We are a Yucatan non-profit civil association with 25 years of experience, founded by Maritza Morales Casanova and her family.
Maritza is native to the Yucatan Peninsula, a region vast in biodiversity and considered a hotspot for conservation.
The conservation of ecosystem, genetic and species biodiversity depends on the ability of humanity to coexist and develop harmoniously on our planet. Each culture develops with its own rules of coexistence. Globally, it is agreed that new generations face a crisis of values and knowledge about their natural environment.
In 1995 and at the age of 10, seeing the lack of respect that his companions showed towards living beings, he began the movement “Humanity United with Nature in Harmony for Well-Being, Goodness and Beauty” by its initials HUNAB. After school hours and occupying public spaces or the patio of his house, he improvised open-air rooms in which he shared his young but interesting knowledge about species and ecosystems. He currently directs HUNAB as a Yucatecan association that has become the main force worldwide that is evolving the concept of environmental education.
We are pioneers of excellence in environmental education.
Given the urgent need to lead new generations through lifestyles in harmony with nature, since 2007 we have promoted the construction of the HUNAB Ceiba Pentandra park in Yucatan, which, with 35% of its facilities built, appears as the first center at the level world specialized in training Heroes for grandmother Earth. When we visit her we find a peculiar characteristic, the instructors are children and adolescents teaching their classmates, like when she started.
Who or what is Grandma Earth?
Mother Earth is already a grandmother, the children in HUNAB say that it is because many years have passed … her veins, which are the rivers, are contaminated or drying up; their lungs, which are forests and jungles, are sick and could disappear … but it is the boys and girls who have the greatest relationship with our Granny Earth, for these are their main Heroes to reinforce harmony between living beings.
What is the problem we seek to solve?
The problem is multifactorial, we talk about the context in the Yucatan Peninsula in three ways: school field, the non-school and the spaces for teaching new environmental leaders.
In the school field; In our investigations we have detected that students from urban, rural and indigenous areas of Yucatan receive poor school environmental education. There is no subject, nor quality educational materials.
In Yucatecan communities, harmful habits and bad practices towards the environment and natural resources are observed. According to WWF, the region is part of the Mesoamerican hostpot for conservation due to its endemism and the loss of 70% of its primary vegetation. The lack of values and environmental knowledge in turn deteriorates the sense of belonging to the community, in a context where the Mayan culture is connected to biodiversity. Young people grow up in communities where hunting and illegal trafficking of wild species, burning of plots and deforestation are common actions, those in coastal areas face problems related to the aquifer, fishery and waste. Through the research work in eleven towns, we found a total lack of knowledge about the theory of climate change, 95% of the participating teachers stated that they were unaware of the recommendations to teach positivist mitigation measures and respecting the cosmovision of the Mayan towns.