The importance of culture cannot be overlooked in the current global challenges in social policies, industrial activities and other environmental hazards. Culture as people's way of life has long history of evolution as it concerns the people, and the role that culture has played in shaping the lives of people is basic to how a people will likely react to situations and circumstances.
Traditionally speaking, most cultures in the world advocate for balanced development and growth between the people and the immediate environment, as cultures that evolved from a people and additionally was not corrupted by external influence in the area of war, conquest or colonialism, tend to support the preservation of the natural environment as means of caring, protecting and preserving the lives of the coming generation. In this sense, many people have argued that indigenous cultures are mainly oppose to environmental disruptive technologies.
In today's world, the meaning and traditional settings of cultures are getting tinted and mixed with globalization, making it difficult to really figure out the kind of cultural background one is operating or acting from. Because the pre-globalized cultures developed and operated life relatively more independently unlike today, making it easy for those earlier cultures to have uniform cooperation and shade-in cultural values between their religious, social, commercial, governmental, and industrial activities.
Unlike today, cultures have being greatly polluted and mixed up, basically from borrowed religions, multicultural technological developments, social behaviors, education, large scale immigration, media, social movements, globalized socio-political cultures, etc. These factors have gone a long way in transfusing external cultural values into the lives of globalized people in the world; as these various cultures go on to pollute and affect one another, making it difficult to figure out the central theme of the culture that may have being in place before the influence of globalization, multi-cultural civilization or multiculturalism.
These are the basic factors that have shaped the world as we have it today, therefore, the purpose of this writing is not to explore the types of culture, models, evolution and history of influences from one culture to the other; but to emphasize the importance of teaching traditional cultural education primarily in place before the emergence of multiculturalism and globalization; as those indigenous cultures often times have at their core values the preservation of the environment through traditional moral and spiritual education. These have preserved a good number of people for thousands of years before the global industrial commercial consciousness takes the stage, and comes with its own culture that tends to make people care less of the environment by choosing money or power over the ecosystem.
In summary, not excluding the factors of human greed, pride, fantasies and prejudice, which have also contributed greatly in diminishing the importance of culture in the lives and decision-making process of a people, leading to actions that have self-destructive consequences. Aside the uninformed human actions stated above; the promotion of traditional cultural education of a people will go great lengths in guiding the formulation of government policies, industrial activities, social consciousness, behaviors, commercial consciousness, education and technological operations; acting as a cord that will always draw the attention to put the people, environment and the subsequent generation into the equation of environmental disruptive policies, sciences and technologies.
By Enyinnaya Uwazie
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