Environmental Education: Who, Me?...

In my last post I talked about environmental citizenship. So, I figure each of us has a personal responsibility as a caretaker of planet Earth. I recently read a cool paper on environmental education and, even though it was aimed at educators, I saw its relevance to YOU and ME. In other words: what can you and I teach ourselves and our children about environmental citizenship?
In their paper entitled “The Failure of Environmental Education (and How We Can Fix It)”, Blumstein and Saylan (Plos Biology, May 2007) discuss seven ways to improve environmental education to promote environmental citizenship in individuals. I’m going to look at four in my next few posts, the first one being:

1. Learning and teaching others about over-consumption. The magnitude of our impact, discussed by ecologists Holdren and Ehrlich, depends on population size, affluence and technology. As countries develop their environmental footprint expands and consumption rate becomes more important. What Blumstein and Saylan say is we need to teach ourselves about how to conserve consumable products. We need to teach our children where and how resources come from—that food, clean water, and energy don’t come from supermarkets, taps and power points.