An Ecology of Environmental Education

Abstract

We tend not to question the implications of the terms we use in environmental education and its ever-changing names, purposes, and goals. Digging deeper into well-worn and accepted meanings from the early nineteenth-century movements integrating place-based nature study since John Dewey through conservation and outdoor education, the tensions in the historical realization of the field are traced. A critique of the social manifestations, political purposes, and philosophical grounding of environmental education is developed in relation to (1) shifts in the definition of its terms; (2) conceptual transformations of the discipline; (3) ecological issues; and (4) pedagogical imperatives. The resulting historicity takes into account initiatives from UNESCO to Agenda 21 and NAAEE to provide an ecology of environmental education.