Photo by Truthseeker08
Ecological Education, one of the seven Laudato Si’ Action Platform goals, points us to the need to rethink and redesign curricular and institutional reform in the spirit of integral ecology to foster ecological awareness and transformative action.
This striving “to promote a new way of thinking about human beings, life, society, and our relationship with nature” is urgently needed right now in our schools, within our families, and throughout our parishes and communities. (LS 215)
CAFOD—an international development charity, the official aid agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales—has provided an invaluable and trusted webinar outlining 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including specific goals related to Ecological Education:
- Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
- Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
- Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
- Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
- Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
We humbly invite you to use this webinar in whatever way best suits both where you are in your journey toward integral ecology and where you are going.
As further inspiration each step of the way, Green Churches, a charitable organization helping Christian communities in Canada care for God’s Creation, offers these beautiful prayers for creation from the Psalms and the Saints.
These too are marvelous lampposts illuminating your path with reflections on love, justice, peace, our natural resources, kindness to animals, the beauty of the earth, and a great variety of other prayers to God for the splendor of his creation.
We offer both the CAFOD webinar and Green Churches’s prayers in the joyful hope they will continue to stir an “openness to what is good, true and beautiful” within each one us, so that ours is “a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.” (LS 205, 207)