Environmental Education: The Central Need

Abstract

T HE INCREASING INTEREST in envirornental education has resulted in the proliferation of an enormous quantity and variety of curricular materials. These materials have been generated by many groups with differing aims and concerns: private industries pursuing their own interests, conservation groups claiming to serve the public good, and others. Some materials build on the tradition of outdoor education; others emphasize conservation, ecologic, or social themes. Few support comprehensive, integrated curricular program. For the most part they are segments of programs-conceptual outlines, helpful hints, student handouts and study materials, approved teaching methods, and so on. The materials tend to be focused around crisis issues, such as overpopulation, pollution, and resource depletion; but seldom are these contents combined into single, coherent package. Does this outpouring of materials have any educational merit? Is there something in the movement that is durable and worth preserving, that cuts across the limited specialties of its myriad programs? Or is the environmental push into education merely what Stillman (1972) has called a symptom of psychosomatic disturbance in the body politic? Superficially, the field appears too fractionated to be readily integrated, but closer examination reveals number of interconnected themes and shared perception of the world and of man's place in it. These can provide the basis for consolidating the best in environmental education. The environmental thrust in education is motivated by an apparent recognition of closed-system aspects of the spaceship Earth-a recognition that, for the foreseeable future, man is bound within system that allows neither entry nor departure. Every decision or activity is approached by the environmentalist from within the framework of the laws that govern such system. Environmental education foresees limitations to human exploits and system of guiding principles not quite divine but of considerably greater import than simple cognitions. Differences and disagreements are rampant, but this shared perception is unifying initial referent.