Train 360 trainers in 18 countries in three years

Training trainers who in turn train and follow up with target populations is ERC’s method for achieving its objectives. A key to addressing trainers and target groups of different cultures in ways that relate to the global environmental crisis and to the problems and needs in their countries and bioregions lies in the development of a cross-cultural curriculum guide, Restoring Ourselves, Our Communities, and Mother Earth. Read more. [insert Hyperlink: The cross-cultural curriculum guide, Restoring Ourselves, Our Communities, and Mother Earth is resource for creative translation and adaptation into local-language training materials. Designed in broad terms, the Guide allows for the actual approach and implementation to be specifically tailored for each initiative within a country. It is intended for use as a resource or toolkit to produce training of trainer’s manuals and other materials (posters, leaflets, audio cassette tapes, videos, other teaching and learning tools) that draw on local environmental conditions and cultural realities while providing regional and global ecological perspectives on the environment and environmental crisis. The Guide will attempt to fill a void in the environmental education arena by providing a holistic ecological approach that promises to motivate, inspire, and transform young people to act in resolute ways for a sustainable future. At the same time, each relevant module will contain practical information about existing and new work opportunities in a given country.

The Guide’s philosophy should embrace the concept of “eco-literacy” as developed, for one, by David W. Orr. The philosophy holds that mastery of one’s person in the context of one’s culture takes precedence over mastery of specific subject matter (for example, the concept of leading from within); that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to use it in a genuinely sustainable manner; that to know something, we must understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and the communities in which they live; and that the way learning occurs is as important as the content of particular subjects. As Orr suggests, “The skills, aptitudes, and attitudes necessary to industrialize the Earth are not necessarily the same as those that will be needed to heal the Earth or build durable economies and good communities” (Ecological Literacy: Education and Transition to a Postmodern World).

The discourse of the Guide is grounded in an Earth ethic based in part on rediscovering and respecting the missing harmony of fundamental laws of nature – namely, the elements - that have sustained life on Earth from the beginning of time and are still expressed in the ways of life of many indigenous peoples. Similarly, the world’s faiths, which command the loyalties of the vast bulk of humankind, have also begun to provide a spiritual basis for care of the environment. Through inter-religious dialogue initiated in part by the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) since the mid-1980s, religious life and the earth’s ecology are gradually becoming inextricably linked, more organically related. The indigenous belief systems and the world’s faiths, which express forms of spiritual ecology, will provide the Guide and ERC’s work with a foundation for imparting an ecological Earth ethic.

The Guides’ content conveys the importance of restoring balance in the human-Earth relationship by reconnecting links between the natural and cultural diversity upon which species survival depends. Biological diversity has been shown by UNESCO, UNEP and a host of other studies to be inextricably linked to cultural diversity. Cultural landscapes, including and especially sacred sites, and their links to conservation of biodiversity were recognized as early as the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (the so-called “World Heritage Convention”). It is no accident that many of the areas of highest biodiversity on the Earth are inhabited by indigenous and traditional peoples who as a rule live in harmony with their environment. This link, however, continues to erode under the weight of 19th century European industrial civilization discourse of utility, instrumental reason, and competitive individualism that to this day informs much of the present globalization process.]

The ERC is launching its training of trainers program with a “master trainer retreat” in Mexico scheduled for late 2003. The main purpose of the retreat is to prepare training of trainers’ teams who will finalize the draft curriculum Guide for field-testing in nine geographically and culturally diverse countries. These projected pilot countries are the Philippines, Jordan, Brazil, Kenya, India, USA (indigenous representitives), Viet Nam, Russia, Denmark. The ERC is recruiting teams, (curiculum guide collaberators), of three young leaders from each targeted country, (age range 21-35) with demonstrated knowledge and experience in ecological education and environmental management.