Applied enviro education turns on Namibians

THE Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) recently hosted a two-week course in Applied Environmental Education for 28 people from Peru, Nepal, Nigeria and Namibia.

This course is the third one in a series of six held at the CCF. Previous topics included Conservation Biology Management and Game Capture and Transportation.The course, which focused on natural resource issues and applications for solving environmental problems, was sponsored jointly by The Smithsonian Institute, the CCF, Environmental Education and Conservation Global (EECG) and Wilderness Safaris.Rudi Rudran from The Smithsonian Institute said that they hoped to present all these courses again and so to teach Namibians to become instructors themselves as well as to enable them to present the courses to Namibians.Ed McCrea from the EECG, who has presented a similar course in eight different countries, said that he had never had such an enthusiastic and outstanding group who had so much wanted to learn.Eslon Kaangundue, a teacher from Windhoek who also runs an environmental club at the school, said that it was of extreme importance to involve the youth in conservation and the lessons learned during the course could be directly implemented in the Environmental Club and in Environmental Studies at school.”Conservation transcends borders and individual lifetimes.Education and training are the tools to sustain biodiversity for the future”. said Laurie Marker, Director of the CCF.Previous topics included Conservation Biology Management and Game Capture and Transportation. The course, which focused on natural resource issues and applications for solving environmental problems, was sponsored jointly by The Smithsonian Institute, the CCF, Environmental Education and Conservation Global (EECG) and Wilderness Safaris. Rudi Rudran from The Smithsonian Institute said that they hoped to present all these courses again and so to teach Namibians to become instructors themselves as well as to enable them to present the courses to Namibians. Ed McCrea from the EECG, who has presented a similar course in eight different countries, said that he had never had such an enthusiastic and outstanding group who had so much wanted to learn. Eslon Kaangundue, a teacher from Windhoek who also runs an environmental club at the school, said that it was of extreme importance to involve the youth in conservation and the lessons learned during the course could be directly implemented in the Environmental Club and in Environmental Studies at school. “Conservation transcends borders and individual lifetimes. Education and training are the tools to sustain biodiversity for the future”. said Laurie Marker, Director of the CCF.