A piccoli passi verso la sostenibilità: educare a prendersi cura dei luoghi

Abstract

We need a special kind of education to achieve sustainability: it must involve every learning context and every age of life; it should enable us to understand ourselves and nature, together with the complex links with natural and social environments; it should improve equity and responsibility, knowledge and dialogue; it should move us to adopt behaviours and practices which
enable us to live a full life, aiming to empathy, respect, care and cooperation.
A possible educational way to implement sustainability is caring for places. Learning this practice enables us to construct our identities through interaction with places of life, which are keepers of remembrance and sets of vivifying touch with the difference; to oppose the present distance between culture and life; to defend the environment, making clear the interdependence between human and natural communities; to foster the feeling of community and ways of active citizenship.