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 environmental 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 conceptual 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; sociocultural transformation process; and environmental sustainability. Each stage feeds from its previous, being the first one both an initial trigger but also 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 environmental education programs, which should modulate and be modulated the/by community and its models of organization. Finally, our conceptual framework advocates that this process will be able to reach the third stage, the environmental sustainability, supported by an environmental educating community that drives environmental culture, which should also boost the driving 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 implementation and evaluation in a real scenario.