Learning to Take Care of Water — We Are Caring for All Life

3. Hermanos de la Tierra, Civil Asociation

Abstract: The awareness of environmental challenges today is especially urgent. The human being needs to rethink his way of being and living on the Planet; think about himself from another biocentric-ecocentrism worldview to build paradigms that allow him to live in the Biosphere with another logic, with a sense of belonging and responsibility for caring and not for mastering and submitting things. The knowledge and approach to the environment where we move and coexist is a concrete way to start that path. This is how environmental education becomes a fundamental tool for raising awareness, changing lifestyle and citizen participation that promotes responsible and democratic decisions. The transfer of scientific knowledge in a simple and practical way to the community, will allow us to make the world visible and to watch oneself in it, recognizing people as the protagonist for the care and safeguarding of Life. Water, the nearby aquatic ecosystems, are themes-spaces in favour of these attempts to “stand” with another consciousness in our House that is the World. The school is a privileged area for these proposals that go far beyond the development of specific topics and practices, it is about moving from a critical view of reality towards a re-signification of educational projects at all levels, to train people as protagonists in the construction of a Culture that puts Life at the centre of all human beings and tasks. The didactic guidelines of the work that began 10 years ago in schools in the rural area of Raco (Tucumán, Argentina) and the expansion of the project with teacher training spaces and the participatory formulation of solutions for the environmental problems of the area are presented (bioindication, purification ditches, composting toilets, waste separation). Achievements and difficulties are made explicit. 

Key words: environmental education, natural sciences, rural schools, aquatic ecosystems, bioindicators, Argentina, knowledge socialization