An Exploration into Meanings of Ecological Citizenship: With Focus on the Values, Skills and Agreement Mechanisms

생태시민성 개념의 탐색적 논의: 덕성과 기능 및 합의기제를 중심으로

The most necessary thing for education now, is an ecological approach to look at and be conscious of the uncertainty of nature and the structural contradiction of society. In brief, we need to make a judgment on what standard and value are required for a forming righteous relation between nature and human being, and include it in the notion of citizenship. Based on this point of view, this study extracted moral virtues, skills and agreement mechanisms of new citizenship from ecologism, environmental justice and the ecological community, and systematized them. From ecologism and environmental justice, virtues that are inner values to lead ecological citizen's act and skills as capabilities required for correcting environmental injustice, were derived. Then, workings of citizens in a community and directions of each society and education were considered from the ecological community as an utopia where ecological citizens ultimately aim for. As the result, the ecological sensitivity, freedom, creativity, a sense of justice, a sense of responsibility, caring were found to be moral virtues that ecological citizens have to have. Next, ecological thinking skills like systemic thinking, quantitative thinking and empathetic thinking, and principles of deliberation and perturbation as mechanisms to improve communication skill and environmental injustice which have been considered importantly as components of democratic citizenship, were selected as skills of ecological citizens.