ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AND SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCE: A CORRELATIONAL STUDY

“Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.”-Fritjov Capra Life is essentially a relationship between living organism and its environment; an environment which provides us with all our needs. It is this underlying principle that exists behind the need to conserve and preserve our natural environment, since the very existence of mankind depends on it. The present study was aimed at establishing relationship of ecological footprint of the student teachers with their emotional quotient. Descriptive correlational research method was used to ascertain this relationship between the variables and the extent to which they were related. The sample for the present study comprised of student teachers pursuing Diploma in elementary education from colleges affiliated to Maharashtra State Council of Examination and Bachelor of Education and Master of Education degree from the colleges affiliated to the University of Mumbai. The sample size for the study was 1465 student teachers. The tool employed the studying the ecological footprint was constructed with the help of inputs from “Personal Eco-Footprint Calculator” given by Tim Turner in his paper „How big is my Ecological footprint‟ and Global Footprint Network. Changes were made to suit the requirement of the study. Spiritual quotient was studied using „The Spiritual Intelligence Self-Report Inventory or the SISRI-24‟ tool constructed by Dr. David B. King (2008). The data obtained was subjected to statistical analysis and correlation between the two variables was established using the „Pearson‟s Product-Moment coefficient of correlation‟. A negative linear correlation was found between the ecological footprint of student teachers with their spiritual quotient with respect to gender and location of college.