With Earth Hour just having been observed this year, it dawns on us that its symbolic importance is not enough to create awareness of climate change and environmental degradation.
In order for the lessons of Earth Hour to be sustainable, environmental literature must be included in the curriculum at all levels.
Unesco has made environment education a core curriculum component in all countries by 2025. In its Berlin Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development of 2022, it declared that “Education must prepare learners to understand the current crisis and shape the future”.
This can happen in a variety of ways, and none of them are tedious or dull.
Within the Sciences, environmental education is typically built in. K-12 learning includes identifying plants, learning about chlorophyll and other natural processes and investigating the role of plants and animals in life cycles.
How this education can be spread to other fields is an exercise educationists have been outlining.
Using the CARE method (complexity, aesthetics, responsibility, ethics) The British Columbia Board of Education, for example, has outlined how language arts, fine arts and even mathematics classes can include issues of the environment in its learning outcomes.
While shapes and patterns are identified and learnt in mathematics, the rhythms of nature are mimicked through music and dance.
Literature is, of course, the most vocal platform to evoke the beauty and awe of nature. Not only do traditional poetry of Wordsworth or Keats celebrate nature’s close bonds with humans, but more modern and accessible works talk with immediacy about the abys into which we may soon be looking, if we are not more careful with how we deal with the immensity of the world around us.
Distinct from nature poetry, environment poetry underlines the complex relationship between humans and nature. Poets are more than writers today - they are the chroniclers of conservation. These ‘ecopoets’ speak to the young who can make a difference when and if they are sufficiently motivated.
An important way to making poetry accessible today is by introducing them on social media. Sites like ‘Poets for the Planet’ and @thepoetryofnature pair words with images, making the text instantly attractive to readers across all ages.
Using terminology of ecology is possible even when learning a language.
The British Council’s lessons on nature for young learners of English address contemporary issues of global warming, climate change and environmental disasters with relevant vocabulary – a training that may be necessary in the years to come.
In Oman, protecting the environment is one of the priorities of Oman Vision 2040. In terms of education, researchers Hana M Al Balushi and Abdullah K Ambusaidi, in a study on environmental education and its effects in school discover that “environmental knowledge appears to be a positive contributor to environmental attitudes and behaviours”.
In many ways, all education is education about our world, what we see in it and what we do with it. But educational policies must ensure that environmental sustainability is an integral part of education so that learners are inculcated with a sense of responsibility for the world they will inherit.
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