Global Citizenship Education: An Emerging Perspective for the Sustainable Development
The twenty first century will not be easy for humanity. Speaking of sustainable development represents a radical humanist discourse and ethical worldview that conceives environmental question as an emergent element of The Limits to Growth that the Club of Rome would advocate in pioneer form since 1972. Speaking of sustainable development implies, indeed, renegotiate socioeconomic behavior and mankind status in the world through a transhumanist feeling and a cosmodern consciousness which allow us to identify environmental problems of the only legitimate “nation-state” of the human beings: planet Earth.
From this perspective of “Homeland-Earth”, and seeing the global warning provoked by the current levels of CO2 that supports our home, it is urgent to start a real axiological, political, educational, and epistemological revolution that aims to change the prevailing moral discourse and consumerist habits of the whole humanity, until today predatory and exploitative of the nature, for multiple possibilities of building a sustainable future horizon. Evidently, such a transcultural and transnational conception can only be achieved with the multidimensional understanding of the structure of the Reality, where all matter-energy converges in the space-time systemically interconnecting different eco-anthropological phenomena.
Environmental management and the challenge of achieving sustainable development is a global problem that requires looking at the political, economic, cultural, and educational phenomenas of the current paradigm, from a poly-logic phenomenology that perceive different levels of Reality which form the world and cosmos humanly known. The same way that own ontology structure nature in different levels of reality with different physical laws, human beings have different layers, levels and planes of epistemological perception which structure and concretize its historical complexity in the cosmological context. Therefore, the environmental problem involves the complex challenge of developing transdisciplinary knowledge to foster new transnational, transcultural, and transpolitical conceptions able to prevent future ecological disasters.
Thus, the Global Citizenship Education proposed by UNESCO for the post-2015 agenda will have to train people with the same philosophical conception of safeguarding humanity and the planet. To achieve these goals, GCE not only has to think about the future, but it will have to anticipate it training people which control better their own evolution. At the dawn of the third millennium, sustainable development should consider the needs of the human species in relation with the nature toward a new perspective emanating from own consciousness of the individual-society-species. The understanding of the human condition in the world requires a break with the positivism thinking of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which reduces and separates the subject from the object, and that confuses social development with economic growth.
Therefore, taking into account the very important recommendations coming from the Belgrade Charter (1975), the Conference of Tbilisi (1977), the Brundtland Report (1987), the Earth Charter (Rio 92), Finland Report (1997), Kyoto Protocol (1997-2005), Johannesburg Summit (2002), the Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (2009), the COP16 in Cancun (2010), and Rio+20 (2012), -among many others-; there are not doubts that global governance of natural resources implies a deep tri-ethical transformation of the individual-society-species: mental-spiritual, social-planetary and cosmic-environmental. This is, effectively, about a new type of epistemological, political, and educational self-eco-organization to create cosmodern consciousness in the current and future global citizenship. Maybe it could be a good idea, dear readers, to start changing the epistemological system of reference, understanding the idea that current world-society is not a gift from our parents, but a loan from our sons and daughters. And what will future generations think if we do not act today and we do not do everything in our hands to safeguard it creating new alternatives of sustainability?
Javier Collado Ruano
Director of Edition
This article was published on 5th June: World Environmental Day, in Global Education Magazine.