Education for environmental sustainability
As an education changemaker, this has been the most interesting panel for me to attend.
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The key messages were the role of education in setting up habits that work for the environment and how schools can take a holistic approach to tackling environmental challenges.
The panel went gradually into discussing the role of indigenous oral knowledge in providing scared knowledge that may just hold the secret ingredients to solving the environmental issues we created. Then, when I asked the question to the plan :« what would our world look like if our inventors were kind?» the discussion took a spiritual dimension. Admitting that on cellular level, each individual can only solve their part of the equation. We can only change ourselves, our decisions, our habits, and that is the only change there can ever be.
It was brought up by a UN Secretariat member, Ms Puri, that for her country India, spiritual awakening can be key to the environment change. Then we brought up the wonderful thinker Alan Watts, his books, and how he also clearly used to teach that macro change is a myth and only micro changes can allow Nature to take its course again.All of the world’s problems come down to one thing in my humble opinion : Ego. Ego.Ego.When self success comes at the cost of world success, when we no longer understand the words “I don’t need to take more than this”, then it’s our minds that are defected. Climate change is only a symptom that our innovators are very smart, but not necessarily very kind.If inventors, educators and parents taught the values that mattered as a basis of any creation, then our industry would be only a simulation of nature. It would never hurt nature.Self questioning is key, we can’t change anything globally if we don’t do some micro work on the self. In the end, we can only change ourselves and that’s really all we need to be doing.
