All of this brought us in close contact with and oriented our attention to the environment, the ways in which it shaped our lives, as well as the ways in which we affected the environment. They also instilled an early sense of care and responsibility for the environment that continued to grow as we gained knowledge of the complex factors behind wider issues such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, resource depletion, and climate change.
Working with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) to develop environmental education books for children, I now look back on my own experiences from the perspective of an environmental educator. Last week, I had the opportunity to attend CSE’s annual Green Schools Carnival and Awards Ceremony. As an adult who sometimes struggles to hold onto the sense of beauty and wonder that is a gift of nature, in the face of despair or cynicism at the state of the world and its environment, there was something refreshing and hopeful in seeing students and educators from schools across India come together to celebrate their sincere efforts towards creating more sustainable communities.
Several schools shared inspiring stories ranging from setting up fully solar-powered campuses to growing community gardens that invited biodiverse life. Each of these stories displayed an effort to take environmental education seriously, beyond the confines of the classroom and theoretical knowledge, by involving students in the daily practices of sustainability.
In 2005, the National Curriculum Framework of India took the important step of introducing environmental education as an integral and mandatory component of the school curriculum. It was also at this crucial juncture that the CSE’s flagship Green Schools Programme (GSP) was launched to supplement and enrich, through its experiential teaching-learning model, environmental education in schools across the country. In 2006, the programme conferred the first Green School awards to twenty schools from around the country. Twenty years later, the programme today has close to 9,000 schools enrolled in its annual audit cycle.
Organised along six verticals — Air, Energy, Food, Land, Water and Waste — the GSP audit invites students and teachers in schools to observe their environment closely, measure their resource use and report on their impact on each of these six aspects of the environment. With this knowledge and benchmarking of their impact, schools have the opportunity and incentive to act further on particular areas to enhance their overall sustainability.
In this way, the audit attunes participating students to a heightened awareness of their relationship with the environment and instils in them a greater sense of stewardship towards it.
It is our hope that increasing numbers of schools will participate in the Green Schools Programme, and that this will encourage young people growing up today in becoming sensitive to nature, knowledgeable about the environment and committed to turning the tide towards a more sustainable life for us all — humans and non-humans — who share this planet.