Fernando Camacho Servin
Newspaper La Jornada
Thursday, January 26, 2023, p. 17
Faced with the high rates of degradation that the environment suffers today throughout the world, it is urgent that educational institutions rethink their teaching methods on these issues, and in particular move away from soft environmentalism
that it does not have a comprehensive and critical approach, pointed out the participants in a forum organized yesterday by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
Within the framework of the seminar The great socio-environmental problems: the challenges of environmental education, Irama Núñez, an academic from the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM, warned that the current ecological crisis goes hand in hand with that of the educational model, which has prevented generating greater awareness of the risks we live.
“It is urgent that education on these issues be critical. It must move away from certain approaches that have dominated it, particularly the instrumental vision, with which it is thought that the environmental crisis is going to be resolved through technology. That ‘soft environmentalism’ of which we are now very soaked, with what is green and what is biodegradable, is a fashion that does not help at all ”, she stressed.
In this context, he called for promoting an education that not only highlights the responsibility of individuals in the damage suffered by nature, but also that of governments and companies, as part of a training in which people -especially all young people – do not remain indifferent or oblivious to the subject.
For her part, Laura Bello, director of the University Coordination for Sustainability of the Universidad Veracruzana, pointed out that environmental education should emphasize the dependence that human beings have on their environment, since we are completely removed from the link with nature
and the importance of its care.
