When you are in elementary school, you learn all about the fundamentals of recycling; how to separate your papers from your plastics, what goes into the landfill, and which foods are compostable.
If you were lucky, your class may have gotten a pizza party if it collected enough plastic bottles. After recycling, however, chances are your environmental education wore thin. Despite this, environmental education is something that should be considered important at all ages.
Environmental education is the teaching of Earth’s natural functions and how people have a hand in them. How you receive this education can vary from an actual class to information you may stumble across on the internet. Despite how you receive your information, it is important to understand that you always have room to learn.
Our environment includes what we eat, what we wear, where we live, and how we live; it surrounds us in all aspects of our lives, and all aspects of our lives impact it.
“Environmental education (EE) is a process that helps individuals, communities, and organizations learn more about the environment, develop skills to investigate their environment, and to make intelligent, informed decisions about how they can help take care of it,” according to the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) website.
A person can’t say that they don’t care about environmentalism because they have no negative impact on the Earth when our relationship with the earth is one of give and take. Environmental education must be a process of lifelong learning.
Figuring out where to start when choosing to be more environmentally conscious can be overwhelming.
Though the first step should always be to do your research, it’s difficult to choose what to research.
When beginning a journey, it is best to make small changes first. The Rainforest Alliance lists some individual climate-friendly actions as: reducing food waste, reducing meat consumption, buying products you can’t buy locally from responsible farms, buying shade-grown coffee, and supporting actions to keep girls in schools.
A good first step is also assessing your carbon footprint. Your carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gasses you create as an individual and/or a household. The goal should be to produce fewer emissions than can be supported by one planet.
According to The Nature Conservatory, the average American produces a 16-ton carbon footprint, four times the global average.
Organizations such as The Nature Conservatory, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, or the Global Footprint Network have online carbon footprint calculators. After calculating your predicted individual carbon footprint, the websites direct you to solutions and changes you can make.
Everyone should consider their environmental literacy.
Environmental education is important to both new generations trying to save the world but also to existing generations trying to sustain it. Everyone should consider themselves an environmentalist because every one of us is part of the environment.