Abstract:

The history of man is the history of the relationship that he establishes with the lived environment. Man has always drawn from it everything that could be helpful to meet his own needs. Over time and with the increasing exploitation of resources, he has experienced both the limited resources and the consequences of deforestation and also the problems caused by the presence of pollutants in air, water, earth which have changed the climate, human life and the lives of other living beings.

This awareness hasn’t led to a gradual improvement of the environmental situation or to a radical change in consumption and development patterns and lifestyles. For this reason, environmental issue should be engage through a constant and useful responsibility process of governments, institutions, associations and citizens. Even if they have global reach, ecological problems, in fact, should be engage from the local level, promoting the active participation of citizens, even the smallest. So it's important to provide people with necessary knowledge about how activate appropriate behaviours. Only in this way it will be able to arouse acceptance of responsibility in government and decision-makers.

Every field of knowledge reflects upon changes dictated by ecological turning-point. In dialogue between knowledge, pedagogy requires a new and deeper reflection on educational themes of environmental protection and care: this reflection should be set at the base of a new integral and planetary humanism. In this paper it is shown the contribution of Italian pedagogy to develop environmental and sustainability education.

In particular it is explained the thought of two important pedagogists who deal with environmental education and sustainability:
• Malavasi talks about “green pedagogy”. According to this author, the pedagogical reflection is called to encourage a hermeneutics and projectual educational awareness. He proposes the model of educational sustainable planning.
• Mortari talks about “ecological pedagogy”. The author invites us to educate people to take care of every living being, following the principle of thought and action from oneself. Mortari replaces the ethics of care to the utilitarian current idea. This ethics is committed to promoting a good quality of life.

Keywords:

Environmental education, pedagogy, sustainability, ethics.