Abstract
Environmental literacy denotes an individual’s set of abilities and commitments necessary to find, understand, assess, and act on information about the health of our environment. So, environmental literacy embodies values, beliefs and attitudes toward sustaining a healthy environment. Prerequisite to environmental literacy is a standard conception of literacy and a more specific idea, science literacy. An environmentally literate person understands the workings of modern science, and of policy-making. They also know how to apply their abilities to affect changes in society. Each of these elements builds on the others. Being aware of and having knowledge about environmental problems only supports the higher order skills necessary to be fully environmentally literate. To understand environmental literacy, we must first understand literacy and, then, science literacy. Literacy encompasses some form of competency, whether in literature, cooking, yachting, child rearing, playing the violin, or any other recognized vocation. At the core of literacy is the ability to read and write so as to learn from the knowledge of others and then contribute to any particular body of human endeavor. This chapter discusses literacy, science literacy, environmental literacy, and, finally, the arts of filtering knowledge and argumentation. Knowing how all these notions interact informs the communication process.
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Jurin, R.R., Roush, D., Danter, J. (2010). Developing Your Environmental Literacy. In: Environmental Communication. Second Edition. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3987-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3987-3_3
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