“The greatest and most depressing conservation problem is not the destruction of habitats or overexploitation, but human indifference in the face of such problems”. This reasoning by the professor of the University of Cambridge, Andrew Balmford, is particularly pertinent when it comes to the relationship between Brazilians and the Amazon Rainforest. For most Brazilians, the Amazon is some exotic and faraway place with which they maintain only a feeble bond of affection and responsibility. Despite the fact that the Amazon Rainforest takes up 61 percent of national territory, more than 80 percent of all Brazilians live outside this region and are simply too far away to be concerned over slash-and-burn practices, chainsaws and clearing-by-chain habits that destroy the forest. On the other hand, those that live on the rainforest’s farming border, witnessing the highest rates of tropical forest deforestation in the world are, typically, migrants and the sons and daughters of migrants that need income but have little knowledge of how to use the resources the forest has to offer. They share the notion that the only way they can make a living is by cattle breeding. For them, the forest is worth more when cleared and converted into pasture land.
According to this vision, a sustainable future for the Amazon Rainforest will require the dissemination of knowledge about the forest – its uses, its importance and its state of conservation – and, above all, changes to the values attributed to her. People will have to care for the forest, both for the products and services it has to offer and for ethical, aesthetical, cultural and sentimental reasons. Sense and sensibility will have to shape the basis of a responsible relation with the forest. Indeed, knowledge and values are acquired through experience and through education above everything else. Therefore, the environmental crisis in the Amazon is, in the end, also an educational one. In response to this, we have created the Amazonian School, whose goal is to develop and test educational approaches to stir among Brazilians – especially among young people – interest, attachment and consequently respect for the forest.
Its History
The New York Marathon of 1998. At the 25-kilometer mark on a 42-kilometer track, a sudden and complete fracture by stress of my right femur bone put an end to my plans to complete the most hyped street race in the world. I fell into a state of shock on the cold asphalt surface without a clue of what had happened and even less of the implications that that would have on my life. Three surgeries in the 4 months that followed, a severe hospital infection and nine months without being able to walk also put an early end to my doctor`s degree in ecology, since, to carry out field work in the reservations of the Biologic Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project on crutches would be quite impossible. On a twist of fate, my short career as an inspiring tropical forest ecologist came to an abrupt end; however, with that event, my professional life steered into a different direction which would culminate in the creation of the Amazonian School.
| “I fell into a state of shock on the cold asphalt surface without a clue of what had happened and even less of the implications that that would have on my life.” |
While I was recovering from the fracture, I accepted an invitation to become the academic director of the Natural Resources Handling and Human Ecology in the Amazon program, from the
School for International Training (SIT). SIT offers study programs in several countries – Semester Study Abroad – that afford American university students a rare opportunity to immerse in specific themes. The Brazilian program had its headquarters in Belém do Pará, where students spent the first 5 weeks living with families while frequenting Portuguese classes and attended talks given by the representatives of local institutions dedicated to social and environmental issues in the Amazon, such as the Emílio Goeldi Museum, Imazon and Funai. During the following phase, we spent an entire month travelling and learning more about everything pertaining to conservation and development in the region, from the hydroelectric powerplants of Tucuruí and Balbina and the lumber companies of Paragominas, mining in Carajás, Serra do Navio and Trombetas River, plantations in Jari and Tomé-Açú, livestock breeding in Marajó and fisheries in the state of Pará, up to the work conducted by the Joy and Health Project on Tapajós River and the Sustainable Development Reservation of Mamiruauá in the lowlands of Solimões River. In the program’s last stage, students had a full month to develop their own research program under my supervision.
It was a fantastic experience, but I was bothered by the fact that just a handful of American students had the privilege to meet the Brazilian Amazon in such a complete and deep way. The majority of those students did not get involved with the issue of conservation upon returning to their everyday lives in the US, and almost all of them lost any connection they may have had with the Amazon Rainforest. So, I decided to seek a way to offer that opportunity also to Brazilian students. With this motivation, I created in 2000 a company called Amazonarium, whose mission was to encourage and enable the arrival of students to the Amazon offering excursions and opportunities for cultural immersion similar to those offered by SIT. In that same year, through Amazonarium, I met businesswoman and environmentalist Vitória da Riva Carvalho, or Mrs. Vitória for short, the owner of the Cristalino Jungle Lodge and president of the Cristalino Ecological Foundation (FEC), and with her I established a collaboration to take the students to the High Forest, within the Deforestation Arc.
In 2002, Mrs. Vitória and I christened our collaboration with the name Amazonian School. The following year, we conducted our first workshop with young people from public schools of High Forest. Sometime later, Edson Grandisoli, who was fortunately my best friend in those graduation days at USP (São Paulo University), joined the team and began to bring groups of young people to our Amazonian School, students from private high schools in São Paulo where he taught. In 2005, the Amazonian School was incorporated to FEC and began to receive support from sponsors thanks to the efforts of its executive director, at the time, Renato Farias. In that same year, I returned to the academic environment with a doctor`s degree from the University of Oxford, in England, to investigate cognitive and social factors, as well as those related to affection, that determine human behavior in killing large felines and how to use education and communication – how to use the Amazonian School – to influence those factors and increase human tolerance to leopards. In the following years, the Amazonian School would consolidate itself as a laboratory of techniques and strategies to educate towards conservation.
Its goals
In these 8 years of experiments, the Amazonian School explored the means to especially reach these three goals: (i) to identify, measure and monitor the factors that determine the behavior of people with regard to the forest and its biodiversity, (ii) to influence such a behavior through education in order to make it more compatible with conservation practices, and (iii) developed an educational model for conservation, which is sustainable both from the institutional and financial standpoint.
| “Understanding human behavior with regard to the natural world should be the first step of any educational program for conservation.” |
Understanding human behavior with regard to the natural world should be the first step of any educational program for conservation. The main threats to biodiversity – destruction of habitats, overexploitation, the introduction of exotic species and pollution – are the direct result of human behavior. When the conservationist educator identifies and measures the personal and social factors that determine a behavior of interest, he/she can choose the interventions that specifically address the more relevant factors, devising strategies which are more effective and efficient towards the desired change in behavior. The measuring of these factors also enables the educator to monitor changes derived from his interventions, evaluating the impact of education, ultimately demonstrating the success of his/her work. Despite the importance of these evaluations, rare environmental education projects make use of them. Education for conservation has traditionally been the field of work of biologists and other natural sciences professionals whose academic formation does not include theory and methods from social sciences applied to the study and changes of human behavior.
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Several of the activities of the Amazonian School had as a starting point the knowledge, perceptions and values of the target audience, evaluated in a qualitative and quantitative manner through research methods from social sciences adapted to local peculiarities. Questionnaires, individual interviews, focal groups and concept maps are examples of such methods. We devised scales to quantify the variables of interest and performed evaluations before and after interventions so as to measure their impact on the participants. The best example of this approach among the activities conducted by the Amazonian School was the People and Leopards Project, the theme of my doctor’s degree.
The main educational approaches tested by the Amazonian School are those that prioritize active learning, in which students build their own concepts on the information they acquire exploring the forest. Students are encouraged to share and discuss their findings and ideas, broadening their approach from a local one to a global view. In this manner, they come closer to understanding their connection with the forest; of how they affect and are affected by the Amazon Rainforest.
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In the workshops of the Day in the Forest, playful activities were developed to awaken and strengthen the affection ties of children with the forest. Ironically, one in every five children in that part of the farming border in the Amazon had never set foot in the forest at all! The Alternative Practices program had a goal to stimulate an interest for economic activities that did not imply in felling the forest among young people from the rural environment, among which was ecotourism. The White-Cheeked-Spider-Monkey project investigated the potential of the charismatic primate, which is endemic to the region, as a flagship species for the protection of the Cristalino State Park. In the Leopards and People project, talks and discussions in the classroom in a variety of communications tools, among them banners, drawing workshops, theater, activity books and a guide for rural producers (The Leopard and People Life Sharing Guide) were developed to increase the tolerance of people to the great felines. In the Workshops on Socioeconomic Development and Conservation of Biodiversity, visiting students from some of the most influent private schools of São Paulo – probable future decision makers – are exposed to the realities of the deforestation border, discuss the opportunities for integration between development and conservation in the region, and ponder on their responsibility towards the destiny of the Amazon Rainforest, both as citizens as well as future professionals.
Education for conservation takes time to cause the desired impact. Many environmental education projects are closed down due to a lack of institutional and financial support before they completely fulfill their mission. This amounts to a waste of resources and contributes towards the notion that environmental education is not effective for conservation ends. Environmental education, combined with legal and economic incentives, plus a participation of the community itself, can really be effective, although on the long term. It is vital, therefore, that it is sustainable both from an institutional and a financial standpoint.
| “Many environmental education projects are closed down due to a lack of institutional and financial support before they completely fulfill their mission.” |
The Amazonian School tested sustainability mechanisms for environmental education. In its collaboration with local schools, it involved directors and teachers and proposed the creation of an Educational Workgroup for Conservation, consisting of representatives from competent local institutions, including the secretaries of education and environment, as a means to legitimize its actions. Its association with a private tourism enterprise supplied us with insights on the opportunities and synergy in integrating environmental education with ecotourism; education is benefitted by the infrastructure of tourism, while in turn it adds value to the enterprise as the social and environmental awareness increases among tourists. Aside from that, tourists can contribute directly by means of a “conservation tax”, through purchasing products from the project, such as t-shirts, stickers and publications and also by divulging the project in social networks.
In the Sister Schools program, we encourage cooperation between local rural public schools and visiting private schools, with academic benefits for both sides and material benefits for local schools, since the cooperation involved the donation of school materials on the part of the visiting school and part of the revenue generated from the visit was used to subsidize the participation of students from local schools. For this effort to develop a sustainable model of environmental education, reducing geographic distances as well as cultural ones among social classes in a country of inequalities such as ours, the Amazonian School received the 2007 Whitley Award. The award is considered the conservation Oscar in England and was received from the hands of Princess Anne in London.
Achievements and the years ahead
The Amazonian School evaluated more than 2000 students from local schools and visiting groups, involving in its experiments approximately 1,500 children and young people as well as 50 teachers from 15 local public schools, aside from more than 300 young people and 25 teachers from 5 private schools in São Paulo and 2 foreign universities. Our results have been presented in congresses and other events and published in popular and scientific media. Still, in order to share the lessons learned with other conservationist educators, we launched at the end of 2010, in São Paulo’s Zoological Gardens, the Planning, Implementation and Action Evaluation Course on Environmental Education.
As it is a common practice in scientific research, some of the themes addressed throughout this journey brought about new issues. Among the next issues to be addressed by the Amazonian School, the most stimulating are those referring to the project’s reproducibility. We are seeking opportunities to test the applicability of some of our approaches in other parts of the Amazon’s Deforestation Arc as a whole, in other Brazilian biomes and within different institutional contexts, with a special interest on the entrepreneurial and governmental contexts. We hope in this manner to contribute for Brazilians to take up their role in conserving their forests and the exceptional biodiversity our country holds.
Silvio Marchini is a Doctor in Conservation of Wildlife and founder of the School of the Amazon. E-mail: silvio@escoladaamazonia.org
