental education also includes open acknowledgement and discussion of values and ethics, especially the relation between human beings and nature.

In short, the methods and tools of environmental education are:

• participatory and experimental,
• problem-oriented,
• interdisciplinary,
• integrated into the nearby surroundings,
• group-oriented,
• value-based.

There are not characteristics that are common to formal education in many countries, and many teachers have not been trained in, have not even experienced, such education. Yet all over the world teachers are pioneering, using the simple and natural technique of choosing an interesting, nearby problem and following wherever it leads, often learning right along with the students. When that happens, when the teacher is learning too, an extremely powerful thing happens. The students are not only learning about acid rain or desertification or the preservation of endangered species, or whatever the particular content of the lesson is, they are also learning how to learn. By watching the teacher’s own curiosity and resourcefulness in solving a problem, by seeing how the teacher asks questions, confronts new information and overcomes obstacles, they are picking up toots for learning that will last them all their lives and will guide them in their own self-induced, lifelong environmental education.

Case studies of environmental education in action are given in the next section. The sample unit below is more general, not adapted to any particular educational context, just to give an idea of how one subject, the disposal of solid waste, can be taught in a participatory, interdisciplinary, problem-solving way that will force everyone, including the teacher, to do a lot of learning.

EXAMPLE: Waste Management

A Sample Unit for Environmental Education.

(This presentation is ordered by key concepts. Each concept may be presented directly through lectures and readings, or deduced from activities and exercises. The suggested activities following each concept are only rough illustrations that can be adapted to different cultures and types of students. The activities are listed in increasing order of sophistication. The first ones are most suitable for primary schools or general education, the later ones for more technical and advanced training.)

Concept One: Life as a Process of Material Flow.

Human life and all forms of human production require a constant input of materials and energy and a constant output, or discard, of wastes. Each human body takes in water, oxygen, food, and discards carbon dioxide, water, salts, and excrement. Each person uses a stream of clothing, containers, tools, toys and other objects, which are thrown away when they wear out or become dysfunctional or uninteresting. Every factory uses raw materials and produces some kind of waste. The material stream flowing through each human life differs greatly in different places and at different economic levels, but some such flow exists wherever there is human activity.

Activities:

1. What do you throw away? Make a list for a day of all the things you or your family discard. Be sure you notice what goes up chimneys, out windows, down drains.
2. What does your school throw away? Go to a local shop or business or factory or farm and find out what it throws away. Make lists or draw pictures of the wastes that are generated by your school or a local industry.
3. Take what your family throws away in a day and multiply it by the number of families in your town (neighbourhood, city) and then times 365 to calculate roughly what all those families throw away in a year. What would you guess all the town’s businesses and factories throw away in a year? How accurate do you think your estimate is? How would you go about making that estimate more accurate?
4. How could you estimate the total discards of your country in one year? Are there any statistics that could help you? How were they gathered? How’ accurate do you suppose they are?
5. See if you can find some statistics that give you an idea of the change over time of waste generation in your city, state, or country. Is the amount of waste going up or down? Why, do you suppose? If the change continues at the same rate, how much waste will be emitted in 20 years? In 50 years? What factors might change those forecasts?
6. Make a diagram of the complete material flow through streams for your family, your school, or a production process near you. Follow all chemical conversions as completely as possible and estimate the flow rates quantitatively, as accurately as you can.

Concept Two: There is no “away”.

Everything that is discarded goes somewhere. It may leave the attention of the person or organization that discards it, but it does not disappear. Wastes may be buried in the ground, carried away by air or water, chemically transformed into something else. They may be taken up into other living beings. They may lie inert for years or centuries. They may be or become harmless or even helpful, or they may cause tremendous problems. But they do not disappear.

Activities:

1. When you throw away paper, what happens to it next? What happens to it after that? After that? Draw a map showing where the paper goes. Where does the dirty water from your household go? The scraps from your kitchen? The smoke from your chimney? See how far you can follow their path through the environment. Write a story about the journey of one thing that flows through your life and then flows on.
2. Walk along your road or around your neighbourhood with a big bag or basket and pick up any litter of waste you find there. How did it get there? If you hadn’t picked it up, what would have happened to. it?
3. If there are facilities near you for handling wastes (sewage treatment plant, solid waste landfill, recycling or composting station, junkyard), visit them and find out how they work. In what form do the wastes leave them? What is their capacity for handling wastes, and how near to capacity are they operating now?
4. Make the most reasonable forecast you can of what the future waste generation of your city, state, town will be over the next ten years and the next fifty years. What might make your forecast change; how certain of it can you be? Estimate what facilities might be needed in the future to handle that waste. Where do you think these facilities should be sited? How much do you think they will cost?
5. Take several kinds of common wastes (agricultural runoff, industrial effluent, household sewage, power plant stack emission) and make the most complete list you can of their chemical composition. What would you expect to happen to those chemicals as they travel through the environment?
6. Devise some monitoring experiments to test that hypothesis. How might these wastes be measured in various parts of the environment? How much is actually present? How might that be expected to change over time?

Concept Three: Everything comes from somewhere.

The materials that are thrown away always go somewhere, and they also always come from somewhere. One can follow the stream of material not only forward, to where it goes when it is discarded, but also backward, to where it originated. If you follow back far enough, you find that it originated in the earth’s resource base; in a mine, a forest, a stream, a farm. Some of these resources are renewable and, if used wisely, can keep yielding materials for our use indefinitely. Others are nonrenewable and constantly depleted by our production and consumption. Some day they will be gone.

Activities:

1. Go back to the list you made of the things you throw away. Where did each of those things come from? By what processes were they obtained, manufactured, and brought to you? Visit, if you can, a nearby farm or mine or forest or well that is a source of the material that flows through your life.
2. On a map of the world, show where all the foods you ate yesterday originally came from. Show where the clothes you are wearing were made. Show where the energy burned by the cars, trucks, and buses in your town came from. Where did the cars themselves come from? What about the metal, glass, and rubber in the cars?
3. Take your list of yearly discards in your town, city, or country, and calculate as far as you can how much metal, wood, water, fossil fuel, and other basic resources they contain.
4. For some of those basic resources, find out how large the available stocks of those resources are in your country and in the world. If materials containing those resources go on being used at the same rate, how long will those stocks last? If the rate of use goes up at 1 per cent or 5 per cent per year, how long will they last?
5. Which resources are renewable and which nonrenewable? For one renewable resource, such as forest, calculate the rate at which it regenerates itself every year and compare it to the rate at which it is being harvested or drawn down every year. Is the use of this resource sustainable? For one nonrenewable resource, such as copper, coal or oil, calculate the rate of new discoveries versus the rate of removal. Learn about how the discovery process works. For how long do you expected new discoveries to continue?
6. See if you can state a basic ethic about the best way renewable resources and nonrenewable resources should be used. If they are not used that way now, why not?

Concept Four: Maximum welfare with minimum flow.

The stream of materials through your life and your society enables and enriches human life, but it also depletes resource stocks at its source and creates pollution at its sink. Clearly an excellent policy for managing that stream would be to keep the flow as slow as possible, to minimize the depletion and pollution, while maximizing the human welfare the materials provide while in use. Here are some ways of doing this:

• increase product lifetimes through sturdy design and easy repair,
• design products and processes with end-use, rather than maximum flow in mind,
• use products efficiently, distribute products equitably,
• measure economic progress by real welfare, not by flow rate.

Activities:

1. Look at the list of things you throw out. How long did they last white you were using them? Could they have tasted longer? Could they have given more service or pleasure before they were thrown away?
2. Who in your community repairs things? Go visit them and watch them work. How much do they add to the lifetime of the things they repair? How might things be repaired more easily, or be designed better, to last longer?
3. One aspect of human welfare is the ability to move around, to get to where one wants to be, and to be able to carry cargos there as well. List the forms of transportation- walking, bicycling, buses, cars- available to you. What wastes does each one produce? What resources does it use? See if you can find or calculate the amount of fuel use per passenger per kilometer or per kilogram carried per kilometer. Which forms of transportation provide the greatest service with the leaf resource use and least waste?
4. Carry out the same kind of welfare-based analysis for other human needs- cooking food, heating rooms, storing food, etc.
5. How much food is consumed in your town (city, state, nation) each year? How well nourished is everyone? How much food does it take to nourish a human being properly? Is there any way the same flow of food could be used to provide greater or better human nourishment, or to nourish more people? What would have to be happen to get the maximum per cent or 8 percent amount of human nourishment from given flow of food?
6. Find out what the term Gross National Product (GNP) means. What is the GNP per capita of various nations, including yours? What does GNP per capita actually tell you about human welfare? If the GNP goes up, is that change necessarily good or bad? What other measures would you like to have for a society, to determine the quality of that society or the welfare of its people.

Concept Five: Ultimate recycling

In natural ecosystems there is no waste. The output of one species or process becomes the input or nutrient for another species or process. Everything is recycled. Human economic systems could also be designed that way.

Activities:

1. What are the waste products of a forest? What happens to them? What are the waste products of a farm animal? What happens to them?
2. Of the things your family throws away, how many are re-used for some purpose? How many others could be used for something? Why aren’t they so used? What would have to happen so they could be?
3. Build a composting system for the organic wastes of your family or school or community, and a garden to use the compost. Set up a system for recycling paper, or metals or glass and putting them back into use.
4. Find out how many of the metals used in your country are reclaimed after use and recycled. If possible, go to a place where metals are recycled and find out how it works.
5. Can you find other examples of factories or business that take wastes from some other factory or business and make those wastes into something useful? What other possibilities do you see for such wasted materials? What would it take to make them happen?
6. Write a science fiction story about a country sometime in the future in which every form of waste is reused. Be as detailed and specific as you can.

Concept Six: Undoing the damage.

The ultimate solution to the problem of waste is minimal flow, maximal welfare (which requires a clear definition of welfare), and maximal recycling. While that solution is being worked out, however, there is ongoing harm from waste streams that are already disposed of poorly, and continuous new waste streams that will not simply stop and wait for a new kind of economy.

These wastes must be disposed of as well as possible. The process of doing that is complicated, because there are so many different kinds of waste with very different properties and toxicities, and there are also different receiving media. For example:

The problem is to match the type of waste with the best receiving medium to minimize damage to the ecosystem. This requires considerable technical knowledge, about the waste and its breakdown products, and about the receiving medium and its capacities.

At this point the educational process becomes more detailed and specific; wastes are usually studied one by one, as case studies, and often as disputed local issues, such as:

• What should we do with our town’s sewage?
• Where should we store the wastes from nuclear power plants?
• How can we clean up toxic chemicals in our groundwater?
• Who is responsible for the air pollution that is killing the forests?
• Should the local paper plant be forced to install expensive air pollution controls?

Excellent educational opportunities arise from these specific issues, including learning how to measure and monitor pollutants, how local economic and political processes work, how the natural processes of the biosphere work.

1. Take one specific type of waste that you know is a problem somewhere near you (this could be, in different societies, human excrement, spent nuclear fuel rods, pesticide residues, industrial dumping, sulfur dioxide or many other things). Trace the material back as far as possible toward its source and forward as far as possible into the environment after it is thrown away. How much material is in these flows? What are the quantities likely to be in the future? What people and institutions in society profit from this flow? Who suffers the worst damage?
2. Is there any short-term possibility for decreasing the flow of material by using it more efficiently? What needs to be done to make that happen?
3. Is there any place to put this waste that could be less harmful than where it is being put now? Is there some method of treating the waste to make it less harmful? Is there damage that has already been done that could be repaired or cleaned up? How could this happen?
4. Is there any possibility of using the substance for some useful purpose rather than discarding it? How could this happen?
5. Talk to people in your community about how they feel about the waste problem, and what they think should be done about it. Be sure you’ve talked to all kinds of people and heard all sides of the issue. If possible, design and carry out a proper opinion survey.
6. For each possible way of dealing with the waste that you can think of, or each way that is being publicly suggested, trace the likely path of the material through the environment. Make the best estimate you can of the total costs and benefits of each option, including the indirect (and hard to estimate) environmental and social costs and benefits. Which option do you prefer? Why? What value trade-offs have you make in coming to your decision? What uncertainties in your understanding of the situation could cause you to change your mind? How could you obtain better information to clear up those uncertainties?
7. Do some small thing to help solve a waste problem near you. Get other people to help you. Pick up litter on the roadsides. Dig a latrine or make a compost pit. Collect bottles, cans or paper for recycling. Hold an educational session for the community. Go visit your public officials and ask them to help you organize a way of collecting household hazardous waste products. These are just a few ideas-you come up with your own!

Complex materials, such as puppets of murals, are usually made by one person or group and then shared with others. Slides or nature collections are borrowed from state fish and wildlife departments. Common school supplies are provided by the schools. Many of the materials, such as weeds or shoe boxes, are brought from home.

The time actually spent with the children ranges from one hour to a whole day. The regular classroom teacher may help out, or attend the workshop and do the ELF teaching, or not participate at all. Activities are a combination of fund and serious study; they include puppet shows, role-playing, creative arts, language arts, mathematics and games.

Here, for example, is an ELF educational unit called “Meet a Tree”.

THE SUM OF MANY PARTS

Objectives: to show how different parts of a tree function. The volunteer brings to class a young sampling, or previously collected parts of a tree, or pictures. These are passed around for the children to touch, while the volunteer explains each part of the tree (leaf, twig, bark, root, annual rings, etc.) and what its functions are.

For review the children DRESS A TREE. The volunteer shows them a tall plain vertical stick and passes out to each child a card with a tree part written on it. The children use construction paper, cloth scraps, string, pipe cleaners, pieces of wood, scissors, and tape to make their assigned tree parts and attach them to the “tree”. As they attach each part, they explain what it does for the tree.

REACH OUT AND TOUCH

Objective: to get to know a tree using other sense than eyesight. The group splits into pairs and gathers outside. One of each pair puts on a blindfold. The seeing partner carefully leads the blindfolded partner to a tree and asks some questions to help guide the exploration. Can you reach around the tree? Can you reach any branches? What does the bark feel like? Can you find the roots? Find a leaf? Does the tree have a sound? A smell?

MEET A TREE QUESTIONNAIRE

Objective: to familiarize children with a particular tree. Have small groups of children select a tree (maybe one from the previous exercise) and fill out for that tree a Meet a Tree Questionnaire:

• In what kind of habitat or surrounding is your tree growing?
• Stand back from your tree. Draw a picture of its shape.
• Does it have seeds, nuts, fruits, cones?
• Find a leaf on or under the tree. Make a drawing of it, or tape it to your questionnaires.
• Look at the bark. Write down words to describe its colour, texture, smell, markings. Draw a picture of the bark.
• What kinds of plants are growing under or on your tree? (Be sure to notice the lichens, moss, fungi, vines.)
• Are there any signs of animals, insects, or birds on your tree? Any holes in or under the tree? Estimate the tree’s height by having someone of known height stand next to the tree and estimate how many times that person’s height the tree is. Estimate the circumference around the tree by measuring your hand or arm and reaching around the tree.
• Is your tree healthy? How do you know?

(The children will need help in answering some of these questions, and may have other questions. Older children can learn to use an identification key to learn what kind of the tree they have chosen and can read a guidebook to learn more about that kind of tree.)

TREE POEM

Objective: to see a tree from different perspectives and record its image in a poem; to practice language skills.

Divide the children into small groups and assign each group to a tree. Designate one person in each group (or one volunteer if the children are too small to write) as secretary with paper and pencil. Place each child at a different distance from the tree- far away, a few paces away, under it looking up, nose to the bark, arms around it. After a moment’s thought each child should give 3 words to describe the tree from his or her perspective, and the secretary should write them down. The group then creates together a poem about their tree, using all the words. All the groups share their poems with each other, either introducing their tree or asking the others to find it from the description.

STAY IN TOUCH

Encourage the children to visit their tree in different seasons and notice how it changes.

Evaluation of ELF activities is incorporated into the training workshop. The first half hour of each workshop is devoted to feedback from the volunteers on the previous exercise. This session is extremely valuable, raising issues of teaching techniques, environmental ethics, and effectiveness, as well as bringing forth humorous and touching stories. Volunteers and teacher also fill out formal evaluation questionnaires. Teachers working in the classroom evaluate increases in knowledge and shifts in attitude.

Setting up an ELF programme requires commitment on the part of the school and the community. A good volunteer coordinator is needed to find volunteers and organize the programme. Many volunteers admit that they serve because they learn so much themselves. The programme brings community people into the schools, and gives children the important message that many adults care about them and their learning. It also conveys that nature and science are not confined to a classroom nor dependent on special equipment, experts, or far away field trips. It explores the wonders of the environment right nearby.

B. Primary School

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics-out-of-school environmental education (communicated by Dmitry Kavtaradze, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University, USSR).

The town of Pushchino 120 km from Moscow is the site of a major biological research station, the Biological Center of the Soviet Academy of Science, Pushchino also the first town to experiment with the idea of a Soviet “ecopolis”-an urban settlement whose development is closely linked with its surrounding ecosystem.

With the help of local scientists, the municipal government, and scientists from Moscow State University, the citizens of Pushchino have learned a great deal about their nearby environment. They have studied and published a 700-year history of their region. They have put out books describing interesting hikes and nature traits near the city. They have mapped the flora and fauna, recorded the climate, and surveyed the population to discover how many people participate in outdoor activities like mushroom-gathering, skiing, and fishing. They have established nearby reserves.

All this was done with the help of children, through Pushchino’s Children’s Ecological Station. The Station occupies a few bright rooms on the first floor of an apartment building in Pushchino. Its walls are covered with colorful posters, maps, and drawings. Its rooms are tilled with work-tables and shelves with various kinds of scientific and outdoor equipment. There are barometers, anemometers, models of anthills, models of the historical fortress of Pushchino. There are children’s nature books. There is an office for Anatoly Bukin, the only paid staff member of the center.

The center is open to all children of Pushchino after school and on school holidays. Attendance is voluntary, and the children can work on any projects they like. If there are enough interested in a particular subject, they organize a Circle with the help of Bukin and/or volunteer adults from the community. There are Circles studying geology, birds, the hydrology of the Oka River, ants, fish, pottery, architecture, computers.

Children’s Circles have measured and mapped wind flows around Pushchino’s buildings, and all the crow’s nests in town, and all the anthills in the surrounding forest. They found and mapped the places where people had made picnic fires in the forest, concluded that there were too many, and then worked with the town to close down some of them and make others more attractive. The children put up feeding stations and nesting places for birds. They have brought to the town authorities proposals for reducing soil erosion, for protection of forest plants, and for setting up fish hatcheries. Every year they have a science fiction writing competition, and a special celebration of the coming of spring.

In the summer the Children’s Ecological Station organizes camping expeditions for the children into the surrounding countryside. Adults accompany the expeditions to oversee the children’s health and safety, but the young people themselves are responsible for planning the meals and cooking them, for water supply and sanitation, for firewood, and for cleaning up the campsite. They carry out research activities on these expeditions, the results of which are published in informational pamphlets for the townspeople.

Most of the education going on at the Children’s Ecological Station is not in the form of lectures, but of active involvement. Exploration takes place at the children’s own pace, in subjects of their own choice, and in a collective manner. Emphasis is placed not just on nature; not just on the town, but on the interconnections between the town and nature.

Publications and teaching aids developed from the experience of Pushchino are now available to other towns and to teachers in the USSR. About 15 other towns and cities have displayed interest in the Pushchino ecopolis programme and the Children’s Ecological Station and are evolving similar programme of their own.

C. Secondary School

Federal Republic of Germany-field study of Rhenish Lignite Mining (paraphrased from a contribution by Lothar Geerling, secondary school teacher, Essen, FRG and Dr. Reinhold E. Lob, Director, Centre for Environmental Education, University of Essen, FRG, in Cowan and Staff, 1982, pp. 266-274).

The largest lignite deposits of Europe lie within the triangle formed by the cities of Aachen, Koln, and Dusseldorf. Much of the coal lies near the surface and is obtained through open-pit mining. 87 per cent of national lignite production comes from this area. Nearly all the coal mined goes to the production of electric power. It provides 26 per cent of the national electricity consumption. In the course of its production so far, 51 villages with a total of about 21,000 inhabitants have had to be resettled.

The coal is of obvious economic importance, and open-pit mining will be expanded in the future. Another 10,000 people will have to move before 1990, and 356 farms that are producing grain and sugar beets will be destroyed. The expansion will also engulf the Hambacher Forest, a natural oak-hornbeam-linden forest with many old trees and rare species. There is significant public criticism of this expansion, on both personal and environmental grounds.

Coal mining is a traditional part of the curriculum for Form 7 of Nordrhein-Westfalen’s secondary schools. In the past the focus of the unit was generally on the methods used in mining, and on the ways of recovering and recultivating the land after a mine was exhausted. Little attention was paid to the problems caused by the complete stripping of the landscape, nor the social effects of resettling people, nor the lowering of the groundwater table, nor the public conflict about the expansion of the mines.

The curriculum was redesigned, not to condemn lignite mining, but to make obvious to the students that their daily and often unnecessary energy consumption promotes an activity that destroys landscapes and causes social dilemmas. Connecting the mining to the student’s personal lives then allowed more general points to be made about the increasing consumption of industrial society and the resulting environmental stress.

The new curriculum begins with a unit on energy as the basis of human existence. The students learn what energy is, how it is consumed, how it is produced, the differences between primary energy, secondary energy, and available energy. They learn the history of increasing energy consumption in their country, and the varying levels of per capita energy consumption in different parts of the world. They learn the difference between nonrenewable and renewable sources of energy, and how the expected lifetime of nonrenewable energy sources can be estimated.

The second unit is about deposits, exploitation, and use, of lignite. The students see the link between their own personal energy use and the lignite mines. They learn how lignite is generated geologically, how it is mined, how it is converted to electricity, what that electricity is then used for in the cities of Nordrhein- Westfalen.

A variety of maps, worksheets, media, and discussions are used in this section of the course, to provoke student’s own reactions to the lignite mines, and to compare the conventional wisdom the students have observed about the mines with the actual facts.

The third unit examines the natural landscape destroyed by the mining and the extent to which a planned, recultivated landscape after the mining can replace it. They learn about the. soils being removed, the effects of a lowered groundwater table on the surrounding area, the stages of recultivation and how long it takes, the archeological heritage of the area (which has been densely settled since Roman times).

The high point of this section is a day-long field trip. The students visit an open-pit mine and a recultivation site over a closed mine. They interview people in Konigshofen, a village about to be resettled, and they also see the slow renewal of social life in a resettled area. They learn from local officials about the expense of moving settlements and the difficulties of making fair agreements. with those who are moved. They walk through the Hambacher forest and talk with the local activist who are trying to save part of the forest.

In the final discussions after the field trip, the students can see the Rhenish lignite mines in all their complexity. They are not likely to take either the extreme view that energy production is an absolute priority whatever the social or environmental cost, or the other extreme view that any exploitation of energy should be rejected. They see their own role in the energy system and realize that some people are bearing a disproportionate amount of suffering to support the students’ own energy consumption. They begin to ask questions about energy conservation and alternative energy sources, and about the proper social responsibility toward people who lose their water supplies or their health or homes in order that energy may be produced.

D. University

United States–Dartmouth College Environmental Studies 50 course (communicated by Dr. Donella Meadows, Environmental Studies Programme, Dartmouth College, USA).

In 1969 Dartmouth College established an inter-disciplinary programme offering students several courses in environmental studies. The courses included:

• basic environmental science,
• the role of the arts in environmental perception,
• the sociology and politics of environmental management,
• computer modeling of complex systems,
• environmental law,
• land-use planning;
• energy use and energy resources,
• International environmental issues,
• environmental ethics.

To allow advanced students to consolidate their learning, a final course called Environmental Studies 50 was created. In this course the students work as a group on some actual problem in the region- a problem that has been suggested by local citizens. They do whatever research, measurements, or surveying are necessary to quantify the problem. They come to understand its legal context, the political issues, the economic impact. At the end of the term they write a final report and make a public presentation, giving their suggestions about how to resolve the problem, usually with local officials and newspaper reporters present.

As an example, one year a large company was seeking to construct a wood-pulp mill on the region’s major river. The company was trying to find the best site and to negotiate with towns for favourable tax concessions. Some citizens wanted to attract the mill to their town; others didn’t want it to be built anywhere. There was great controversy and there were very few facts. The ES 50 class was assigned to study the proposed pulp mill and to prepare an environmental and economic impact assessment.

The students decided to keep their own opinions neutral until they learned more. Because of their serious neutral position, they were able to work with local citizens and experts of all opinions, including environmentalist, loggers and representatives of the company and of other competitive wood-products companies. The students learned how a pulp millworks and what the technology of this one would be. They visited similar mills already in operation and measured air and water effluents. They studied the impact of the forests, on the highways, on employment, and on the entire local economy. They made use of opinion surveys, soil maps, traffic counts, tax data, and computer models of the future economy of the region and of the international paper market.

Their final public presentation was attended by hundreds of people. They delivered a sober, factual impact assessment for the plant and gave the local citizens advice, not on whether it should be built, but on how to minimize its negative impact and enhance its positive impact if it were built. They pointed out difficulties in the laws and points on which local vigilance would be necessary to be sure environmental regulations would be enforced. They also pointed out that the previous performance of this particular company in other locations had not been good, either in environmental compliance or in employee relations.

The students did not oppose the plant, they only presented facts, none of which were disputed by the pulp company. Later, in a public referendum the pulp mill was voted down. It was never built. Since then a number of smaller, locally-owned wood products firms have started to use the lumber resource that the pulp mill would have consumed.

• Here are some other topics taken up by ES50 classes over the years:
• Should the use of salt to keep roads clear in the winter be reduced?
• Should a major hydroelectric dam on the river be built?
• How should a nearby town write its zoning and subdivision regulations to capture the value of the town’s people, preserve the town’s resources, and yet permit a reasonable rate of development?
• What is happening to discarded hazardous chemicals and radioactive materials in the region?
• How should Dartmouth College meet its energy requirements as the pace of fossil fuels increases?
• What will be the impact on the settlement patterns of the region if there is a major expansion of the College and its associated hospital?
• How can the region dispose of its trash after the local landfills are used to capacity?

E. Graduate Training

Thailand-Master’s Degree in the Technology of Environmental Management (communicated by Dr. Chirapol Sintunawa, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies, Mahidol University Bangkok, Thailand).

Thailand has long had an active environmental movement among its students and scientists. In the early 1970s this movement created considerable political uproar over two environmental scandals: the pollution of the Mae Klong River by sugar mills and the army hunting wildlife by helicopter at the Tung Yai Wildlife Reserve. As a result an article was written into the Thai Constitution on conservation of natural resources and the environment, a National Environment Quality Act was passed, and at Mahido University anew Environment Education and Research Project was established in 1973. The Project became a permanent Faculty of the University in 1978, now called the Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies. Its founder and initial director was one of Thailand’s foremost environmentalists, Dr. Nart Tuntawiroon.

The guiding idea of the Faculty was to bring together experts in many disciplines to do research and teaching as interdisciplinary teams. As Dr. Tuntawiroon wrote: “Planning and management of resources and the environment for tomorrow’s world are too complex to be left in the hands of specialists who have too narrow a view to be able to perceive the world in a holistic manner… A Thai economic planner, sitting in his air- conditioned room in Bangkok, juggling figures… would be pleased to endorse the policy of deforestation to increase available land for maize and cassava cultivation, as these crops show handsome figures in the list of annual export revenue. He does not realize that this is perhaps draw nutrients which have been accumulated in the soil by natural processes through thousands of years.”

“This same economist will quite likely, with all good intention, approve of a plan for building a reservoir for irrigation, power generation, or industrial consumption. He will not be aware that the money invested may be entirely wasted, as there will be no water to fill the reservoir, since the watershed feeding it has already been destroyed. It is most unlikely that he will understand the secondary and tertiary effects of some development projects on the environment, such as why dam building should create salinization, affect fish population, or spread schistosomiasis.”

To avoid this kind of narrow-mindedness, the Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies advocates training people to act in “an interdisciplinary team, each member of which must be quite competent in his own field and yet be able to work with others in harmony towards a unified objective. This is of course much easier said than done, and training manpower for such a purpose cannot be easily accomplished. It can perhaps be likened to an orchestra, each member of which must not only have a complete mastery of his own individual instrument, but must also be able to perform with others in perfect harmony to produce a symphony.

About 35 students each year are admitted to the 2- year Master’s programme in the Technology of Environmental Management. It is by far the most popular and highly competitive postgraduate course in Thailand- an average of 800 candidates take its entrance examination. The entrants already have bachelor’s degrees and usually several years’ working experience in fields such as public health, soil science, engineering, fisheries, economics, biology, forestry; geology, or agronomy. They spend their first year in intensive course work, as follows:

• Ecological Systems Analysis.
• Systems Approach and Cybernetics.
• Pollution Problems and Control I.
• Population Studies.
• Sociology and the Human Environment.
• Introduction to Mathematics and Science (for those with backgrounds in social science).
• Introduction to Economics and Management (for those with backgrounds in science).

Semester Two.

• Environmental Conservation and Resource Management.
• Mathematics Applied to Environmental Systems.
• Pollution Problems and Control II.
• Economic Analysis of the Environment.
• Administrative Systems for the Environment.

An important part of the first year is the five field trips the students take to study Thai environment and development problems firsthand. Their first trip is a general introduction to Thailand’s varied bioregions and cultures, from the hills of the northeast to the fertile central plain. on the second trip the students visit the faculty’s ecological field station in the south. They study the ecology of a mangrove/fishery/coastal region and the coffee growing hills above it. The third trip involves practice with research tools such as surveys and physical sampling. The students spend 12-17 days in a single village, usually one that is far distant and hard to reach, sometimes only approachable by bamboo raft or by elephant. They collect data on the population and the economy and they analyze soils and waters with the Faculty’s mobile laboratory. A different village is visited each year, and thus over the years a valuable data base is being assembled on Thailand’s rural areas.

On the fourth field trip the students develop a conservation or resource management plan for a wildlife area or national forest, usually at the request of a government agency. The fifth trip draws together all the expertise and knowledge the students have acquired during the first year. They spend 4 weeks on site researching a detailed environmental impact assessment for a proposed development, such as the Nam Choan Dam near the Burmese border on tin-mining on Phuket Island. After returning from the site the students have two months to prepare together their written analysis, which is delivered to the proper government authorities.

These field trips not only give students a chance to use all the tools and concepts they have learned in the classroom, they also acquaint the students directly with the resources, the environment, and the people of their country. Four to six faculty members go along on each trip, so the students also get to watch the faculty work together as an interdisciplinary group and solve problems on-site. And through the trips the students already, in their first year, are supplying information and analysis directly useful to their country.

Second-year students work with the 20 faculty members on research projects, which are written up as individual master’s thesis. Much of this research is commissioned by the Thai government. Examples of thesis topics are:

• A field study of agricultural energy use for the major crops of Thailand.
• Effects of sediment from mining activities on the coastal aquatic ecosystems of southern Thailand.
• A socio-economic impact analysis on the use of biogas in Thai rural households.
• An economic evaluation of land degradation through crop nutrient removal by cassava, sugarcane, and maize.
• A forecast of the saturation point for the expansion of Bangkok International Airport.
• An integrated approach to wastewater treatment in the tapioca starch industry.
• An investigation of pesticide content in human tissue in Thailand.
• The relationship between socio-economic environmental factors and the performance of pupils from slum and non-slum districts of Bangkok.

More than 200 students have now graduated from the Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies. They have not lost their disciplinary identities as engineers, lawyers, educators, etc., but they have gained the additional ability to understand, communicate with and work with people of other disciplines, and they have learned to see some of the long-term environmental and social consequences of short-term decisions. They now work at the National Environment Board, the National Energy Authority, the Ministries of Agriculture, Industry, Education, and Defense, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Departments of Forestry and Mineral Resources, and in the private sector and journalism. Some have stayed on to teach in the Faculty, many continue to work with the Faculty as consulting experts or as sponsors of research studies.

The cost of this Master’s Programme is paid partly by student’s fees and research grants, but mostly by the government of Thailand. As Mahidol University’s Rector, Prof. Natth Bhamarapravati says, “We are a country with an average income of $900 per capita. But we support our university and train our students as if we had $2,000 or even $4,000 per capita- in order that some day we will have that much.”

F. Advanced Training

Costa Rica–CATIE and the training of national park managers (excerpted from a paper by Craig MacFarland, James R. Barborak arid Roger Morales, Wildlands and Watershed Programme, Tropical Agricultural Research and Training Center (CATIE), Turrialba, Costa Rica).

In 1969 there were only 25 protected natural areas in Central America, covering less than 3.2 per cent of the land area of the region. Only 8 of these were actively managed in the field. The others were “paper parks” only. By 1981 the number of protected areas had risen to 149; covering 11.6 per cent of the land area, and 127 were receiving at least minimal field protection through stationing of rangers; naturalists, and park staff. Among the protected areas are three existing and four planned Biosphere Reserves, and six World Heritage Sites, with two more planned.

This growth could never have happened without a tremendous increase in the number of trained and motivated professionals in the field of wildlife management at all levels, from senior policymakers through planners and area managers to basic technicians, rangers, guides, and extension agents. A major factor in training those professionals was CATIE. the Centro Agronomico Tropical de Investigacion y Ensenanza (Tropical Agriculture Research and Training Centre).

CATIE is a non-profit research and training center formed and supported by the Central American nations, the Dominican Republic, and the Organization of American States. Its central campus in Turrialba, Costa Rica, includes classrooms and laboratories, field experimental plots; and an excellent library on tropical agriculture, animal husbandry, and renewable resource management. Among CATIE’s educational programmes is an active Wildlife and Watershed Programme (WWP). Besides training, this programme also does technical assistance, research, documentation and information services, and experimental or demonstration projects in the countries of the region. The projects and activities of the programme are chosen jointly with the key resource management institutions in the member countries.

Since 1977 WWP has sponsored more than 60 regional and national short-term training activities of 10 major types concerning wildlife management, and has created a M.Sc. post-graduate study programme in wildlife management at CATIE. More than 760 individuals have been trained (some have participated in more than one activity). Of those, 710 are now working actively in wildlands management somewhere in the region– many of those not doing so have been promoted to areas of even greater responsibility. About 85 per cent of the directors of wildlands agencies and parks in Central America and 60 per cent of the junior professional staff have received at least 2-3 weeks of training in CATIE programmes; some have received much more. Over 40 different publications have been produced, including manuals on training methodologies, techniques,- and sample management plans.

Here are some of the types of training devised by the CATIE WWP programme.

In-service training

Personnel in need,- of specific training are matched with trained individuals working in similar situations in another country to serve as apprentices or assistants and thereby to learn on the job. For example, when Nicaragua set up its pilot national park Volcan Masaya, it needed to train rangers. WWP with the Costa Rican National Park Service set up an on-the-job training programme at Volcan Poas National Park in Costa Rica, an established and well-maintained park. The training was inexpensive, the Nicaraguans traveled by bus to and within Costa Rica, and required only living expenses while they were there.

Mobile seminars

These 2-3 week excursions provide a broad basic introduction and first-hand exposure to management problems, tools, and approaches. Around 30 participants with 7 instructors visit manage watersheds, national forests, recreation areas, national parks, and cultural monuments. There are intensive lectures and readings, plus site visits, with practical field exercises in small groups at each site. The main purpose of the mobile seminars is consciousness-raising and preliminary familiarity with the principles and purposes of wildlife management.

Short courses

These courses last only a week and are used primarily for training in operational (short-term) planning. Each one places heavy emphasis on practical exercises that produce a real and useful product for a specific wildland area in which the course is held.

Major thematic workshops

These intensive 3-4 week events spend about 25 per cent of the time on an introduction to concepts, principles, methods, and techniques, and 75 per cent on projects in which the participants work in groups, guided by instructors, to prepare a real product such as a management plan, environmental education programme in the field, or set of interpretive designs. They are held in wildland areas, and they produce a useful byproduct for those areas at no extra cost. The plans produced by the participants are in draft form and need revision, but they are always of high quality and are generally put directly to use by the park or forest for which they are designed.

Master’s training at CATIE

In addition to the degree candidates, a number of special students come to CATIE for one year of coursework and field work, including working with national counterparts in Costa Rica on two in-depth practical exercises, such as the preparation of a management and development plan for one protected wildland and an environmental education plan for another. There is emphasis on how to work with local people and with local, regional, and national agencies and how to involve them in the planning process. The result is not only training of each student, but also two excellent plans per year for Costa Rican wildlands.

All programmes are multi-disciplinary and field oriented with practical, hands-on experience to supplement the theoretical and conceptual base. All involve working with local people and local institutions. Instructors come not only from the CATIE staff but from national agencies, from the wildlife preserves, and sometimes from international conservation organizations.

G. Teacher Training and Curriculum Development

Sudan–the University of Khartoum’s environmental education workshops (communicated by Dr. William Stapp, School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan, USA and Dr Yaqoub Abdulla Mohamed, Institute of Environmental Studies, Khartoum, Sudan).

Sudan’s environmental education programme was given a great thrust forward by three workshops held between 1983 and 1985. They were attended by governmental officials, educational administrators, and classroom teachers, and sponsored by the University of Khartoum’s Institute of Environmental Studies, Clark University’s International Development Programme, the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and USAID.

The first workshop was designed for high-level administrators in the Ministries of the Environment, Health and Education. The workshop focused on the philosophy of environmental education, its methodologies, strategies for the development of an environmental education curriculum and teacher training.

The second workshop was for school administrators and trainers of teachers. It focused on increasing awareness and knowledge about critical problems of the Sudanese environment, and strategies for integrating environmental education into existing educational programmes.

The third workshop developed an environmental education curriculum. It was held at Bakht-Er-Ruda Institute of Education in Ed Duiesn, Sudan, which is a community of over 4,000 teachers, teachers-in-training, and elementary and secondary students.

The participants in this third workshop, were 20 selected trainers of teachers and administrators, representing elementary, intermediate, and secondary education. They came from a variety of educational disciplines: science, history, math, Arabic language, English language, Islamic religion, geography, music and art. Their task was to design a curriculum in environmental education for Bakht-Er-Ruda itself, using the recommendations of the first two workshops about goals and objectives, guiding principles, and concepts.

The participants decided to organize the curriculum around three critical environmental issues of Sudan: desertification, famine, and health. They agreed that elementary schools should concentrate on the learner’s home and school area, the intermediate levels on the learner’s community, and the secondary schools on the region and the country of Sudan.

At each level, elementary, intermediate, and secondary, three interdisciplinary teams were formed, one for each topic area. Each team then decided on the level of understanding of each issue to be achieved at each educational level, with the work integrated so that each level built on the understanding achieved at the one below.

Then each team worked out a relatively comprehensive and detailed unit of classroom activities that would occupy one to several weeks of classroom time.

For example, in the area of desertification the elementary it could discuss soils and wind erosion and involve students in the planting and care of trees for a shelterbelt around the Bakht-Er-Ruda school grounds: At the intermediate level the students could establish and maintain a tree nursery for the community of Ed Duiem. At the secondary level, they could work with the District in the implementation of a total forestry programme.

In the area of famine the elementary students could learn about basic nutrition and the effect of under- nutrition on the growth of children. They could review the Bakht-Er-Ruda school lunch programme for its nutritional content and make recommendations for improvement. At the intermediate level, they could develop a student volunteer programme for the Famine Relief Center of Ed Duiem. At the secondary level they could study the causes of famine in the Gezira District and assist in the development of programmes to reduce the District’s vulnerability to drought.

On the final day of the workshop, each team presented its suggested curriculum and activities to the whole group for comments and evaluation.

H. Adult Education

Zimbabwe-district conservation workshops (communicated by Mrs. Soneni Ncube, Department of Natural Resources, Harare, Zimbabwe).

In 1984 the Department of Natural Resources of the Government of Zimbabwe, with assistance from UNEP, organised a National Workshop on the Role, of Women in Conservation.

Women constitute the majority in the population of Zimbabwe’s rural areas. They utilize natural resources more than men, who often live in towns and only come home over weekends. It is women who suffer most when natural resources such as firewood, water, and thatching grass are depleted through mismanagement. It was for these reasons that the workshop was planned for women.

The workshop was attended by influential women delegates from all eight provinces in the country. They discussed the environmental problems they saw in their areas, identified the causes of those problems, and suggested possible solutions. During the course of the workshop, the women also heard lectures on soil erosion and soil conservation, wildlife preservation, water conservation, forests, and the relationships among these various resources.

At the end of the meeting the women made several resolutions, the first of which called for more such workshops, to be held out in the districts and the provinces. The women said that a lot of people in rural areas were not sufficiently aware of the interactions among the natural resources, and therefore did not understand why it was necessary to conserve.

The Department responded by holding eight similar workshops, one in each province. In each of these women participants again requested more workshops, at the level of district councils (in Zimbabwe the smallest local administrative units). They also requested that men and youth be allowed to attend the workshops along with the women.

So the Department put on 55 more workshops, one in each district. The participants included local chiefs, political leaders, and district council officials. The workshops took place in district halls or office buildings, or in government training centers. These centers have electricity, kitchen facilities. and overnight accommodations for people who have come some distance, as well as meeting halls with blackboards and projection screens. The Department of Natural Resources supplied projectors and films.

The workshops were held just before the rainy season, when there is little work in the fields, so that people can stay for the whole 3-5 day period. Each was attended by 30-60 people. Participants came from as far as 150 km away, and they were fed and housed for free. Bus fares were also reimbursed. Each district was given a budget of Z$600 (about $US360) for all the workshop expenses.

The schedule and content of each workshop was different, because each district’s resources and environmental problems are different. Each programme was drawn up by Department of Natural Resources field officers, in conjunction with field workers in forestry, agriculture, wildlife, and various non-government development organizations. This co-operation of agencies was important, because it let the rural people see that conservation of resources is not a secondary issue, but is interlinked with economic development.

Here is the schedule for one workshop, held in Cheziya/Gokwe District in June 1985 (films are shown in the evenings):

Day 1

Morning:

• Welcome and introduction.
• Opening address (by the Secretary or Natural Resources and Tourism).
• Remarks on resource conservation by the District Council by a Women’s Leader and by a Youth Leader.

Afternoon:

• Group discussion on conservation.

Day 2

Morning:

• Tour to problem areas: a silted river behind a dam, overgrazed areas, unprotected and eroding arable land.

Afternoon:

• Group discussion.

Day 3

Morning:

I think it is necessary to emphasize this fact: No one need wait for anyone else to adopt a human and enlightened course of action. Men generally hesitate to make a beginning if they feel that the objective cannot be achieved in its entirety. It is precisely this attitude of mind that is the greatest obstacle to progress-an obstacle that each man, if he only will it, can clear away himself, and so influence others.

M. K. Gandhi

Anyone who has been paying attention to the global environmental situation is bound to be worried. The ozone layer that protects all life from dangerous ultraviolet radiation is being depleted by chloride pollutants. Because of carbon dioxide generation from fossil-fuel burning, the global climate may be changing. Hundreds of millions of people live in poverty. The world’s population is still growing rapidly. Tropical forests are disappearing. Soil is eroding.

1. United Nations Environmental Education Conferences and Reports

Caduto, Michael J., A Guide on Environmental Values Education, UNESCO, Paris, France, 1985.

Connect, an international newsletter of UNEP and UNESCO on environmental education (printed on recycled paper), distributed free in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Arabic Russian and Chinese).

IUCN, World Conservation Strategy, (prepared with UNEP and the World Wildlife Fund), 1196 Gland, Switzerland, 1980.

Stapp, William B. and James E. Crowfoot, Developing a National Strategy for Environmental Education-A Planning and Management Process, UNESCO, Paris, France, 1978.

UNESCO, The International Workshop on Environmental Education. Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 13-22 October 1975, Final Report, Paris, France, The International Environmental Education Programme, UNESCO-UNEP, ED-76/WS/95, 1975.

UNESCO, Intergovernmental Conference on Environmental Education, Tbilisi, 14-26 October, 1977, Final Report, Paris April 1978.

UNESCO, Environmental Education in the Light of the Tbilisi Conference, Paris, 1980.

UNESCO, Trends, Needs and Priorities of Environmental Education since the Tbilisi Conference, (Preliminary report of a world survey) Paris, 1983.

UNESCO -UNEP’s “International Strategy for action in the field of Environmental Education and Training for the 1990’s,” Nairobi, Paris 1988.

UNESCO -UNEP International Environmental Education Programme, numerous environmental education modules, on simulation and gaming, environmental problems in cities, energy, conservation and management of natural resources, pre-service training of teachers, and many other topics. Information about availability and procurement at no cost can be obtained by writing to Connect at the UNESCO address given on page 54.

2. On the Theory and Practice of Environmental Education

Bakshi, Trilochan, S. and Zev Navch, Environmental Education Principles, Methods, and Applications, Plenum Press, New York and London, 1980.

McInnis, Noel and Don Albrecht, What Makes Education Environmental?, Data-Courier Inc., Louisville KY, 1975.

Silver, Michael and Eva Mekler, Bringing Up a Moral Child: A New Approach for Teaching Your child to be Kind, Just, and Responsible, Addison- Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1985.

Stapp, William B., “An Instructional Model for Environmental Education,” Prospects, Vol. VIII, No. 4, 1978, pp. 495-507. Studies from the Clearinghouse for Science, Mathematics, and Environmental Education, Ohio State University, College of Education and School of Natural Resources, 1200 Chambers Road, Third Floor, Columbus, Ohio, 43212, USA.

Schoenfeld, Clay, and John Disinger, Environmental Education in Action P Case Studies of Selected Public School and Public Action programmes, January 1977.

Schoenfeld, Clay and John Disinger, Environmental Education in Action ll: Case Studies of Environmental Studies Programmes in College and Universities, February 1978.

Schoenfeld, Clay and John Disinger, Environmental Education in Action III: Case Studies of Public Involvement in Environmental Policy, December 1978.

Bowman, Mary Lynne and John F. Disinger, Environmental Education in Action IV. Case Studies of Teacher Education Programmes for Environmental Education, December 1980.

Cowan, Margaret E. and William B. Stapp, Environmental Education in Action V International Case Studies in Environmental Education, December 1982.

Sytnik, K.M. (ed.), Living in the Environment: A Sourcebook for Environmental Education, UNESCO/UNEP, 1985. (Translated from Russian.)

Brown, Lester, The State of the World 1986, 1987, etc., Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC USA. (Analysis, published annually, of global resource, population, and environmental problems and possible solutions.)

Centre for Science and Environment, The State of India’s Environment 1984-85, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, 1985. (A readable, fascinating, and very critical assembly of facts and stories about land, energy, resources, environment, health, food, and poverty in India. Interesting in itself, also a good model that could be adapted to other nations.)

Our Common Future, OUP-Oxford 1987. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development to UN General Assembly and UNEP’s Governing Council.

Council on Environmental Quality, The Global 2,000 Report to the President, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C.,1979. (A comprehensive summary of information from many U.S. executive agencies on the state of the world’s population, resources, and environment.)

Ehrlich, Paul, Anne H. Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Ecoscience, W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1977 (new edition due out soon). (The most massive, scholarly, and complete college-level textbook on environmental science and policy issues, also an excellent reference book.)

Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, “The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem”, in Herman Daly, Toward a Steady-State Economy, W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1973, pp. 37-49. (The significance of the law of entropy to economic development.)

Harrison, Paul, land, Food, and People, FAO, 1984. (A non-technical description of the findings of a major FAO/IIASA study of the soil and water resources of the ultimate food production capacity of the Third World.)

Holdgate, Martin, Mohammed Kassas, and Gilbert White, The World Environment 1971-1982, A Report by the United National environment Programme, Tycooly, Dublin, 1982. (An excellent sourcebook on the state of the world environment.)

Illich, Ivan, Tools for Conviviality, Harper & Row, New York, 1973. (On people-oriented development.)

Lovelock, James E., Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University press, Oxford, U.K., 1979. (The theory of the earth as a self regulating system.)

Macy, Joanna Rogers, Dharma and Development, (The story of the Sarvodaya Shramadana peoples’ movement in Sri Lanka.)

Meadows, Donella H. et al., The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York, 1972. (A computer model of the world population, industry, resource system and its potential for supporting all human needs.)

Myers, Norman, Gaia: an Atlas of Planet Management, Anchor Press/Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York USA. 1984. (A colourful, comprehensive sourcebook of data, graphs, and charts about the earth, its resources, and its human economy.)

Repetto, Robert led.), The Global Possible, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1985. (Expert papers from a global conference on the state of resources and the possibilities for good management.)

Tolba, M.K., Development without Destruction, UNEP-Tycooly Press, 1982.

4. A History of Research on Concepts for Environmental Education

(taken from Ph.D thesis by Michael Atchia at Salford University, U.K.,1978).

Craig, G.S., Certain techniques used in developing a course of study for the Horace Mann Elementary School. Bureau of publications, Teachers’ College, Columbia University, New York, 1927.

Robertson, M.L., The selection of science principles suitable as goals of instruction in the elementary school. Science Education, 19, 1935, p. 65-71.

Martin, W.E., A determination of the principles of the biological sciences of importance for general education. Unpublished. Ph.D dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1944.

Glidden, H.F., The identification and evaluation of principles of soil and water conservation for inclusion in the secondary school curriculum. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1953.

Irish, E.E., A determination of materials dealing with soil conservation and suitable for integration into courses of high school science for general education. Science Education, 37, 1953, p. 84-99.

Caldwell, L.T., Determination of earth science principles. Science Education, 39(3),1955, p. 196-213.

In the 1970’s concern for the environment reached a global level for the first time in human history. One of the responses to that concern was the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden. This conference established UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme, the first organization ever authorized by the world’s governments to monitor and protect the global environment, and to make information about it available to all the world’s people.

The Stockholm conference also emphasized the need for environmental education. Recommendation 96 called for education that could link academic disciplines, deal with actual and urgent problems, and prepare the citizens of an interdependent world to live and prosper in harmony with the laws of their planet. The Recommendation stated that:

organizations of the United Nations system… should establish an international programme in environmental education, interdisciplinary in approach, in-school and out-o f-school, encompassing all levels of education and directed toward the general public, in particular the ordinary citizen living in rural and urban areas, youth and adult alike, with a view to educating people as to simple steps one might take to manage and control one’s environment.

UNESCO in particular was asked to work with all appropriate United Nations agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and. member nations to develop a framework for furthering international education.

By 1975 UNESCO and UNEP had established an ongoing International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP). It assembled an international bibliography and a computerized world directory of individuals and organizations involved in environmental education. It surveyed the UNESCO member states (136 of them at the time) to assess their environmental education needs, and it called together experts to begin articulating the principles and procedures for environmental education. A workshop in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1975, brought together a group of twenty experts from each of the five UNESCO regions to provide a framework for environmental education.

The Belgrade meeting was followed in 1976 by regional meeting in Latin America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, to assess the regional status of environmental education and to form networks of interested people within the regions. These meetings paved the way for a worldwide meeting in 1977-the Intergovernmental, Conference on Environmental Education, held in Tbilisi, USSR.

Delegates from 70 countries attended the Tbilisi meeting. They drew up 41 recommendations setting goals, targets and strategies for implementation of environmental education. These recommendations were ultimately endorsed by 150 nations.

At Tbilisi enthusiasm for environmental education produced a remarkable degree of agreement, which transcended the common differences between North and South, East and West. As a result, those interested in environmental education can now derive support from colleagues all over the world, from an international movement and a growing network for the exchange of ideas and information.

Five years after the Tbilisi conference, the IEEP conducted a second worldwide survey to evaluate the progress of environmental education and to determine new trends. The member states surveyed reported that environmental education was an increasing priority, reflecting a growing concern for the threatened environment.

The IEEP’s international newsletter Connect is distributed free in six languages to 16,500. individuals and institutions throughout the world who are actively involved in environmental concerns: IEEP now maintains a data base with information on 900 environmental education institutions and 300 projects. It has put out many brochures and books, prototype modules for education and for teacher training, guides on environmental education methodologies, and audiovisual material.

Thirty-one pilot, experimental, and research projects have been undertaken, aimed at helping member states to incorporate environmental education into their national education plans. Regional and sub-regional workshops have been organized; and 37 national teacher training workshops. Over 140 countries have been directly involved in the UNEP/UNESCO International Environmental Education Programme, more than 260,000 primary and secondary school students, about 10,00 teachers and administrators–and the number reached indirectly are much greater.

At the same time, UNEP, together with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) developed a World Conservation Strategy, first published in 1981. The purpose of the Strategy is to stimulate improved management of living resources and to provide policy guidance on how this can be done. It outlines three primary objectives: