In the Name of Environmental Education: Words and Things in the Complex Territory of Education—Environment—Development Relations

Abstract

The proclamation of the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development by the United Nations has placed education in general, and environmental education in particular, at the front of a future full of important and uncertain meanings. On the one hand, those inviting a conceptual, theoretical and praxiological revision of the education–environment–development relationship appeal to the role of education in the construction of ‘sustainability’ and lifestyles that will make it possible. On the other hand, there are those that anticipate new and different readings of the environmental educative task. They range from the questioning of its historic entity and identity (more than 30 years of initiatives, plans and programmes across the world) to the firm demand for its proposals to provide an ‘education’ that is essential for the renewal of human action and thought. The article subscribes to the latter position, arguing in favour of the necessity of an environmental education that does not contradict itself, neither in its critical-reflexive discourses nor in its emancipative practices, as a fundamental pillar of any development that aims at being ‘human’ and ‘sustainable’ from a pedagogical, ecological and social point of view.