A Sustainable World and Environmental Education with CTERA

The second Argentine convention on environmental education, organized from October 26 to 29, 2006 in Mar del Plata, produced through its debates and the diversity of its participants a very rich series of proposals on the development of environmental education and, unexpectedly, on the deep shifts that need to take place to take on the magnitude and complexity of society’s interdependences. These proposals all converge toward the following idea: in order to strengthen and invent environmental-education dynamics, Argentine society needs to reorient, in depth and simultaneously, its organization, its knowledge and its ways of producing.

Strategies to be implemented over the long term

Four strategies emerged to achieve the necessary reorientations:

* Perceive the relations that make us interdependent and place us in solidarity with the biosphere and our environment, and produce approaches to manage them.

* Manage these interdependences and define the terms of a new social contract where all actors each assume their responsibilities.

* Achieve a new perception and articulation of unity and diversity, and of the local and the global.

* Organize over time and for the long run the necessary shifts in ways of producing, of trading, and of institutional engineering.

A number of ethical principles emerge from these strategies to establish the link between personal convictions, regulations, and collective obligations. Responsibility is one of the core values. These ethical principles inspire a deep evolution in the governance of public action and in ways of trading and producing by proposing to put the management of relations at the heart of governance: relations between unity and diversity, between the local and the global, between having and being, between freedom and responsibility, between continuity and change.

How knowledge is circulated and developed, including by the education system, is also called to change on the basis of these principles. The shifts in models will necessarily be slow and gradual. This is why they must be implemented in continuity and in the long term.

The emergence of this agenda provides a better understanding of the dynamics pursued by education as regards relations to the environment and citizenship. Including this ethical content, promoting building approaches to knowledge and projects with relations at their core, the importance given to sense, to the local, and to contextualizing place environmental education in a particularly active position to contribute to taking up collective challenges, starting with changing citizens’ hearts.

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