“Dealing with the ecological crisis: a case for cultural approaches”

Abstract

The environmental crisis we are currently experiencing is still mostly approached through technocratic strategies. Technical approaches have, however, deep limits in promoting long-term results. The ecological crisis is instead a cultural problem, to which we need to react with cultural approaches. It will be, in the next decades, essential to involve the Global Citizenship in pursuing a radical change in lifestyles and mentality about the role of the humankind on the planet and its relationship with the nature. In order to achieve awareness and responsible attitudes towards the environment, beyond technical tools, we urgently need education to sustainable patterns and a new transdisciplinary orientation in the knowledge development. Education to sustainability will depend both on institutional pathways and on grassroots and civil society movements that, proposing alternative lifestyles, informally educate the population to different and more sustainable worldviews than the western consumeristic one. Beside the involvement of the population on a global scale, dealing with such global problem requires an approach in the research that promotes cooperation and integration among the fields of studies and the society practitioners, beyond the traditional sectorization and division among the sciences, and without which is not possible to develop an integrated and holistic understanding of the current situation.