Environmental education in Malaysia: a decade since Stockholm

Abstract

The conscious awareness of the essential role of environmental education as an integral part of the Malaysian educational process is a fairly recent and an almost post- Stockholm conference development. Like several other countries of the Third World, Malaysia's immediate post-independence pe- riod was devoted to fulfilling the need for real per capita growth, greater economic strength and stability through exploitation of natural and mineral resources, and rapid urbanization. The 1960s, a period of general indifference to the potential dangers posed by massive development, witnessed the beginnings of environmental deterioration through indiscriminate logging, soil erosion, river pollution and industrial pollution. The level of consciousness demonstrated on the matter was remarkably low, the government had devised no strategy to contain an inevi- table problem on its hands, a point well illustrated by the glaring absence of any environmental concerns expressed in the First and Second Malaysia Plans (1966- 1970, 1971-1975); the public too remained silent, ill informed as they were on environ- mental problems and passive observers of the development scene unfolding before them.