At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, the global ecological crisis has deepened: atmospheric pollution, climate change, deforestation, water resource depletion, and soil degradation pose a serious threat to human life. This situation shows that neglect of nature ultimately returns to man himself. In this regard, the issue of forming the ecological consciousness and culture of youth should be the focus of attention not only of the education system, but also of the entire society.
Because today’s youth are the owners of tomorrow. Their attitude to nature will determine the ecological sustainability and quality of life of society in the future. The formation of ecological culture is understood not only as providing information about nature, but also as forming in the younger generation love for nature, environmental responsibility, the habit of saving resources, and the ability to apply ecological thinking in practical activities. Ecological consciousness is a level of human thinking in which a person considers it his duty not to subjugate nature to his own interests, but to preserve it, to maintain natural balance. A person strives to live in harmony with nature as an integral part of his life.
The process of forming such consciousness is complex and gradual. This depends, first of all, on family, school and public education. In the family, a child observes the attitude of his parents to nature, and at school he receives theoretical knowledge through ecology and natural science lessons. But the most important thing is practical learning, that is, direct contact with nature.
The education system plays a special role in the process of ecological education. Environmental trainings, ecological clubs, and “Green Space” campaigns held in schools, colleges, and universities help young people avoid apathy. In addition, initiatives such as “Eco-schools,” “Young Environmentalists’ Circles,” and “Eco-marathons” encourage young people to be environmentally conscious. Instilling elements of ecological culture in every lesson and event is an educational strategy that yields long-term results. For young people living in the digital age, environmental problems are not only related to nature, but also to technology. Electronic waste, excessive consumption, plastic use, and energy waste are all directly affecting the lifestyle of modern young people.
Therefore, the formation of environmental awareness should not be limited to planting trees or cleaning up garbage. It broadly refers to the philosophy of sustainable development: that is, a person takes into account the interests of nature in every decision he makes in his life. For example, saving water, turning off electricity, using recyclable materials instead of plastic, and separating waste are simple but very important habits that demonstrate the ecological awareness of young people in everyday life. Ecological education is an investment in the future. Raising an ecologically conscious generation is the most important investment in the future. Because environmental problems are solved not by technology, but by people themselves. A responsible attitude towards nature is culture, this is education, this is an indicator of the level of consciousness.
If today’s youth are ecologically conscious, responsible and active, then in the future our country will have a healthy environment, clean air, green cities, and environmental safety. The formation of ecological awareness is not only the task of environmental science, but also the general responsibility of the entire society. Nature is not an inheritance for us, but a reliable trust that we pass on to our children. Therefore, the formation of the ecological culture of young people is the greatest gift not only for today, but also for future generations.
When young people love nature, protect it, value every tree, save water, and dispose of waste properly, they will develop an ecological consciousness and become responsible individuals.
Bekturdiyeva Nozima Mardonbek qizi was born on July 22, 2006, in Yangiariq District, Khorezm Region, Republic of Uzbekistan. She graduated from a secondary specialized school and is currently a second-year student at Urgench State University named after Abu Rayhon Beruni.
Two Wingless Birds: A Poetic Interpretation of Eva Petropoulou Lianou’s Poem
By: Rizal Tanjung
A Word Too Vast to Define
The poem “Freedom” by the Greek poet Eva Petropoulou Lianou is a silent outcry from an age that has forgotten the meaning of words. She begins with an invocation that echoes like a bell in an empty temple:
> Freedom,
A word
Who has all the meaning of…
That word—Freedom—stands alone, like the sun in an impartial sky. It is not merely a word, but a mirror where humanity reflects both its longing and its sin. In her opening lines, Eva exposes the irony of modern civilization: how freedom has become a mantra endlessly repeated, yet rarely understood.
The word bears the weight of history: from Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to Anne Frank’s whisper in darkness; from Lord Byron’s revolutionary heart in Greece to Mahsa Amini’s final breath on the streets of Tehran.
The word lives and dies in every generation.
Eva writes not with ink, but with the coagulating blood of the world’s moral conscience. In the simplicity of her verses, she unveils humanity’s absurdity:
> Humans are killing humans
Humans are manipulating humans
Freedom, once sacred, has become a tool.
Humans kill in its name, manipulate in its name, and oppress under the illusion of defending it. In Eva’s vision, freedom is no longer something we possess—it is something we have lost and are desperately trying to recover.
—
Two Wingless Birds: A Metaphor of Existential Loss
> Freedom,
A game between two birds without wings
This line is perhaps the beating heart of Eva’s entire poem. It condenses the tragedy of the modern human condition into a single haunting image.
Two birds without wings—creatures born to soar yet deprived of flight. They can still play, but never rise from the ground. They flap at empty air.
Here, Eva’s imagery resonates with Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros,” where the poet likens himself and humanity to a majestic albatross whose wings are too large to walk the earth:
> “The Poet is like the prince of the clouds…
his wings prevent him from walking.”
But Eva inverts Baudelaire’s logic. The wings are not too large—they are gone.
We live in a world where even the air of freedom has been confiscated.
If Baudelaire mourned the poet’s inability to fly in a vulgar world, Eva mourns the modern soul that no longer remembers it once had wings.
—
Freedom as Hunger
> Freedom,
A hope inside two hungry stomachs…
This image is visceral—it pierces the most primitive depth of human existence.
Eva shifts the notion of freedom from the ideological to the biological.
For the hungry, freedom is not a concept; it is bread.
For two empty stomachs, freedom is not a political slogan; it is a single edible hope.
In this, Eva stands beside Pablo Neruda, who in his Canto General proclaimed that revolution is not about flags, but about bread on the table of the poor.
> “Bread is born of the earth, and freedom too.”
Eva and Neruda speak from two distant worlds—Greece and Latin America—yet they bleed from the same wound:
true freedom cannot flourish in a starving land.
Her lines echo Frantz Fanon’s philosophy, who saw liberation not only as decolonization of the mind, but as the emancipation of the body.
Eva reminds us that before humans can think freely, they must first be free from hunger—both the hunger of flesh and of meaning.
—
Elefteria — The Sun That Has Yet to Rise
> Freedom,
Elefteria
A sun waiting to rise…
“Elefteria” (ἐλευθερία) — the ancient Greek word for freedom — was once the heartbeat of Hellenic civilization.
For Greece, Elefteria was not only a word but a goddess, a spirit, a destiny. She was the light born from centuries of struggle against oppression.
But for Eva, Elefteria is no longer the radiant sun—it is a sun waiting to rise.
Freedom is not a memory of the past; it is a promise unfulfilled.
This metaphor recalls Rabindranath Tagore’s “Where the Mind is Without Fear”, where he envisioned freedom as a dawn of consciousness untainted by division and hate.
To Tagore, freedom is the light of awakening; to Eva, it is the light that has not yet broken through the mist of the world.
The phrase “waiting to rise” carries a wound that never heals—a Camusian absurdity reminiscent of The Myth of Sisyphus. Humanity pushes the boulder of freedom uphill, only for it to roll back again.
Freedom, like Sisyphus’s stone, is eternally pursued but never fully attained.
—
The Second Education: Relearning the Meaning of Old Words
> We are in need of second educational system
Re write new words
Or learn the meaning of the old one
Eva ends with a gentle yet piercing philosophical critique. She calls for a second education—not an institution, but an awakening.
We must learn again what words truly mean, for words have lost their souls.
“Freedom,” “Peace,” “Love”—today they are mere hollow syllables, traded in political speeches and advertisements.
Eva calls for a moral-linguistic revolution.
She implies that the crisis of modern humanity is not economic nor technological, but semantic—we have lost the meaning of the words we live by.
In this, she echoes Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned that “words are the tombs of experience.”
Eva urges us to open those tombs and resurrect the spirit within.
—
Between Eva and the World: Philosophies of Freedom
Through brevity and clarity, Eva’s poem blends Greek spirituality, modern social critique, and universal awareness. She stands among the great voices who have wrestled with the idea of freedom:
1. Walt Whitman – who saw freedom as cosmic self-celebration in Leaves of Grass.
Whitman sang: “I celebrate myself.”
Eva whispers: “But what we do — humans are killing humans.”
Whitman’s tone is ecstatic; Eva’s is elegiac.
2. Langston Hughes – who dreamed of freedom deferred.
Eva’s “sun waiting to rise” mirrors Hughes’s “dream deferred,” but on a global scale.
3. Paul Éluard – who repeated “Liberté” as an incantation of resistance.
Eva repeats “Freedom” as lamentation.
If Éluard wrote against Nazi tyranny, Eva writes against global amnesia.
4. Rumi – who taught that true freedom comes from shedding the self.
Eva, within the secular silence of modernity, echoes the same truth: we have lost our wings because we have lost our souls.
—
Freedom as a Mirror of the Self
Freedom is a prayer shaped like a wound. It does not preach—it grieves.
Eva Petropoulou Lianou is not a prophet but a companion in sorrow, weeping with us over a freedom that has become “a game between two birds without wings.”
Her poem reminds us that true freedom is not merely a right, but a moral consciousness—
a refusal to kill, to manipulate, to forget.
Freedom is not just the breaking of chains; it is the rediscovery of the wings once folded within the human heart.
And perhaps, as she writes,
> Freedom, Elefteria — a sun waiting to rise…
That sun will rise—
when we dare to relearn the meaning of the old words we have long betrayed.
—
Beneath the Shadow of the Unrisen Sun
Eva’s Freedom belongs to an age starving for meaning—starving for morality, starving for humanity.
Her work stands at the crossroads of poetry and philosophy, prayer and protest, beauty and wound.
She does not write to glorify freedom,
but to restore it—to place it back into the trembling hands of those who deserve it.
The whoop, whoop, whoop of the police siren died to a guttural moan as Anais pulled her Kia to the curb just inside the small Ohio town of Springfield, within striking distance of Dayton. She peeped into the rearview mirror and spied a policeman alighting from the cruiser and striding her way. What now? she thought. She was driving down Rivers Road, a virtual gauntlet of police speed traps, according to her husband.
The policeman rapped with his knuckles on her window and so Anais lowered the glass pane. “Yessir?” she asked.
“Driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance,” said the cop dully.
Anais turned and fished through her glovebox and purse and eventually turned up the requested documents. She passed them through the window to the policeman, who accepted them without a word. Anais, a recent Haitian refugee, had never been accosted by law enforcement in this country. But, she had heard stories. She didn’t know what to expect, but remembered what her grandmother, who’d raised her, always said: “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Do whatever they say,” she’d cautioned. Anais waited.
The 19-year-old woman turned her head and noted that the policeman was staring intently at her, through the harsh beam of a huge flashlight. She couldn’t make out his features. Did he suspect she harbored drugs, because her skin was brown and she dressed differently from others? Unable so far to buy native apparel, she was still clad in a vibrant, red and blue chambray Karabela dress.
“Get out of the vehicle,” directed the cop, taking a step back to allow Anais to open her door. She silently complied. Out on the pavement, she stood by the car, uncertain and forlorn. Where was her grandmother when she needed her? She glanced at the western sky; the sun had already slipped below the horizon. It was quite dark now. The road at this hour was little travelled and not a vehicle had passed since she was stopped. She felt very vulnerable.
“Do you have any illegal drugs, contraband or weapons in your car or on your person?” he asked next.
She shook her head no.
“Do you speak American?” asked the cop impatiently.
Anais blinked. “I speak the English,” she told him in her thick accent.
He grunted.
“Why did you stop me?” asked Anais nervously.
Ignoring her question, the cop handed back the documents she’d passed him before and said, “Do you have citizenship papers?”
Anais nodded. “I have the green card,” she said.
“Let’s see it,” grumbled the cop, extending his tiny hand.
Anais gave it to him. He drifted back to his cruiser, engaged the radio for a few minutes and then returned and handed the document back.
“What’re you doing on the roads at this hour?” queried the cop.
Anais glanced at her cell phone: it was almost 9pm.
“I’m on my way home–from the grocery store,” she said. She began to feel some dark misgivings about the way this interrogation was proceeding.
Now the cop directed his large flashlight again into Anais’s face and after a moment, said, “turn around, put your hands against the vehicle, take a step back,” he ordered. She did.
At just that moment, another police can rolled up and parked behind the first. Men got out of both doors. Their boots scunched over the gravel on the side of the road. The first cop withdrew and met them halfway to his vehicle. They talked in hushed tones. That left Anais standing awkwardly against her car.
Anais looked up as the men exchanged a bawdy laugh. Were they talking about her? she wondered. Anais was a newlywed and she longed for the comfort of her partner, to hear his voice and feel his arms around her, but the policeman had seized her phone.
Finally, the first cop tromped loudly to her car and roughly patted her down and then, without warning, seized one arm and pulled it behind her back. Handcuffs clicked into place over her wrist. He took her other arm and secured that wrist as well. What was happening? she thought wildly, as the cop opened her back door and pushed her through and face down onto the bench seat in the rear of the Kia. Now the other two cops approached and stood staring down at her supine figure, chucking malevolently. They likewise had flashlights.
“Not bad,” murmured one of the newcomers, “for a greasball.” They all laughed.
“Got a nice ass for a spic,” opined the third racist cop,” reaching in and groping Anais’s backside and running his fingers between her legs.
She whimpered and struggled fruitlessly against her bonds.
“So,” said the first cop. “Who wants to do her first?” he asked the others conversationally.
One of the cops said, “Maybe we should do dinner first. You said she’s from Haiti. What’s your pleasure, senorita, a dog or a cat?” They laughed yet again. The burning essence of marijuana now wafted through the air.
Anais thought hard, then suddenly spoke out. “I saw your face,” she rasped desperately.
The three men grew silent as statues.
“I thought she didn’t see you,” whispered another of the three.
“She didn’t,” said the first cop. “I never gave her my name or showed her a badge or nothin’. I used my flashlight, like the last time. She’s lyin’.”
“But, what if she ain’t,” said another voice.
“Then you’ll have to kill me,” Anais spoke out. “Or go to jail for kidnapping and rape. I’m a married woman,” said Anais with sudden rage. “And my husband owns a big gun. You’ll be shot, if you touch me again,” she shouted. “You release me now, and I’ll forget about the touching and the disrespect. You decide now. You got five seconds to decide.”
In a matter of only a few seconds, the handcuffs were opened and Anais was freed. The other two cops hurried off to their car and sped away. The first cop snatched the keys from Anais’s ignition and tossed them and her cell phone into the weeds a few feet away and loped to his vehicle and likewise took off. She could hear the tires burning rubber.
Finding her keys, Anais stumbled back to her car and was soon motoring home, shaking and crying as she drove. She lived only minutes away. The only thing she saw when she entered the small house was Michael.
He said, in his rich, soft baritone, “Carino. I was worried about you.”
She fell into his warm embrance and immediately told him of her narrow escape at the hands of the rogue policemen. After she’d completed her narrative, Michael gently grasped her shoulders and said, “Did you really see his face?”
Anais had the grace to blush. “No, Michael. The flashlight was in my face the whole time.”
Then he said, “Anais, I don’t even own a gun.”
She smiled up into his face. “No, but you would’ve gotten one,” she whispered with confidence.
