Forest educators as bearers and implementers of deep ecology ideas

Abstract People think very little about the consequences of consumer and ecological manners. Responsibility for raising children to sustainable behaviour is transmitted to educational institutions that bear the full weight of this burden. Non-teaching experts such as foresters enter the educational process. These specialists are called “forest educators”. At the 14th European Forest Pedagogics Congress 2019 in Latvia, 167 forest educators from Europe met, and 52 of them were willing to participate in a qualitative research survey. This paper aimed to identify why foresters, as people without pedagogical education and despite the unfavourable funding, become educators. The following questions guided this research: What leads them to start organizing educational and adventure programmes for children and the public? Is their intrinsic motivation based on an unconscious level to implement ideas of Deep Ecology? Philosophy of Arne Naess and semi-structured interviews with forest educators in the form of the Pyramid Model of Wengraf, through which qualitative data were obtained, methodologically approached this paper. Interviews with foresters revealed their values, needs, motivation, dominant psychological-ethical moments and prosocial behaviour that brings inner satisfaction and pedagogical activity as an added value of their profession. Forest educators have a unique philosophical system related to nature and the environment. They subconsciously follow and develop the ideas of Deep Ecology through the methods of Forest Pedagogy. The paper presents the way of involving forest educators into the distance and online teaching due to the Coronavirus pandemic, as well as the topic for further research in this area.