Environmental Education
Main Objective
To contribute to the formation of a social weave favorable to conservation processes, the sustainable management of resources and to a new environmental ethic. Participative and critical learning will create an individual commitment projected towards clear and important actions that alleviate the surroundings natural, social, cultural and economic problematic. This will create dialogue and encounter spaces for different logic, wisdom and knowledge arisen from the local experience of the Natural Reserves and the knowledge derived from regional and global processes.
Resnatur’s Environmental School
Environmental Education reaches across all of Resnatur’s goals, implemented by each one of the programs and actions that are developed with support of an interdisciplinary team. The proposed strategies strengthen the social weave by qualifying and enabling the individuals to develop processes which enhance group integration, social enrichment and a better coexistence between the citizens.
Resnatur’s Environmental School is a formation and qualification strategy that develops an environmental educative process for an improved approach to the country’s social and political context. The designed thematic courses include theoretical, practical and research components, with qualified and well referenced information.
Two thematic courses have been developed until now: the first of them was “The environmental dimension of the conflict”, and the second: “Sustainable conservation-production systems .”
First Course: “The environmental dimension of the conflict”
The thematic contents developed throughout this course were: environmental dimension, environmental legislation and citizen formation, alternative resolution of environmental conflicts, and national social-political context.
Thematic development of the course:
- The maps
Working with maps that include information regarding the people in specific territories allows an understanding of the situation of the nodes due to aspects that affect them (violence, agriculture, infrastructure work, cattle razing, etc.), and to locate the participants in Resnatur’s defined eco-regions. In addition, it exposes the social conflicts and violence issues as something that exist in everyday living. - Population and landscape
The history of the population and landscape change allowed to understand the evolutionary process and transformation of the surroundings, due to the human intervention in the natural biological processes. - Environmental legislation
This included he possibility of understanding aspects of environmental law and of legal alternatives to influence the conflicts. The use of tools such as petition rights, law suits, information requests to organizations, among others; helped and motivated the participants to be an active part in the formulation of different proposals for the conservation in their areas. - Conflict resolution
For the conflict resolution processes it has to be clear that one of the main sources of controversies in the Natural Reserves, is the fight over natural resources. Different forms to approach conflict were discussed with practical exercises and reading material.
Results
The environmental peace agendas
This procedure aims to operate the social dimension in the natural resources and the biodiversity conservation strategies through practical and theoretical exercises; developed by Marisol Isaza and Catalina Restrepo members of the Suma-Paz Natural Reserve of the Cundiboyacense node.
The Suma-Paz association designed this method from its experience in the Sumapaz region in order to increase knowledge of the relationship between environment and peace. This would allow the actors of environmental management in Colombia to propose actions in social dynamics that determine the future of Colombians.
The first step of this project occurred with nine of the eleven Resnatur’s nodes, creating biosocial cartography, landscape histories and some future conservation strategies.
Present development of the agendas
44 socio-environmental organizations of four social networks and with direct influence in 3800 families are helping to develop the social dimension of the conservation strategies. The existing methodology is being applied in the middle and upper Chicamocha, in the high Suarez river basin and north of Gutiérrez, Boyacá/Colombia.
These Environmental Agendas are the future conservation work of next the fifteen years, and they include two main aspects: a methodology that is being validated with regional communities, and a social addition of the process in communities of the middle and upper Chicamocha, and more recently in the high Suarez river basin and north of Gutiérrez.
There are two Agendas programmed for these regions: an Environmental Agenda of the Water and an Environmental Agenda of the Oak.
The background of this proposal include the necessity of the Natural Reserves of the Civil society to develop conditions to operate strategically within the armed conflict and the social violence, and thus to survive without jeopardizing the work of many years in different regions and their ecosystems.
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