Sustainability

How to educate for sustainable

development in a globalized world?

From my point of view, a person who “practices sustainability” and makes his/her world sustainable is a person who does not damage his/her environment, who looks after the world and who takes care of the natural resources. As I could find in the dictionary, sustainability is the quality of conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.

We have to be aware of the resources that the Earth provides us, resources that we use in our daily lives and that we need every day. We are dependent from our natural environment, and sustainability helps us to maintain our life conditions, our well-being and our welfare society. We have to preserve and to look after our natural world and our natural resources because our lives depend on it. Do you imagine a life without water? So, if we continue wasting these kind of resources such as water, coal, minerals, petroleum, materials, and so on, we will not have natural resources for a long-term, aspect that will influence (and that nowadays is influencing) our health, our daily lives and our environment. We are destroying earth’s resources faster than they can be regenerated, so we have to reflect on what we are doing with our planet.

Being sustainable we can keep our environment and our ecosystem healthy, guaranteeing the natural resources, goods and services that humans receive from the Earth. We have to be aware of the negative impact that sometimes humans give to the environment, causing pollution or wasting natural resources. Earth’s population has increased, using more natural resources than we need, wasting, damaging and disrupting ecosystem’s life cycle, considering that some animals have disappeared. But nowadays we live in a world that every day becomes more globalized, and we have to use this globalization to study our Earth, our ecosystem and to conserve our environment. We can see our world as a connected system so we have to join our forces to transfer by generations, sustainable actions that conserve our planet. We have to fight against the issues that nowadays damage our planet, such as the big problem of the climate change.

Nowadays everything is connected and, as I have said in the globalization part, the actions that happen in one place of the planet, will affect in other place of the world, even they are separated from many miles of distance. That’s why the air pollution or the bad products that one city uses, can affect the air quality of another place of the world. Being connected has advantages and disadvantages but, from my point of view, we have to see globalization as a positive aspect, using our union to solve problems; because the decisions that we make now, will affect our children when they are adults.

Sustainability is not an individual problem, if not it is a social challenge where everybody must help. We, as future teachers, must teach taking into account that nowadays we live in a globalized world and that we have to transfer to our children sustainable actions in order to learn how to look after the environment without wasting natural resources. Recycling; using green resources; using green energies such as solar power; using green mobility such as the bike or the public transport; taking care of our environment in order to not create pollution; using green technology; saving water and electricity; not wasting food or resources, are some of the actions that we can teach to our pupils in order to educate them in a sustainable and globalized world. It is true that this is a challenge that teachers have, but the important thing is that children are aware of buying what they need, not what they want. And I think that if we want to transfer this to our pupils, first of all we must do sustainable actions that take care of our environment.

We have to reflect on the world that we want to live to the future generations, because the actions and the damage that now we are doing in our world, they will have bad consequences that our children will suffer when they grow up. That’s why we have to think about the influence of our actions in the future. The actions that we do now, they will be the footprints that we will leave in our world to the future citizens, because, whatever we do or not, it will affect.