Ecology and Education in Marine Protected Areas: Insights from Brazil and South America - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 347

specifi cally directed towards regional South American MPAs, where programs are
restricted basically to ecological evaluations.
Confronted with pressing near-future challenges related to GECs, measures to
implement long term socio-ecological research in South American MPAs are urgent.
The recent establishment of new Long Term Socio- Ecological Research (LTSER)
programs, such as LTSER-Chile, offers a holistic approach that offers an alternative
to integrate into and complement with, the several MPA's efforts already in
development.

23.4 Integrated Educational Experiences

in South American MPAs

For most conservation unit categories, the development of educational actions is
mandatory. For example, Brazilian legislation “SNUC” (Brasil 2000 ) defi nes as a
main objective “to promote education, educational conditions, environmental inter-
pretation and the recreation in contact with nature” ( http://www.mma.gov.br/areas-
protegidas/sistema-nacional-de-ucs-snuc ) . However, environmental education (EE)
in Brazilian MPAs is still incipient. Activities for visitors are frequent at marine
parks. However, most cases lack instructive activities. Hence, they offer only a
superfi cial tourism, not a genuine ecotourism nor an educational experience.
Structured EE activities are rare (Ghilardi and Berchez 2010 ), and most of them
have a poor conceptual basis (Berchez et al. 2007 ).
Since the 1977 Tbilisi Conference Statement, evolving environmental educa-
tional concepts were synthesized during the Rio 92 Conference (Pedrini and Brito
2006 ). There is growing consensus that, for the betterment of living conditions as
well as of those related to the environment, changes in basic values and attitudes are
fundamental (La Trobe and Acott 2000 ). Toward that aim, the Field Environmental
Philosophy (FEP) program developed at Omora Park in the Cape Horn Biosphere
Reserve in Chile provides a valuable methodological approach that can be adapted
to other MPAs (see Aguirre Sala 2015 in this volume [Chap. 15 ]). FEP's methodol-
ogy integrates ecology and philosophy, and research results are communicated
through metaphors and fi eld activities guided by an ecological and ethical orienta-
tion and implemented through special trails or areas. FEP is based on a biocultural
ethic that addresses not only human welfare but also the welfare of the whole com-
munity of life (Rozzi and Massardo 2011 ; Rozzi 2013 ).
EE requires holistic approaches that integrate the teaching of biology, ecology or
other disciplines that focus on cognitive objectives with activities that target both
emotional experiences and skills acquisition, to achieve enduring transformative
processes (Ghilardi-Lopes 2014 ). Furthermore, EE actions should develop the
capacity to contextualize these gains by applying new beliefs and behaviors to
everyday life. Objectives related to social transformation, including the capacity to