2014 represents the 30th year of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE), making it one of the oldest academic journals in environmental education still in publication. The oldest is The Journal of Environmental Education, founded in 1969. Another journal, The International Journal of Environmental Education and Information, was founded in 1981 but is no longer in publication, and the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, also founded in 1984, has not had any issues since 2011.

The Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE), first published in 1984, is a rich source for investigating the history of environmental education in Australia, as it has sampled research and writings in the field since the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) was established in 1980.

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.

At the turn of the 21st century, an historical moment of rapid earth system change and environmental crisis in an era labelled by some scholars as the Anthropocene (the age of humans), the need for environmental education is perhaps greater than ever; but, as I argued 27 years ago, not just any environmental education will do. As the world confronts increasingly complex issues of rising poverty, escalating conflict, and ecological degradation, it matters what we mean by ‘the environment’, and it matters what educational practices we engage. Too often, environmental education has adopted the persistent and problematic ‘human versus nature’ binary in Western thinking, a conceptual legacy that leads to false dichotomies separating problems considered more ‘social’ from those classified as more ‘environmental’. Over the past 3 decades, the field of environmental education has expanded globally, benefitting from the path-breaking analyses of environmental justice studies, feminist political ecology, and the environmental humanities, all transdisciplinary fields that offer environmental education a critical frame for understanding the dynamic ‘social nature’ of human and environment connections and interdependencies. Yet, the current discourse of the Anthropocene reengages these oppressive dichotomies. To rethink and transform this re-splitting trend, I envision the flourishing of a robust, socially critical environmental education grounded in feminist analyses, environmental justice and decolonial theories, and engaged in embodied, lively action research collaborations supporting more sustainable and resilient communities.

I wrote ‘Narrative and Nature: Unsustainable Fictions in Environmental Education’ in 1991 as a revised version of a paper subtitled ‘Poststructural Inquiries in Environmental Education’ that I presented at the Sixth National Conference of the Australian Association for Environmental Education in September 1990. To the best of my knowledge, these papers were the first instances of advocacy for poststructuralist analyses of dicourses/practices in the Anglophone literature of environmental education. The key influences on my thinking at this time were US and Canadian ‘reconceptualist’ curriculum scholars, including Cleo Cherryholmes, Jacques Daignault, William Doll, Clermont Gauthier, Rebecca Martusewicz, William Pinar and William Reynolds. The significance and impact of my poststructuralist inquiries in environmental education were recognised by the award of the inaugural Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Environmental Education Research in 1997. Since then, my ‘post’ scholarship has expanded to include postcolonialism and posthumanism. Narrative continues to be an important theme in my work, especially through my development of an approach to narrative experimentation that I call ‘rhizosemiotic play’.

There has been very limited progress along the pathways to sustainability sketched in my 1991 article. Some would argue we have taken several steps backwards. Environmental education is now more prepared to acknowledge the role of neoliberal global capitalism in promoting unsustainable development, and to associate sustainability with social movements and parties of the green left who urge new forms of economy and global democracy. Corporations and governments have been successful in linking education for sustainable development to ecological modernisation or light green versions of the status-quo, but in England, even the limited advance of a policy on sustainable schools under New Labour has been swept away by the present coalition government.

I am enormously grateful to the readers of this journal for their kind attention to this work over the past 30 years. Conceptual analysis, the subject of my article, is primarily about clarifying meanings of those key concepts that are central to our collective work. Given the number of nebulous concepts in environmental education, and in education in general, this work has never ceased to be important — though, sadly, it is often neglected. Take, for example, a concept currently in vogue, social learning. Two ways of approaching this sometimes fuzzy concept would be, first, for authors to provide a clear articulation of the term, in their own view. What exactly does the idea of social learning involve for an author, and what are the implications for its use in the particular context in which it is used? This is a lot like clarifying one's own assumption about a concept for the benefit of the author and reader alike, and something we should be able to expect from all authors. Second, researchers can analyse the scope of a concept's usage within a body of literature, such as Rodela (2012) has done with social learning. This kind of analysis can provide a kind of heuristic for other researchers to navigate the extant usage of a key concept, and to point in future directions.

As one of the contributors to the first issue of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE) in 1984 (and to a further seven issues between 1991 and 2009), and as a sometime member of its editorial board (1991–1994) and the editorial collective that edited four issues (1999–2002), I have been privileged to witness at close hand its development from infancy to maturity. My particular focus in this brief reflection on the journal's development is on the research methodologies that it has privileged or diminished. In the interests of brevity, I focus in detail only on some tendencies that emerged in the first few issues, with the remainder being dealt with via selective references and impressions.

The process of researching ‘Children's conceptions of nature’ was spontaneous — a story in itself! Having taught in Victorian primary schools in the 1970s, after 15 years in teacher education in the university sector, I felt it was important to ‘return’ to the classroom — to walk the talk! Each Friday afternoon for an hour or so, I met with Year 6 children to ‘chat’. In the mid-1990s, ‘philosophy for children’ was emerging. My doctoral, completed in the early 1990s, focused on philosophies of education and environmental ethics. We chatted a lot in class — about anything. One puzzled kid asked, ‘Where does space start and finish?’ Another, ‘Are not running spikes a way to enhance sport performance?’

Documenting a history of environmental education in Australia within an international context has been a research focus (some would say obsession) of mine since 1974, when I undertook a ‘needs for environmental education’ survey for the Curriculum Development Centre. Given the human-centred issues that launched the field (clean air and water, population), it was disturbing to see how it became characterised as nature focused from the 1990s onwards, to distinguish it from education for sustainable development (ESD). As we now look post-decade, we find that ESD is not yet integrated into mainstream education and sustainable development agendas, and the need to promote global citizenship is being added to the agenda. Most of the UNESCO priority action areas from 2014 look very familiar: policy support, whole-institution approaches, educators and local communities. The fifth area is Youth, a category that emerged in its own right for the first time in Agenda 21. Having been in this historical space for so long, I expect I will continue to document a history of the field for as long as I can, to see where the journey leads us.

In 1984, the Australian Journal of Environmental Education commenced. At that time I was 6 years old, in my first year of primary school at Tieri State School in Central Western Queensland. I knew nothing of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE), or environmental education for that matter (at least not in a formal sense). In many respects, I was perhaps part of the intended audience (the future generation). As was the case with many children of my generation (Generation X, on the cusp of Generation Y), environmental education at school was largely incidental. Having grown up in a mining town (from 1983 to 1991), environmental conservation was certainly not a welcomed perspective. All the same though, my childhood was free, untamed and unsupervised in the Australian bush. It was that pastime or playtime where my environmental consciousness began its emergence.