Educating Our Communities and Ourselves about Conservation of Aquatic Resources through Environmental Outreach

Educating the public about the importance of healthy ecosystems is vital to the protection of the environment, yet the accelerating pace of scientific discovery, the rapidly expanding role of information technology, and the increasing complexity of modern society tax traditional forms of environmental education. While there is a growing public awareness about environmental concerns, environmental illiteracy is still a major impediment to protecting our life support base. Improving environmental education is a global concern. An international environment and school initiative (CERI 1995), produced under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, outlines measures to address environmental illiteracy; among those measures are educational policy reforms, professional development of educators and research materials, revision of the core curriculum of academic programs to embody environmental perspectives, stronger partnerships between the community and educational institutions, and teaching methodologies to improve the quality and relevance of education. Former political leader Mikhail Gorbachev (CEO 1990) also emphasized the importance of environmental education, as well as its linkage to global politics. He noted that “the ecologization of politics requires us to acknowledge the priority of universal human values and make ecology part of education and instruction from an early age, molding a new modern approach to nature and, at the same time, giving back to man a sense of being a part of nature. No moral improvement of society is possible without that.” Likewise, a social contract for scientists, proposed in 1997 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science