Environmental Education is Essential in Today's Life

The environmental damage already reeked due to alarming on-going population explosion, rapid movement towards urbanization and industrialisation. Increasing needs of energy and fast scientific and technological advancement cannot be reversed unless there is collective thinking, will and effort towards environmental degradation. Ecological education, together with sound legislation, sustainable execution, and responsible actions by individuals and communities, is an important component of an effective policy framework for protecting and managing the environment. Centre for Environment Education, CEE was created in recognition of the significance of environmental education in India's overall environment and development strategy. The result of a unique partnership between government and a non-governmental institution, CEE was established as a Centre of Excellence in 1984, supported by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India. Environmental education employs and enhances critical thinking and basic life skills. It is difficult to overstate the importance of environmental education. Popular understanding of the relationships between society and the natural foundation upon which civilization is constructed is critical to our future, and exposure to nature is likewise vitally important to the healthy emotional and cognitive development of children and young adults. In the coming decades, the public will more frequently be called upon to appreciate composite environmental issues, assess risk, estimate proposed environmental plans and understand how individual decisions affect the environment at local and global scales. Creating a scientifically informed citizenry requires a concerted, systematic approach to environmental education. A current study found that kids today spend an average of 6 hours each day in front of the computer and TV but less than 4 minutes a day in unstructured outdoor play. This creates severe health and mental problems among kids these days.School days are the best time to teach children about different ways of life because it’s a time when children structure their thoughts and ideas. From the time a child is a preschooler, and throughout the child’s school years, the job of revealing children to the world around them is an essential pre-requisite or foundation to learning that is often neglected by parents who are not conscious of this need. Now a day’s schools are realizing this need of stressing on making children conscious about the environmental issues so that they can secure their and the world’s future. There is no end to the amount of environmental awareness to which parents and teachers need to expose the children. It is essential that parents should prepare their children and continue to teach and expose them to the world around them from pre-school onwards.