It is an appropriation process that seeks to organize subjects in a way to enable political advocacy work. We refer to these as "collective subjects"", said activist Juan Francisco Santos, of the Center for Education and Promotion of Sustainable Development in Cuba (CEPRODESO).

According to Santos, "what matters is not the concept, but people experiencing this appropriation from their points of view and experiences".

“Therefore, popular environmental education is a collective building process; it involves the capacity building of political subjects in permanent dialogue with their practice and the rest of the realities of the context or territories they belong to", adds a video produced by "Desde Abajo" (www.desdeabajo.info) and supported by CEPRODESO and the environmental organization CENSAT Agua Viva – Friends of the Earth Colombia.

On April 15-16, in Bogota, Colombian capital city, the two groups organized a
workshop on popular environmental education, which resulted in the new video.
Environmental activist Danilo Urrea, of CENSAT, states in the video that "popular environmental education schools, or schools of sustainability, aim to join the territorial defense processes in a more permanent way".

In this sense, "popular environmental education, as stated by the developers of this practice, involves trying to recompose the relationship between human beings and nature".

Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC) has been organizing an annual capacity-building school for several years, called the "School of Sustainability". This is an itinerant school, and CENSAT has been a fundamental actor in its creation and development.

Urrea believes that popular environmental education also seeks to "present an education model that is against domination and the models that only reproduce exercises to control the population".

"Popular environmental education, in turn, aims to understand nature as an integral part of our lives and ourselves as part of nature, and therefore, strengthen the defense of our territories"