Promoting Conservation through Environmental Education
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11/12/2017
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Kashmir Monitor
The expansion of cities, demand for energy and water crisis, overall environmental conservation is a cause of concern for all the stakeholders. The consumerism type of society thinks that all the natural resources are for their consumption only. We are living in a society where everyone is running a race to extract more than their requirement. The greedy ones are in front of this race turning everything into desert blindly and ruthlessly. With matrix of environmental problems and no compromise with economic development, less or no effort to restore its pristine glory, environment is at stake. We want everything for our luxury and forgot all other species that are extremely important for our survival and in fact we even don’t think that have an equal share out of all resources that we had.
The technology that has been created over the years has provided immense comfort to people and has improved the knowledge of understanding in almost every sector of life that has also contributed to the standard of living. With environmental implications associated with almost every kind of technology, scientists especially environmentalists now must harness technical innovations for conservation of environment. The technology need to be diverted to ensure environmental sustainability which is the most important challenge for the scientists these days. Every day we come across with different challenges in terms of environmental management since new inventions solve one problem and give birth to other unexpected ones.
Today we cry for environmental conservation as we are now surrounded by countless diseases that are linked with environmental deterioration and many of the problems are due to xenobiotic substances that are in the environment due to rapid industrialization, urbanization and modern agriculture. Medical professionals and environmental activists take years to understand the diseases caused by these substances. Most of these problems fizzle out due to lack of financial assistance or negligence by the concerned authorities. They say “innovation is a key to sustainability” and innovation needs reinvent ourselves and observations must yield results that will help sustainability and accountability without compromising for ethics and values. These innovations need to be accepted politically, socially and economically. It is now time to live up to our responsibilities. Lack of resources is not the problem but managing scanty resources to feed ever growing population and to maintain the supply and demand is a key challenge for sustainability.
We need to promote environmental awareness at school level and must respect the people in this profession to spread environmental education and environmentalist need not be attacked, should be appreciated for this dedicated and pious cause. The introduction of environmental education should not be made political if we need to progress in the battle of conservation. Hence, the basic and ingredient key for conservation is that environmental education should be introduced compulsorily from the elementary level with same weightage as to other subjects and must be embedded in the genes of individuals that is possible when it will be implemented at basic level. The experts of the field should come forward to disseminate the knowledge of this subject skillfully and efficiently to the targeted audience. A person with different background will never do justice, as this subject is a multidisciplinary subject and only an expert will correlate its multidisciplinary nature with other subjects and vice versa. It is very heartening to know that a teacher of education or history or political science is teaching environmental science at secondary level.
To sum up; conservation of environment is possible when humanity will believe that resource conservation is not merely for the present generation but for the coming generations as well who have to walk on the face of this Earth later. This is the right time to do our bit and bring positive changes without putting the ball on the shoulders of others and we should remember environmental index is crushing fast and unfortunately we are part of it.