Environment Education in Goa: Creating Paper Tigers?

For some time now, India’s schools have had to accommodate a healthy dose of environmentalism within their curricula. This was not always the case. In 1991, the Supreme Court of India, in an unprecedented order, directed the mandatory inclusion of environment education in the coursework of all Indian educational institutions, from school to university. It repeated these directions in 2003 when it found they had not been sincerely implemented.

Nothing that really matches the sweep of the Supreme Court’s order – and its enormous consequences for environment protection – can be found in any other country’s environmental history in recent times.

I live in Goa, a small, verdant tourist paradise abutting the west coast of India. If anything, the order of the Supreme Court should ensure that Goa’s priceless ecological endowments including its rich biodiversity, its majestic rivers, beaches and paddy fields will be fiercely protected by the new armies of youngsters emerging from Goan schools and colleges. But is this really happening? What is the ground reality?

Over the past twenty years, Goa has passed from an innocent, low-scale, low density, largely rural, laid-back culture to a breathless, hectic, international tourist destination, invaded by thousands of visitors from India and abroad. Tourism has induced the construction of concrete jungles on virgin beaches. Coconut groves have been demolished for installing rooms and infrastructure. Unplanned complexes without adequate environmental safeguards for their sewage have led to contamination of ground water. High-decibel Goa-trance night parties have disturbed the peace of entire villages. Huge volumes of garbage have accumulated across the tourism areas especially the beaches, since the villages were never confronted in their living with such wastes and have absolutely no expertise in dealing with them.

Tourism has also disrupted social life, bringing in its baggage serious problems like pedophilia, gambling and drug use.

Apart from mass tourism of the kind that Goa has invited upon itself, the local unemployment scenario has created pressures for the erection of industries with their own significant demands on available water supplies and land. These industries naturally generate liquid effluents and air emissions, in addition to creating industrial wastes – some hazardous – for which there is neither landfill nor land.

As if this were not enough, recent developments in China – connected with the erection of infrastructure for the 2008 Olympic Games there – have led to a runaway demand for iron ore, much of it sourced to Goa. Tiny though it is, Goa contributes 60% of the exports of iron ore from India. Iron ore mining – by open cast or strip methods – is one of the most environmentally destructive industries on the planet. As the very term “strip mining” implies, the rich forest vegetation of the area to be mined is first stripped, followed by removal of the top layers of fertile soil. The mining activity then moves below the ground level in search of ore seams, disrupting ground water aquifers and depriving local communities of water supplies.

For every ton of iron ore exported to China from Goa, more than 3-4 tons of soil and rejects are produced as wastes. These are piled in huge, carelessly dumped, artificial mountains outside the mining leases. The washing that these mountains of mud and waste get from the heavy 4-month long (3000 mm) tropical monsoon results in most of this loose material eventually finding its way through the rivers into the estuaries and the sea where it creates its own brand of havoc.

Today, the spectre of climate change threatens to submerge some 5-10% of Goa’s coasts in a few decades through sea-level rise (SLR), sending the tourist industry’s principal assets quite literally under water.

Though these major developments have placed a serious question over the survival of Goa and its natural environment, the population of this small state is finding it extremely difficult to confront them in an intelligent way. The crucial question that concerns us here is how many of these issues get reflected through the environmental education programs that are being introduced in its schools as a result of the Supreme Court’s concern? If these issues – mining, tourism, sea level rise, garbage – are not directly engaged by the environmental education curriculum, what would be its utility? Are we all merely interested in producing paper tigers?

At the moment, the environment education curriculum has been introduced in all the schools of the country – including those in Goa – through the special agency of the Centre for Environment Education (located at Ahmedabad in Gujarat State). In Goa alone, the program at the moment reaches 200 schools and is supported by the Department of Education. Of these, 40 Goan schools have been initiated into a conservation program connected with the protection of Olive Ridley turtles on Goa’s coastal beaches.

Other activities linked with the environment education program of the schools involve preparation of environmental and wildlife posters and booklets; camps for students and educators in the wildlife sanctuaries and national parks; and organized quiz competitions. Most of these are fairly conventional and routine activities. They are organized because they are linked to a popular perception that they will enhance awareness of the natural environment and the stresses to which it is being increasingly subjected. Few of these activities have really speaking any meaningful connection with the controversial environmental threats seriously threatening the future of the state.

And neither are governments about to agree that they should have such a connection. Governments – and official education departments – are not enthusiastic about introducing discussions about the environment that might seriously challenge the present unsustainable industrial model of economic growth.

All this means is that when the children grow up to be adults, they will unquestioningly continue the processes that have been endorsed and supported by the present generation – based on an ever deepening consumption of the planet’s natural resources – and which are already reckoned to take human populations to more difficult and unpredictable times and climes, endangering in the process all non-human life as well.

How do we get out of this really? Will the present education system allow any other options? 

I am not suggesting at all that children should be exposed to nightmarish scenarios of sea level rise or water wars at a tender age. The most important aspect of educating youngsters is to ensure that they are not burdened with matters that can cause anxiety or depression. Ordinary life including the demands and expectations of parents, is difficult enough as it is. The problem is something else: is the prevalent system of teaching, its objectives and goals, conducive to environment education at all?

At the moment, the educational “system” has simply absorbed the issue of environment education into yet another subject for students to study in the conventional way they study other disciplines including geography or social science. It is the only way the system knows how to deal with such issues –even a potentially exciting subject like the natural environment is turned into a routine, textbook-and-examination oriented act of labour. Let me illustrate what I mean through a simple example.

One of the safe subjects studied in the environment course is trees and forest systems: their ecological functions; their role in climate change; their utility to human beings, etc. One can find any number of trees standing outside most classrooms in India (and Goa). However, the entire discussion on trees is reduced to playing with coloured pictures of trees in textbooks. The context of the discussion on trees is even more depressing: the students are sitting on benches which are made from dead trees. The text book’s pages come from a paper-making factory which devours trees as raw material.

Almost all children would love to learn about trees by climbing on them and playing in their branches. This is what normal children have done everywhere in all times and in all societies. Today, it appears, this is no longer possible, under excuses that children may get hurt or fall. Thus the environment education class largely ends up discussing trees as abstract pictures given in textbooks, howsoever colourful, without any direct encounter with trees themselves or the forest. This is a poor way to learn about nature, the mother of all environment concerns.

One source of the problem is the modern school environment which has – due to its history of development – actually no connection, emotional or otherwise, with the natural world. Sometimes, in fact, the two stand in contrast. Many schools, in fact, are built like factories: endless series of square blocks, poorly ventilated, like cells in prisons, as they obviously do “factory schooling”. Some look like army barracks. The idea behind such regimentation of space is probably that the school administration wants all sources of “distraction” to be eliminated. But recall what pandemonium a simple butterfly can cause by flying in through a classroom window?

In India, before the arrival of English education, most formal schooling took place under the village banyan tree. The classroom was located within a natural setting, in the lap of nature. This setting allowed for much informality, discussion, questioning and interaction. Modern education, we all know, has done away with that close association with nature for a purpose and relocated the students into concrete boxes – favoured jobwork of government public works contractors. In doing so, it has also eliminated the interactive learning element and turned educational practice into a one-way dissemination ticket, with fairly little freedom for open, unpredictable, creative learning.

School buildings are constructed, in fact, always in squares or rectangles, which facilitate one-way teaching. Rarely is there a classroom shaped as a circle, as this would disorient the established one-way pattern ruling between teacher and taught.

The prevailing wisdom assumes that learning experience must be isolated from the real world of nature, or society, in some way. In fact, the school simply assumes that learning naturally – or on the street – is not learning or not the best way to do learning. In fact, the reverse may very well be true, as hundreds of unconventional schools set in natural surroundings with free learning programs have demonstrated.
In the case of Goa, the present methods of environment education may well raise a generation of citizens with plenty of environmental information in their heads, ready subjects for quiz competitions. But it will not prepare them for looking critically at present “development” policies that are already threatening to initiate a near total destruction of their natural habitat in the near future.

Let us therefore admit that there is no sense in learning about the environment sitting in the sterile enclosure of a classroom. The environment is all around us, almost all of it outside class walls. If one is to learn about it, one can only do so by getting out of the box. The direct encounter with nature is a matter of close observation, experience, experiment coupled with feelings of love, awe and wonder. For these reasons, environment education can become a major impetus for a different kind of learning simply because it can occur only outside the classroom. Eventually, that experience is bound to affect our study of other subjects as well.

Educators, in fact, ought to use the opportunities provided by environment education to liberate learning from the box in which it is trapped. Once students find themselves in circumstances in which discussion is part of the process of learning, not only will questions readily emerge about garbage, or mining, or climate change, but education itself will revert to what it was always intended to be: a first-hand learning encounter, unmediated by unimaginative textbooks.

About the author:
Claude Alvares is Director of the Goa Foundation, a post he has occupied for twenty years. He has a Ph.D. from the Technische Hogeschool, Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. The Goa Foundation is a civil society association that monitors the impacts of development on the natural environment of Goa. The Foundation publishes literature for environment education and often moves the High Courts when faced with instances of environmental distress.