Loren wants 'environment' subject taught at high school

Imagine high school students painstakingly maintaining an aquarium of tropical fishes at school not only for their beauty, but for them to better understand how fragile the world's ecosystems can be.

Senator Loren Legarda said that this scene may be replicated in schools nationwide once her proposal to include the subject, Environment and Development, in the secondary level curriculum is passed into law.

The author of the Solid Waste Management Act and other landmark environmental laws, Loren has filed Senate Bill No. 1097 to realize her dream of the Filipino youth having a solid foundation on ecology and the fight against environmental despoliation.

"Developing the consciousness of the youth on conserving the environment will help ensure the continuity of our efforts to balance ecology and social development," said Loren.

Loren pointed out that the youth has a natural enthusiasm towards conserving the environment as made evident by the big number of youth volunteer-members of the tree-planting environmental group Luntiang Pilipinas, which she founded in 1998.

In 2001, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) feted Loren and Luntiang Pilipinas in Turin, Italy for raising environmental and ecological consciousness in the Philippines.

Spearheaded by Loren who has put up tree sapling nurseries, Luntian has already planted over two million trees nationwide in the last nine years.

Still, Loren said recently at the floor of the Senate, in her speech titled CPR for Mother Earth, that the battle against environmental despoliation is a losing one unless the people of the world move as one to save the planet.

Loren lamented that while the present school curricula flesh out the constitutional mandate to inculcate into the youth nationalism and patriotism, concern for the environment is lacking in subject matters taught in school.

"Our children must know that unless we take care of the environment today, their children and the succeeding generations will live in a barren and inhospitable earth marked by vicious climate changes, drought and lack of natural resources," she warned.

Loren said it should be impressed on the youth, as the leaders of tomorrow, that there is a need to strike a balance between social development and progress on one side and preserving the fragile ecological balance.

Under Loren's proposed law, the subject Environment and Development shall instruct high school students on the state of the Philippine and global environment, the threats of environmental degradation and its impact on human wellbeing.

She said the value of the natural resources conservation in the context of sustainable development will be part of the subject, whose content shall be developed by a curriculum board to be created.

Loren stressed that it will be the duty of the board, as well as the teachers, to make learning about the environment attractive to students.

"This is the reason why I want theories to be supplemented by hands-on activities like maintaining simple ecosystems like those found in an aquarium," she said.