Environmental Literacy As Economic Booster For African And Global Economies

By Peter Wuteh Vakunta

Deepening environmental crises aggravated by unsustainable life styles in Africa and the world over make it imperative to educate people, young and old, toward a people-oriented sustainable development. Africa, and indeed, the global community cannot afford another generation that is environmentally illiterate, with deleterious life styles characterized by environmental abuse—over-consumption, overproduction of waste, population explosion, dirty energies, pollution, conflict, poverty and violence (Le Grange et al. 1997, p.10). Environmental educators have a pivotal role to play in helping people to understand the importance of environmental literacy and assisting them to develop environmentally friendly ways of eking out a living. Education for a sustainable environment would improve livelihoods, halt resource depletion and preserve ecosystems.

 At the Fifth Annual World Bank Conference on Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development held in Washington, D.C. (October 9-10,  1997) the following alarm was raised:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on social resources. If not checked, many of our current practices will put at risk the future that we wish for human society, and the plant and animal kingdom, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner we know. Fundamental changes are urgent, if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about. (World Bank, 1997)

The urgent need for educating people for the purpose of environmental sustainability has been articulated in many policy documents in Africa and beyond. The South African Reconstruction and Development Program (1996, p.1) the Consultative National Environmental Policy Process (1996, p.3), the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) guidelines and treaties are examples of policy documents that have underscored the need for  implementing environmentally sound policies in the field of environmental education. In these blueprints a high premium has been placed on the crucial role education, notably adult environmental education, is seen to play in changing attitudes toward sustainable living. Defaulting would be tantamount to courting danger.

A strong case has been made for the proposition that the greatest danger to the survival of global population today is not atomic warfare, not environmental pollution, not population explosion, not the depletion of natural resources, and not any of the other contemporary crises, but the underlying cause of them all—the accelerating obsolescence of humans. In other words, humanity’s inability to cope with a rapidly changing world is manifest in man’s attitude toward the utilization of natural resources. The only hope seems to be an educational program that would re-equip the present generation with the skills and competencies required to function adequately in a world characterized by perpetual change (Knowles, 1980). This is a daunting task facing adult educators and environmental facilitators in the twenty-first century. This century harbors many challenges, not least of which are local and global environmental problems. The onus is on us all to equip ourselves with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies needed to meet these daunting challenges.

The concept of ‘environmental education’ has been defined differently by various researchers (Disinger, 1983; Goodall, 1991; Lucas, 1972; and Martin, 1975). Our definition is analogous to that of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) which defines the term as follows:

Environmental education is a process of recognizing values and clarifying concepts in order to develop skills and attitudes necessary to understand and appreciate the interrelatedness among people, their culture, and their biophysical surroundings. Environmental education entails practice in decision-making and formulation of codes of behavior about issues concerning environmental quality. (IUCN 1971:2)

The foregoing definition underlines the role of environmental education as a process anchored on the following precepts:

•  It involves both education and training that enable people to solve local and global environmental problems such as health, sanitation, pollution and soil erosion;
•  It encourages people to be more environmentally responsible in the context of the communities in which they live;
• It raises awareness to the need to think globally and act locally; and
  It is directed toward making environmental sustainability a feasible paradigm for the alleviation of global poverty.

Environmental education seeks to create an environmental ethic—principles necessary to attain a dynamic balance between quality of life and environmental quality. It is a practical process of equipping humans with the material and intellectual know-how necessary to improve the quality of the environment. Environmental education guarantees a sustainable environment—one that maintains its natural resource base (Yeld,  1991). It entails the maintenance of:

• A sustainable scale of the economy relative to its ecological life support system;
• A fair distribution of resources and opportunities between present and future generations, as well as agents in the current generation; and
• An efficient allocation of resources that adequately accounts for natural capital (Contanza, 1991).

What makes an environment sustainable remains a moot point amongst environmental activists. In order to determine the factors that account for environmental sustainability, it is critical to understand the connotation of the term ‘sustainable.’ To ‘sustain’ means to enable something to continue to exist over a period of time (Slocome & Van Bers, 1990). The aforementioned definition is of crucial importance in the field of environmental conservation. Environmental education is of such critical importance in this day and time that this writer has devoted an entire poem to its cause:

ECOTAGE

Wondering what this lexis stands for?
Denotes environmental terrorism
Yeah!
We’re environmental terrorists
We brutalize Mother Earth!
Scorch her
Pollute her
Suffocate her
Poison her
Slash her
Burn her
Slice her
Bruise her

Yeah!
We’re killer nations!
It is an eyesore
Streets and parks
Littered with cans, paper
Bottles, wrappings, feces
Aquatic life a-choking with litter
Oil spills
Toxic waste
Plastics
Sewage
And more

Yeah!
We’re emasculators of earth’s beauty!
Biodiversity on the
Brink of extinction
Wild life endangered
Guess what this generation will
Bequeath to posterity?
A depleted ecosystem!
Halt this genocide!

When seismic incidents like tsunami—the undersea earthquake that hit the peoples of Asia very hard— transpire, one is bound to take a second look at the situation back in Africa where many countries have been hit as well by natural disasters. Countries like Ethiopia, Mozambique, Cameroon, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, and Chad among others have been affected by cataclysmic incidents yet very little action has been taken to prevent future occurrences.

Ethiopia, which is on the verge of famine, has accused the international community of waiting until skeletons start to appear on its national television screens before taking action. While Ethiopia was grappling unnoticed with its drought problem, vast areas of Mozambique disappeared under floodwaters. A woman who attempted to save her life by climbing onto a tree gave birth to a child on the tree during one of those floods! God has uncanny ways of doing things! Even if drought and floods are unpredictable in themselves, they happen with such predictable regularity that one would have thought that something could have been done to handle the consequences more efficiently. So why is the response to such calamities frequently so slow?  In the United States of America, the Katrina disaster was handled with such a lackluster attitude that the global community started to wonder whether or not racism was involved.

There appear to be two main problems at the root of poor disaster management in Africa—the piecemeal approach to funding and a lack of co-ordination between governments and aid agencies. Africa’s political leadership and education stakeholders continue to pay lip service to the integration of environmental literacy into school curricula to their detriment. Scant attention is continually paid to the ramifications of environmental illiteracy on national economies. Inattention to environmental abuse in Africa has been attributed to environmental illiteracy which has resulted in the indiscriminate exploitation of meager natural resources by impoverished communities.

Most Africans abuse the natural environment in their struggle to eke out a bare living through agricultural activities, many of which are detrimental to the health of the ecosystem. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreparable damage on the physical environment.  If this attitude toward environmental protection continues unchecked many of our current practices will put the future generations of Africans at risk for many years to come.  We must learn to exploit our natural resources wisely so that we do not compromise the possibility for future generations to survive. Most importantly, we must ensure that our natural resources (oil, diamonds, gold, etc) do not become our curse.

Sadly enough, when environmental and energy interests clash in the West, Africa goes up in flames, the same flames that dot the landscape of our oil-wells. The vendetta between the  Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), the organization led by late Ken Saro Wiwa, is a case in point. I was in Nigeria on November 10, 1995 when the military dictatorship of late General Sani Abacha, at the peak of international criticism of Nigeria’s despotic regime ordered that Saro Wiwa and eight others (the “Ogoni Nine” be executed by hanging. This was done by military personnel after a sham trial condemned as “judicial murder” by Britain’s Prime Minister at the time.  Saro Wiwa’s real crime had been his defiance of the British oil giant, Shell BP, and one of Africa’s most brutal military dictators, Sani Abacha. According to most accounts, Ken’s death provoked international outrage and the immediate suspension of Nigeria from the Commonwealth of Nations which was meeting in New Zealand at the time. Saro Wiwa and his followers were from Ogoniland, a small densely populated region of the Niger Delta, where Shell had found oil in the 1950’s. While the company had grown rich from the profits extracted from the Delta region, the communities that owned the land continued to live in abject poverty, lacking basic facilities such as roads, schools, healthcare and clean water.

Africa Today (2005) points out that during a mass protest against the spoliation of their land by Shell BP, Saro Wiwa was noted to have said: “The march is against the devastation of the environment. It is against the non-payment of royalties. It is anti-Shell. It is anti-federal government, because as far as we are concerned the two are in league to destroy the Ogoni people.”(1)Views like these placed him and his Ogoni followers at loggerheads with the military junta headed by Sani Abacha. The animosity resulted in repeated detention, torture and murder. Rowell of Africa Today (2005) points out:
In the ten years since their deaths, little has changed in the Niger Delta. Oil remains a curse. The communities are still locked into a cycle of extreme poverty, widespread unemployment, environmental pollution and social injustice that has increasingly manifested itself in violent conflict. (2)

In this write-up, I have argued that environmental literacy and economic prosperity go hand in hand. As the global community continues to forge ahead with preemptive measures to mitigate the impact of ecological disasters on economic development, the African continent has to follow suit. Africa’s physical and built environments deserve to be protected and conserved. We must strive to meet our needs without making economic survival impossible for future generations.  I have attempted to speculate on appropriate paradigms that could ensure the integration of environmental education into academic curricula. I have touched on the implications of inadequate disaster management on the economies and politics of nation-states. I argue that environmental disasters constitute the ‘tragedy of the commons’, using the word ‘tragedy’ as the philosopher Whitehead used it to refer to the fact that the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness; it resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things. In other words, there is a subset of problems, such as population explosion, atomic warfare, environmental abuse, and the recovery of a livable urban environment that threatens the very existence of contemporary man and acts as spokes in the wheel of economic prosperity.© The Entrepreneur Newspaper 2009. All Rights Reserved 

Works cited

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