Deep ecology: the awakening process to a complex environmental education

Abstract

Facing the contemporary environmental crisis, the environmental education emerges as a tool for coping and minimizing the impacts of human civilization on natural resources. So, in most of the works, what is observed is the predominance of environmental thinking, often devoid of ecosystem vision. The speech is limited to the need of preserving resources related to a distorted and uncritical development. Little attention is given to the dimensions of sustainability, the environment being treated as a part of the individual, mere outer portion of the human body. This perspective demonstrates the fragility of this speech to an effective awareness by revealing the disorder of the actions that occur within a deterministic ecological process, with little attention to the educational sphere, related to cognitive, ethical and cultural factors. Within these aspects, Complex Environmental Education suggests self-knowledge, awareness and environmental action in pursuit of the development that considers the integral quality of life, rather than the economic variable. In this sense, the deep ecology booster acts as an agent in the process of awakening to environmental education that is self-sustainability and so complex, because it helps the human perception on the integrative and dependent view of all beings, unifying them for the life.