This article was written very early in my career. I was part way through my doctoral degree study on environmental education (EE) theory and practice, and had just completed an evaluation of a national EE curriculum development project. In both of these projects, I found that despite the presence of an emerging discourse about what a distinctive EE is or ought to be, classroom practice represented as EE was essentially either informational or nature study in character — somewhat different from the ‘education for the environment’ being advanced by researchers and curriculum developers internationally at the time. It seemed to me that this situation was less one of teachers’ failure to implement government policy than one of EE curriculum developers failing to recognise teachers’ existing, robust personal constructions of EE (of the environment, education, teaching and learning . . .). An entailment of this position is that EE research has the opportunity and responsibility of exploring the relationship of teachers’ theories and practices and the professional contexts within which these are intelligible. Consequently, a new wave emerged of participatory research involving teachers-as-researchers directly investigating the meaning and significance of their professional work. Some of this work is represented in the following publications.

Art is as old as human culture. For most of the time, art was part of an exchange between humans and the cosmic order. Art was meant as a gift to nourish the fecundity of life. Art was communication with ancestral creational powers — the invocation of a poetic space from which creation entered the material realm. This paper explores art as a way of tapping into the invisible forces of reality. I argue that humans can experience these forces as aliveness (joy/desire to give) and can transmit them by poetic creation. Through art, humans have a capacity to nourish life, in parallel to how natural productivity unfolds from the unseen into the embodied domain. This capacity is a source of artistic creation. It is a crucial means to participate in a life-giving cosmos. Although the Western understanding of art is far from this attitude, art has remained the domain where aliveness is accommodated not with empirical, but with imaginational means. In the current global crisis of life, it is crucial to remember the potential of art not only to relate but to contribute to aliveness. Programs in environmental education should build on the direct perception and expressive imagination of aliveness.

Over the last decade there has been a discernable global upsurge of nature kindergartens, forest schools, bush schools and nature-based primary schools; all with varying degrees of intent focused on (re)connecting children and young people in/with/as nature. Yet, not all of these educational endeavours are the same. The understanding of the role the natural world might play in pedagogy varies, the desire to work within the system or radically change it shifts according to commitments and philosophies, and the perceived divide, or lack thereof, between child and nature also has significant effects on curriculum and content. Still, there is a shared commitment among these educational movements to change existing relationships with nature and education. There is a desire and much work being done to ecologise education. In this Special Issue, with its primary focus on the west coast of Canada, we offer a pause to story, philosophise, expand, and disrupt as this ‘type’ of education presents a significant shift and fundamentally questions what school is and what education is for.

Throughout the world, Aotearoa-New Zealand is recognised for its extraordinary biodiversity. However, many species that make up this distinctive biodiversity are under threat of extinction due to human impacts, such as the ill-considered introduction of particular animals. Many New Zealanders participate in the protection and restoration of their environment, which involves the lethal control of these introduced animals. Primary school children (5–13 years old) engage in conservation education as part of their learning, which aims to develop their abilities to take informed action to protect and restore our environment, sometimes including lethal control of introduced animals. Recently, concerns have been raised that children learning about the lethal control of introduced animals does not align with the values that should be explored and encouraged according to Aotearoa-New Zealand’s national curriculum. We argue that conservation education, including learning about the lethal control of introduced animals, encourages children to explore and encourage these values, namely valuing the diversity in their heritages, ecological sustainability, participation for the common good, equity, innovation, and respect for others.

This article was prompted by a Ministerial veto (2021) of the Australian Research Council’s decision to fund a research project by the authors to explore the student-led climate movement in Australia. It was also prompted by criticism of the veto which accused the Minister of bringing “politics” into what was represented as a scholarly matter. It addresses two questions: How should we understand this idea of “politics” in the context of Australian climate politics since the 1990s? Secondly it considers dominant ways of thinking about “the political” devised by ancient Greek writers and politicians which still inform the European liberal tradition. We question how fit for purpose this approach is in the Anthropocene? Our key argument is that the western tradition of thinking about “the political” is deeply anthropocentric. Historical traditions have encouraged inegalitarian and anti-democratic accounts of who can be political by excluding different kinds of people from political life. The Anthropocene requires a new, critically reflexive account of “the political” that is inclusive of people currently marginalized and excluded as well as nonhumans and nonliving components of ecosystems on which we all depend. This extends the idea of democracy beyond the human and points to a politics of climate justice.

The School Strike 4 Climate New Zealand (SS4CNZ) movement have organised and led four strikes between 2019 and 2021. With each successive strike, adult support for students’ demands increased. Their most notable achievement was garnering sufficient support to pass Aotearoa New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Bill into legislation. However, tensions with SS4CNZ led to the Auckland Chapter announcing its disbandment in 2021. There were mixed responses to their decision. In this reflective essay I argue that this disbandment was a positive move forward because these youth were showing their willingness to re-build relationships with their Māori and Pacific Island activist peers. By disbanding, not only were these young leaders enabling their Māori and Pacific Island peers to lead future actions, they were acknowledging the connections between racism, colonialism and climate justice; responding to our relational crisis by demonstrating the importance of re-building robust and reciprocal relationships between humans and more-than-humans when advocating for ways to navigate towards a climate-just society.

The Nature Conservation Council of NSW (NCC)'s Bushfire Program is unique amongst conservation organisations. The Program has been running for over ten years, focusing its campaign work mainly on government policy, legislation and commissions of inquiry. However, the Program was originally initiated to provide support to over 70 conservation representatives on bushfire management committees (from state to regional levels)

In 2003, the Community Bushfire Education Project (CBEP), which is funded by the Environment Trust (ET), was developed as an extension of the Bushfire Program. The CBEP's main focuses have included coordinating community and professional workshops, field trips and school visits.

The design and advocacy principles of the Bushfire Program have been significantly influenced by the CBEP. Principles associated with Education for Sustainability, including capacity building, partnerships and critical thinking, have been key drivers in this.

Traditionally, the NCC Bushfire Program has been a strong advocate of enforcing environmental assessment and controls through regulation. However, to date, bushfire regulations have only had limited success in changing unsustainable practices. We have learnt that a complimentary approach to regulation is voluntary action. This entails a participatory approach to bushfire management planning. We feel this change in philosophy can apply to all land management and environmental issues and may parallel a larger shift within the environment movement.

Through this paper we will show how the Bushfire Program has developed to incorporate community education as a central pillar of, rather than in addition to, its core campaign; the difficulties this presents and the strengths it provides. The NCC now sees community participation and empowerment as a key component of any natural resource management campaign.

The decisions and activities of engineers are often intimately connected with the choice of energy systems and their far reaching effects on society and the environment. Yet there is little or no explicit ‘sustainable energy education’ — that is, education about the rote that the production and use energy plays in modern society, including the related technical aspects—in most undergraduate engineering courses.

The significance of energy to modern society, the culture of engineering, and the future outlook for sustainable energy education are explored from a historical perspective in the context of environmentalism, feminism and industrialism. The current status of sustainable energy education theory and practice in Australia is outlined. Drawing on interviews with key practitioners possible approaches to sustainable energy education in engineering are discussed. Current courses and resources for sustainable energy education for engineers are summarised.

Learning about the utilization, development and perhaps conservation of energy for our expanding world population has long been a part of science curricula. The world “about” is, however, paramount in describing the nature of these courses, and parallels a similar phenomenon observed in numerous so-called environmental education programmes in schools. Despite the close association between energy use expansion and environmental impact, little “energy education for the environment’ has occurred in this country.

This paper examines some of the reasons for this situation and highlights the difficulties facing the environmental education teacher who wishes to lead a valid study of energy sources. External community influences, a lack of breath and problems with information availability are identified as factors which contribute to the present status of energy education. It is perhaps fortunate that the majority of students seem to possess positive attitudes towards energy conservation and the environment, and so, hopefully, remain receptive towards improvements in this aspect of environmental education.

The paper sets out suggestions for seven areas of study within curricula whose practitioners Intend them to prepare students for the difficult task of pursuing sustainabllity at personal and community levels within societies not yet close to taking that pursuit seriously. In addition to developing clear understandings about sustainabllity, biodiversity, climate change and psychological roots of ecological crises students need to experience Deep Ecology cognltively and personally, and to take action. Some difficulties this poses for environmental educators and education systems are outlined.

A world view is emerging in areas like peace education, environmental education, justice education and development education which cannot be understood simply by applying old assumptions to these areas. This world view involves a different ethical framework, a different epistemology and a different way of functioning in order to achieve goals. I call this new world view social ecology, a philosophy which has emerged as a result of the threats to our planet and which takes as its starting point such principles as ecological sustainability, non-violence, grass-roots democracy and social equality.

Since its conception, environmental education has carried out numerous plans, strategies and programmes aimed at restoring an adequate person–nature relationship, addressing the main environmental problems that threaten the planetary ecosystem balance. Even though environmental education proposes an integral education, it is infrequent that the spiritual dimension of the person appears reflected in its programmes. However, spirituality, which often manifests itself by providing affect and meaningful significant life experiences, aims to be a key factor in the development of lasting pro-environmental behaviours. Promoting and valuing ecological spiritual intelligence is configured as an interesting advance for environmental education. For example, starting from the cultural-naturalistic values provided in every part of the territory. As an example, we propose the one made in the Basque country (Spain), using the spirituality contained in the Basque mythology.

Environmental Education is one of the cross-curricular themes, introduced in the mid 1990s in the curriculum of Flemish secondary education (12-18 yr). Both the Brundtland report and the ENSI philosophy inspired the development of the objectives for EE. A strong partnership exists between the departments of education and the environment of the Flemish Ministry and the provincial authorities, which resulted in the project ‘MOS’, an environmental management system for primary and secondary schools. Besides environmental objectives, the pedagogical objectives of the project are strongly emphasised. The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development provides a strong stimulus to link Environmental Education to the other cross-curricular themes, Citizenship and Health Education and to include the ‘MOS’-project into the broader framework of Education for Sustainable Development.

In this paper I describe the design of distance education texts that encourage the kinds of student-tutor dialogue which ‘industrial’ methods of course delivery may find hard to achieve, and how such texts enable students and their tutors to be critically reflective about the theory and practice of environmental education in different cultural contexts. Aspects of the following are discussed - the limitations of ‘new technologies’ in resolving issues faced by distance educators; the potential of open texts in distance education; ways of supporting students in necessary critical reflection; the Importance of social belonging for students, especially those of distance education courses in environmental education. The paper concludes with a series of suggestions for colleagues wishing to establish culturally sensitive, critically reflective distance education courses in environmental education.

Drawing on posthumanist and new materialism theorising, we take the concept of resonance for an a/r/tographic ‘walk’ to know, be and do differently, to challenge human-centric separatist ways that have resulted in our current socioecological crises. Beginning with Ingold’s knotty thinking, we identify the notion of resonance as a node for exploring and thinking about interactions in the world. Guided by Barad’s proposition of entangling ethico-onto-epistemic ways, our a/r/tographic thought experiments find resonances that echo through bodies, through connections as nature, through deep-time and modern spaces to notice and attend to intraactions within the ecological collective. Through art-full, thought-full scholartistic enquiry, we explore diffractive encounters to consider resonance as a conceptual tool for tuning into and harmonising with the entanglements of body–mind–space–time–matter. We pose this exploration of resonance as the start of a knotty theory conversation for shifting into a new ‘common world’ knowing, being and doing.

In recent years, food scholarship has extended its preoccupation with consumption to interrogating the relationship between eating, culture and waste, and their effects on the environment. Simultaneously, food-related concerns have also become a recurrent part of popular culture, where examples from children's television provide fertile ground for discussion. This article analyses the multiple representations of food, consumption, and waste in Stephen Hillenburg's animated series SpongeBob SquarePants. Focusing on the specific food-related pedagogical philosophies that seem recurrent in the series, and following in Henry Giroux's footsteps by seeing a link between popular culture and educational structures, my discussion unravels the show's engagement with the over-consumption of fast food, the acculturation of the burger as the American meal par excellence, and environmental issues of ‘over-production’. I aim to show how, ultimately, SpongeBob SquarePants offers an evaluation of the connection between consumption, health, and disposability in contemporary Western societies.