Economic development and environmental development have been long-lasting debates between capitalists and environmentalists. It is also seen as a debate around modernization with globalization at one end and environmental justice at the other end. Our society today is moving rapidly toward development and increased industrial revolutions and globalization. Indigenous communities in Ogoniland are also experiencing such development due to multinationals’ exploration of crude oil in their communities. The exploration of oil has caused environmental, socioeconomic, health and political problems in indigenous communities in Ogoniland. These issues require a depth of understanding from all sectors (public, government and corporate sectors) to address them. Hence, through textual analysis and interviews from the government and environmental social movement organizations, this paper presents the types of environmental educatiSon programs carried out in indigenous communities in Ogoniland to address environmental issues and other socioeconomic issues due to oil exploration. These environmental education programs in indigenous communities contribute to environmental policy creation, the development of environmental curricula and pragmatic actions toward mitigating environmental degradation and socioeconomic issues in indigenous communities. Thus, revealing the significance of indigenous knowledge and practices in addressing contemporary environmental issues.

In this article, I call for a cripping of environmental education as a necessary move in shifting away from the field’s current conceptions of disability as defect and deficiency, and towards disrupting the structures and processes that operate as normalizing technologies within ableism/sanism. Through an examination of the ways that the field of environmental education has/has not engaged critical disability politics, I illuminate how disability is not often included within environmental education literature. When it is, it is often through the use of disability as metaphor or through recommendations for best practices in accommodating disabilities. More often though within environmental education, disability has operated as a hidden curriculum, underpinning much of the field’s curricular, pedagogical, and even philosophical foundations. Through a cripping of the field these compulsory able-bodied/able-minded assumptions are made apparent. I suggest that by centering crip bodies and minds through cripistemologies, we might enable new ways of knowing, being in, connecting to, and understanding the natural world.