文档介绍：Chapter 3 (pp. 43 – 68 from Environmental Education: a pathway to sustainability, John Fien (editor), Deakin University, 1993)
Environmental education and
sustainability: A view from
critical theory
John Huckle
Introduction
Perhaps the [19921 Earth Summit marks a twenty year cycle, and we have ‘arrived where we started’. We know this place, and these crises are familiar, but the feeling is not one of deja vu. Things have changed, and these changes call for redoubled learning and exploration of new ethical, political, economic and edu cational paradigms. We know much better the territory and solutions that have to be explored. But time is short and, it must be said, the calibre and extent of current debate on the interface between environmental survival and the role of education is disappointing. Whether education as a whole can be bold enough to develop an adequate response, on a mensurate with the issues that have to be addressed over the next decade, remains a crucial question. (Sterling 1992, pp. 1—2)
Stephen Sterling wrote these words in an editorial to the 1991—92 edition of the Annual Review of Environmental Education which summarises many of the ideas he presents in chapter 4. He reminds those of us old enough to remember 1972 and the Stockholm conference that environmental education is once again being promoted as a vehicle for social change and more sustainable forms of development. He suggests that environmental educators have made limited progress during the past twenty years, and advocates more debate on the interface between education and environmental problems informed by holistic, ethical, political, economic and educational paradigms.
This chapter provides a critical basis for considering the holistic perspective on education for sustainability presented in chapter 4. This chapter elaborates the first imperative of education for sustainability outlined in the conclusion of chapter 2: that it must be grounded upon an appreciation of the root c