Looking at the NAEE website on Friday, I was moved to look again at the GEEP call to action. You'll find it here.
This is the rationale:
As environmental educators, we know that what we do informs, inspires, and enlightens. It builds human capacity, provokes questions, enhances skills and shapes values and attitudes. It galvanizes individuals, families and communities to make informed decisions about the environment that lead to a sustainable society. Even more, it helps people connect deeply with each other, their communities, and the natural world.
Given the unprecedented challenges we face as a global society—from climate change and biodiversity loss to decreasing access to nature and a growing gap between the rich and poor—there has never been a more important time to scale up our environmental education efforts. Global leaders must make better use of education and capacity-building as strategies to improve the environment, along with tools of governance, regulation, economic and community incentives, and technology.
The Global Environmental Education Partnership (GEEP) is focused on building capacity for environmental education and sustainability around the world and using the power of education to help address global environmental and social problems. Its advisors are made up of researchers, policymakers, education practitioners, and others who represent government and nongovernmental sectors from more than 20 countries and regions. GEEP believes that national and international professional networks are essential to ensuring the quality of education in, about, and for the environment. These networks need support from a wide range of stakeholders. As a network of networks, GEEP brings together partners who are committed to helping global citizens address environmental and social challenges by developing and strengthening environmental education worldwide. This Call for Action is asking the international environmental education community to take stock of where we are as a field and think ahead to the future. It includes ten draft actions, crafted with input from GEEP leaders from around the world, and is designed to get input from educators working in this field about our key priorities for the next decade.
And as NAEE noted, we can all go to ActNowForEE.org and make a contribution to the discussion and action. I've done so using my University of Bath identity but I'm tempted to have another go just as myself.
Personally, I think that GEEP is a good idea at this time as it is important to continue to stress the 'environmental' as it's this that, ultimately, keeps us all (and I mean all life) alive; of course, it's the economy and society that does this in the here and now, which is why environment, society and economy always have to be taken together. In recent times, however, there has been a significant change to our circumstances. Whilst social and environmental injustice has been with us (almost) forever, and while humans have always had a tendency to local environmental damage, it's only recently that we've been buggering up the biosphere on a global scale. The actual and possible consequences of this need stating amid all the focus on genocide, discrimination, wealth and health disparity, exclusion, etc, as it will do us little good in the end if, once we've eliminated poverty, racism, misogyny, trans (and all the other) phobias, etc, we find there's no longer any possibility of clean water.
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