Environmental Education: A Field Under Siege

Synonyms

Education for sustainability; Education for sustainable development; Environmental culture

Introduction

Facing the current consumption and production patterns associated to neoliberalism, environmental education (thereafter EE) is a controversial and contending field in different levels and modalities. This field is composed by a wide repertoire of pedagogical practices that pursue supposedly common objectives, but actually has qualitative different scopes. This repertoire fluctuates between approaches that question the (à la mode) civilizing trajectory and approaches that only tend to mitigate some of the problems caused by a certain way of life. In its more critical versions, it is a field of explicitly subversive social practices in confrontation with the establishment. Thus, even from its apparition, EE has fought for defining its own identity.

Due to these characteristics, EE has been directly attacked – even since the early 1990s – by a series of discourses that question...