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.

This review essay offers a critique of the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development through an appraisal of three recent texts. These texts explore issues of sustainability and sustainable development in the context of three different (but interrelated) discourses-practices, namely, (lifelong) learning, (educational) leadership and (environmental) law. The texts reviewed are:

Halsey, Mark. (2006). Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Hargreaves, Andy, & Fink, Dean. (2006). Sustainable Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Scott, William A. H., & Gough, Stephen R. (2004). Sustainable Development and Learning: Framing the Issues. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

Social research is a critical foundation for programs that seek to engage communities in change and in the development of more sustainable societies. Without appropriate research, programs aimed at change are likely to be based on implicit or assumed problem identification and/or inferred community needs and wishes. If we are to achieve community participation in activities that lead to real change, research to find out about those communities is the first step. Over the past ten years the NSW Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) has developed a considerable body of social research, conducted with both the general community and specific community segments, to underpin its environmental education programs. This paper includes a review of some models for integrating social research into education programs, and examines the extent to which social research has impacted on both the environmental education programs and the organisational culture of the DEC. From this are drawn learnings from the perspective of a major State environmental agency, about the integration of social research into any program or organisation seeking to achieve social change towards sustainability. As well as program specific benefits, the ultimate outcome of this process is to assist in producing an organisational culture which values evidence-based decision-making and develops policies and structures that incorporate a social research dimension into both programs and policy.

The background to the development of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and the resulting techniques and procedures, or legislation, have been presented by many authors; for example, Canter (1977), Munn (1975), Porter (1985) and Thomas (1987). During the past decade many people have become involved in the practice of EIA, but how they have been trained for this involvement is not well documented. To contribute to the documentation, I will explain the development of a module which can be adapted to suit the time available for the coverage of EIA, and the varying capabilities of undergraduate and post graduate students enrolled in environmental engineering/ management/ planning/ policy/ science/ studies courses.

Following sections examine, firstly the relationship between the objectives of EIA and those of the module, which I will refer to as Environmental Assessment. Next the constraints which influence the form of the subject, and the range of possible training techniques are discussed. Finally, the details of Environmental Assessment's structure are presented along with some comments on its approach.

Higher education institutions are considered by many to be pivotal in shaping the next generation of thinkers and practitioners required to further work towards addressing the sustainability challenges faced by contemporary societies. The extent to which higher education has embraced this responsibility is debateable. Notwithstanding, this article reports upon our experience as three students employed as tutors in teaching sustainability to our undergraduate counterparts. Drawing upon our collective experience as both students and tutors within The Fenner School of Environment and Society of the Australian National University, we explore what makes student-facilitators part of an effective approach for sustainability education. Through this process, we describe some key practices that student-facilitators apply and which contribute to students’ understandings of sustainability. These key practices are: conceptualising what a tutorial should be; taking the position as a facilitator of discussion; using game-based activities; and the role that student-facilitators play in a community of social learning at the Fenner School. We conclude that the incorporation of student-facilitators in the teaching and learning of sustainability play a unique and significant role that should be valued, fostered and supported in higher education.

In this paper, we draw on the ontology and epistemology of the local Kasena ethnic group in Northern Ghana to explore Early Childhood Environmental Education. The study, taking place in Boania Primary School, drew on the concept of two-eyed seeing, where both western and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies were taught. In this way, Indigenous Ecological Knowledge was integrated into the Early Childhood Environmental Education programme for the Kindergarten two classroom environmental studies topics. Two Indigenous Elders led the integration of local knowledge into environmental studies topics by visiting the school to teach the children through taking them outdoors for learning activities. After this, in-depth interviews were held with the teacher, Indigenous Elders, and nine children regarding their experiences. The purpose of the study was to explore how Indigenous Ecological Knowledges can help instil in children positive environmental attitudes and values, while also connecting them to nature and offering them a more relational understanding of human to nature relationships. Based on the Indigenous cultural framework of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility towards nature, the findings show that the integration of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge into environmental education has the potential to improve our relationships with the environment.

After more than twenty years of contemporary environmental education, there is still an inferior representation of it in schools. By 1990, UNESCO recognised that to improve the effectiveness of teacher implementation of environmental education in schools, teachers needed training. To date, there is insufficient research into teacher training in environmental education that could provide insights into teacher understanding and how to positively change teacher understandings about environmental education. The aim of this research was to document and examine the changes in teacher understandings of environmental education during an in-service training program in environmental education.

To examine teacher change in detail, this research used a qualitative and naturalistic inquiry methodology while using a case study approach. The case study showed that teacher understanding was complex and affected by many factors that contribute to personal and professional growth, development and learning.

Environmental education is commonly used to satisfy the natural curiosity of tourists, increase conservation awareness and strengthen pro-conservation values. Yet it does not always address the more sensitive ecosystem management issues such as animal culling as it may be seen to upset the balance of the positive tourist experience. For this reason, this study compared acceptance and non-acceptance of animal culling from two angles: for tourists either provided or not provided with a brief passage of information regarding why animals may be culled; and tourists’ opinions on the culling of native versus non-native animal species. Conducted in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia where conservation and tourism co-exist within a traditional pastoral setting, 789 self-administered questionnaires were analysed. Results highlighted the differences in tourists’ acceptance levels for the culling of native and non-native species, as well as the possible influence of environmental information on these acceptance levels.

The aim of this article is to show how water emerged as a research method nearby and within a small stream during a 9-month fieldwork carried out with preschool children. The fieldwork was informed and shaped by the preschool children’s and researcher’s situated knowledges and their questions about environmental issues concerning water, absence of water, pollution and ethics. The empirical material consists of films and photos, drawings and field notes, produced together by the preschool children and the researcher during the research. The analysis draws on relational ontology and the writings of Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway. The article concludes with a discussion about what can be learnt from the study and its contribution to research within the fields of Early Childhood Education and Environmental Education.

This is a researched account of an offshore coral reef education partnership formed during a time of rapid environmental change (the coral bleaching events in the years 2015 to 2017). The aim of the partnership is to encourage a learning connection with Sea Country. Framed as civic environmentalism, this article explores the dimensions of practice between a reef tourism provider, local schools, a local university, and local Indigenous rangers that enables primary, secondary and university students, rangers, and educators to travel together on day trips to the outer Great Barrier Reef and islands and have immersive and sharing educational experiences. Offshore environmental education and higher quality marine education is increasingly important in the Anthropocene, when Australian reefs are subject to the pressures of climate change and other impacts other impacts that diminish their resilience.

With water shortage and increasing demand for water, education may have an important role in promoting the sustainable management of water resources. Educational curricula are the key resources used by teachers for studentsʼ teaching and training purposes. This study assessed water culture and water education-related criteria and standards in programmes and school curricula for Primary, Middle and upper Secondary school education in Morocco. It also investigated teachers for suggestions and views regarding methods for water-related topics and concepts implementation. The main tools used consisted of a content analysis grid for programmes and educational guidelines. A questionnaire and interviews were administered to 95 teachers of different subject areas, belonging to the three investigated school levels. Findings showed that the occurrence of water education criteria and standards is weak in school curricula of the investigated school levels. They were explicitly or implicitly addressed depending on the subject areas. The main topics consisted of water cycle definition, water as a vital source, water pollution sources, water economy interest. However, no reference has been made to water law, its accessibility, aesthetics and water-related professions.

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.

In the last 30 years we have increasingly, as humans, been individualised and set in competition with each other in the quest for ever increasing productivity. Neoliberalism has exacerbated those very liberal humanist features that feminist poststructuralist theory set out to dismantle with its critique of binary thought and the ascendance of white, male, elite, western consciousness. While transferring the responsibility for individual survival to the individual, away from the social, it weakened our responsibility, our response-ability, to each other and to the earth and our earth others. In this paper I tease my way, through stories, and through new materialist concepts, to a sense of self as emergent, as process rather than (id)entity, as response-able and responsible in the mattering of the world.

For white settler researchers aiming to contribute to the work of decolonising education, actively seeking ways to disturb and destabilise long-held onto-epistemological assumptions associated with colonial modernity is important. In this article I investigate how these disturbances might occur in a diffractive and decolonising reading methodology. I outline two prior diffractive reading experiences that drew on decolonial theory and Barad’s diffraction theory: A situated inquiry of the Great Barrier Reef as a pedagogical agent; and a reading of Australian teacher education policy through military imaginaries. In this article I read these prior diffractive reading experiences through one another, attending to further methodological patterns. I identify two connected methods of defamiliarisation that are generative for destabilising colonising ways of knowing, norms and thinking in education. These are: Bringing ostensibly different phenomena together in diffractive relations with one another; and reading difference in the spirit of companionship, that is, in an orientation to learning from difference rather than to master difference. I suggest that if education continues to rely on and wield the same modern critical tools that support colonial-capitalist systems it will be unable to recognise, address and reimagine the continued violence of these systems.

Based on a review of NSW and Victorian education materials, we conclude that the following three issues are neglected within education about climate change, and should be included in future syllabuses: (1) there are large disparities in per-capita greenhouse gas emissions between industrialised and developing countries. Hence, international equity and its implications for Australians must be addressed. (2) There is a considerable gap between the outcome of Australian emissions abatement, and reductions, which are necessary to achieve an ecologically sustainable and internationally equitable emissions level. Given the absence of adequate technological and political incentives, the potential of individual responses must be further explored. (3) Responsibility for climate change is not restricted to emissions from households and private cars, but must be extended towards emissions associated with the personal consumption of goods and services.

The project of mapping sustainability initiatives across a region is part of a larger program of research about place and sustainability education for the Anthropocene, the new geological age of human-induced planetary changes (Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen, & Crutzen, 2010). The study investigated the location, nature and type of sustainability initiatives in the Gippsland region of Victoria, Australia. The purpose of the study was to trial the development of a place-based survey questionnaire to map initiatives in education for sustainability across a region in order to understand how they emerge in local places. The data from the survey was interpreted using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. This article focuses on the qualitative thematic analysis across all survey responses and assesses the findings in order to determine the usefulness of the approach. The study found that a regional place-based approach enables a different conceptualisation of the possibilities of a cross-sectoral interconnected system of sustainability education. The nonformal and informal sectors are important sites of innovation and have great potential to enrich the pedagogies of education for sustainability in the formal sector.

Among the most significant, controversial and difficult concepts for environmental educators and students alike to come to terms with are those of the anthropocentric (or totally human centred) view of the environment compared with the biocentric (or totally non-human centred) attitude to the environment. The concepts are significant because they represent profoundly different philosophical positions and also because they may have far reaching implications and, therefore, consequences in practice. Eckersley (1992, p.26) says:

They are controversial because both views have been said, by different authors, to be either totally disastrous or absolutely redeeming for the planet. For instance, in his recent authoritative and well received book Towards A Transpersonal Ecology, philosopher Warwick Fox writes (1990, p. 13)

and adds (1990, pp. 18-19) that it is

Yet Jeff Bennett, expressing the anthropocentric view in a volume entitled Reconciling Economics and the Environment, says that

(Bennett & Block 1991, p.272)

Within the globalising trajectory of modernism, conservation, then environmental (EE) and now sustainability education (ESD) have each emerged as developing responses to risk produced by and in the modern state. Through adopting a long term process perspective, this paper narrates the emergence of situated learning perspectives and a developing re-orientation of EE at the start of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD). We identified the need to examine ESD practice in responses to recent ESD consultations in 14 southern African countries, where a rhetorical marking was noted in discussions on ESD practices, particularly with regard to changing teaching and learning processes. The paper narrates how an interplay of review, research and practical engagement activities have all contributed to an extended critical review of learning interactions in environmental education in an attempt to provide useful perspective for educational activities within the UNDESD. We found that EE and ESD initiatives only acquired more substantive meaning and coherent orientation when examined within ongoing inquiries into situated learning, agency and risk reduction in contexts of poverty, vulnerability and risk, the key concern to us in this paper and the primary focus of the WEHAB (Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture and Biodiversity) sustainable development agenda in the region.