Educating for our environment: an Australian experience

Abstract

This paper examines how some of the principles of environmental education have been taken up in environmental strategies and activities in Victoria, Australia. The focus is upon the efforts of the State Government-funded Victorian Environmental Education Council (VEEC) to encourage the development of environmental education in sectors and organizations outside the formal education sector and not usually associated with either the ‘environment’ or ‘education’. The relative success of initiatives fostered in marginalized community sectors and in the private industry sector are discussed. Following the abolition of the VEEC (late 1993) with a change of government, questions are raised about the sustainability of environmental reform agendas in the public political domain. In view of the fragility of sympathetic political environments, it is argued, that for environmentally sustainable development a broader commitment to social justice and social change must be fundamental to environmental education principles and processes to both include all sections of the community and, also, to actually change who makes decisions and how and where they are made.