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In its broadest sense the “environment” component of environmental education spans such diverse areas as dietary habits, in vitro fertilisation, religious beliefs, occupational health, desertification, the changing nature of work, arms control and over-population. At its best contemporary environmental scholarship highlights the degree to which all these issues are intimately related.
At its worst and narrowest, the process of environmental educational consists of firstly identifying the basic features of an ecosetting for example, a rainforest, a reef or an urban waterway; and studying environmental change in that setting through identifying the goodies and baddies in relation to impacts upon that environment.
An experience I had recently teaching about North Stradbroke Island highlighted the dominance that the narrow view of environmental education has attained. In discussion prior to the study, students indicated that for them, the term “environment” was basically an alternative label for flora and fauna or the “green”/natural elements of the island. They could not comment very easily then about the place of humans in this picture of environment nor could they outline in any detail the range of social, economic or political factors affecting that island's environment. Such factors were incidental to that environment.Also students' ideas about “environmental conflict” and the island seemed to be centred on examples of actions taken by one or other of the conflicting groups, through protest meetings or demonstrations, classifying the main contenders Into two camps - those for and those against the bridge.
