Raising awareness among those who will tomorrow dedicate themselves to educating new generations about the importance of the oceans in the sustainability of the planet is the central purpose of the Good Use and Bad Use of the Sea conference, which the Faculty of Education and Sport Sciences is promoting this Monday together with the Campus do Mar and the Galician Culture Council. Through different presentations and workshops, this initiative seeks to delve deeper into the need to promote a “new culture of sea use”, as highlighted at its inauguration by the coordinator of the Science, Nature and Society section of the Galician Culture Council, Francisco Díaz-Fierros, who defended the importance of educational work that allows all scientific knowledge generated around the oceans “to also be shared by those who are the protagonists of its use”.
“For Galicia, the sea is of vital importance,” added Professor María Álvárez Lires, coordinator of a conference that seeks to show “what are the good and bad practices”, with the aim of the teachers of tomorrow “acting in favor of the environment”. To this end, this seminar, which is being broadcast by UVigo-TV, combined the presentations of the professor of the University of Umeå (Sweden) Nora Rhätzell, the researcher of the National Institute for Fisheries Development of Cape Verde Elisia Silva and the professor of the University of Surrey (United Kingdom) David Uzzell, with the installation in the faculty of the workshops of the program Dive into the Ocean, of the Campus do Mar. Hence, the vice-chancellor Juan Manuel Corbacho emphasized the transversal and international nature of this day, “two of the main axes of our Campus CREA specialization project”, in an inaugural event in which the director of the Campus of International Excellence-Campus do Mar, Emilio Fernández, and the dean, Vicente Romo, were also present.
How to bring climate change to local reality
Along with the different activities that took place at the faculty, this day will be completed with the lecture that this afternoon will be given at Casa das Campás by Professor of Environmental Psychology David Uzzell, who will try to answer the question of why knowing the consequences of climate change does not cause changes in the behavior of citizens. “We have to make climate change real for people, communicate its serious effects in a personal, immediate, local and concrete way”, emphasizes this researcher, for whom “people tend to think that climate change will have a great effect at a global level, but not significant effects locally”. Hence, this British researcher emphasizes the need to develop “policies and actions that make citizens aware that we have to act in our own neighborhoods or in our workplaces”, for which he considers communication work necessary to make people understand how “it will affect their lives or their jobs”.
“We are talking all the time about what will happen in 40 years and people who don’t know if they will be unemployed next week don’t think 40 years ahead,” added this professor, who in his report will propose specific examples, such as forest fires or floods, with the idea of showing how “extreme weather episodes, which are happening more frequently and intensely, have direct consequences” in people’s lives. Along the same lines, Uzzell also advocates raising awareness among citizens that the actions they can take to combat climate change do not have to be seen as “a change in their lifestyle so they will have to stop doing things,” but as a change “that can lead them to a better and healthier life.”
The importance of promoting sustainable development was also the focus of Nora Rhätzell’s report, which focused on delving deeper into the relationships between nature and the world of work based on the interviews she conducted with 120 union leaders from different countries. In this sense, this professor of Sociology defended that “human beings have to think of themselves as part of nature, not as something alien” and work as a process that implies “a constant transformation of nature”. Based on these ideas, Rhätzell presented the students with three ways of understanding this relationship between work and the environment; the technological one, which sees nature “as a source of resources” and which is more frequent when “there is no form of relationship between work and the natural resources that are being used”; the anthropocentric one, which approaches this relationship “from the point of view of human needs”; and the holistic one, which promotes “an alliance of work and nature”, which requires “changing the social relations of production”.
The sea with a gender perspective
Another of the objectives of the second edition of Good Use and Bad Use of the Sea was to address ocean conservation from a gender perspective, thanks to the participation of Cape Verdean researcher Elisia Silva, who delved into the effects that not taking into account the reality of women in fisheries policies had in her country. “It is very important to raise awareness that we all have the same right of access to these resources”, stressed Silva da Cruz, who emphasized that, despite this, men and women play different roles in this area. “For example, women have a role more related to marketing or more linked to the collection of seafood”, stressed the researcher, who emphasized that, although women play “an important role in the world of fishing, this is not visible”.
In this sense, Silva recounted an experience in her country, where “policies that did not consider women caused us environmental damage”. According to her, the fact that the reality of women in fishing communities was not taken into account meant that “in order to have an economic activity, due to the problem of poverty that exists in our country, they often had to collect and sell species that were prohibited”. She added that “both knowledge of the species and employment alternatives were lacking”, which is why the training and awareness-raising work carried out subsequently, as well as “the integration of women in different areas”, brought with them “a positive impact on the environment and the quality of life of the community”.
Duvi Fountain
