The quality of the environments affects the quality of our lives. Our actions as producers, consumers, voters, recreators, and procreators have a cumulative impact on the quality of the environments that sustain us. Our future, and the future of generations yet unborn, depends on choices we each make on a day to day basis. It is essential that our educational system develop and nurture environmentally literate citizens. Environmental education differs from environmental advocacy in empowering people with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to make informed choices rather than advocating specific choices.
Environmental education is a life long process.
As people develop, grow and learn, they gain increasingly sophisticated insights into the functioning systems of our planet and the ways in which humans interact with them. Environmentally literate people also share a variety of skills. Sound environmental education leads to action, the things we do as consumers, producers, recreators, procreators, and voters. That is, environmentally literate individuals make choices and take day to day actions that will conserve and enhance the ability of the environment to sustain functioning ecosystems and meet human needs now and for generations yet to come. Actions may be as simple as seeing that trash is put in proper containers or more complex activities such as working to promote proper use of rain forest resources or facilitating recycling activity.