By: Ana Laura CattaneoScience Coordinator at New Horizons Bilingual School. She holds a degree in Nutrition with graduate studies in multiple areas of Nutrition, a course in University Pedagogy, and is currently pursuing a Master's in Education. It is beautiful to see the Dominican community taking part in activities that help improve the environment, as happened during the coastal cleanup along the Malecón, at the mouth of the Ozama River, which was full of plastics and other waste, where people of all ages showed solidarity with their surroundings and awareness of the impact that citizens' poor practices have on nature. In the Dominican Republic, individuals and non-governmental organizations can be seen developing initiatives to care for and protect the environment—for example, the establishment of collection centers for sorted non-solid waste, aimed at making recycling easier. No one can deny the effects of climate change on nature or the impact of human actions on the natural environment. The reality is that our country lacks an organized waste disposal system, and there is a clear gap in education around waste disposal. Some blame the lack of trash cans; yet in many countries, national parks have nowhere to leave waste, and they aren't dirty because visitors take their plastics and containers back with them, while in others, no one can cut down a tree without special permission, even on their own land. This raises the question: is it possible to raise awareness and train generations who will make decisions and move a country forward with environmental impact in mind? According to the principles set out in the document United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (Delors, 2006), "environmental education based on specific strategies plays a fundamental role in building societies with the skills to contribute to social change toward protecting natural resources and reducing harm to the environment." For about 15 years now, various studies on values education have been published (Molano, 2012; Sauvé, 2004; Gutierrez & Pozo, 2006; Ruiz, Barraza & Ceja, 2009; Alvarez & Vega, 2006) regarding environmental care, guiding the implementation of these approaches in schools—not just in theory, but through school-wide interventions with specific activities and monitoring and evaluation programs. Now more than ever, it is necessary to include educational programs in the school curriculum that foster environmental values, such as respect for the environment, ecological awareness, and eco-friendly initiative and participation, among others. These programs, developed in the classroom, must be reinforced by the example set by the institution itself—in other words, the school must practice what it preaches. How is this achieved? By reducing plastic use, avoiding straws, sorting solid waste, recycling materials, planting and expanding green spaces, and implementing eco-friendly energy systems. It is good news to know that some educational institutions in the Dominican Republic are promoting environmental education. One example is DEEP: an environmental education program in the Dominican Republic. It is a project launched in collaboration with Hiram College, Learning Streams International, and COUNTERPART International, a U.S. environmental protection agency, and carried out by several private schools in Santo Domingo, where scientifically relevant protocols are used to gather and collect data on the quality of fresh and coastal waters, rivers, and mangroves, among others. Initiatives like this, along with the structural changes and eco-friendly lifestyle habits schools can adopt, will surely leave a legacy of citizens who care about their natural environment, ultimately achieving a positive impact on the Dominican environment.
