Environmental culture and education: a new conceptual framework

Abstract

Considering the exacerbation of present ecological crisis and the urgent need to restore natural balance, present paper proposes a new approach for envi ronmental education. Reviewing concepts as “cultures of nature”, “cultural ecology”, “environmental literacy” and “environmental culture”, we recreate the strategies and goals of environmental education and propose a new con ceptual framework to establish environmental educating communities and promote environmental culture. This framework builds on the community itself and is structured in three different sequential stages: driving forces; so ciocultural transformation process; and environmental sustainability. Each stage feeds from its previous, being the first one both an initial trigger but al so the permanent driving forces that feed the all cycle. Driving forces from the first stage are taken from political and social will, which would create mechanism to promote environmental education and best practices. Second stage is a process of sociocultural transformation of the community contexts based on the implementation of environmental best practices and environ mental education programs, which should modulate and be modulated the/by community and its models of organization. Finally, our conceptual frame work advocates that this process will be able to reach the third stage, the en vironmental sustainability, supported by an environmental educating com munity that drives environmental culture, which should also boost the driv ing forces from the first stage, closing the loop. We conclude that, since this is a theoretical approach, it needs now to be validated through its implementa tion and evaluation in a real scenario.