Throughout the world, Aotearoa-New Zealand is recognised for its extraordinary biodiversity. However, many species that make up this distinctive biodiversity are under threat of extinction due to human impacts, such as the ill-considered introduction of particular animals. Many New Zealanders participate in the protection and restoration of their environment, which involves the lethal control of these introduced animals. Primary school children (5–13 years old) engage in conservation education as part of their learning, which aims to develop their abilities to take informed action to protect and restore our environment, sometimes including lethal control of introduced animals. Recently, concerns have been raised that children learning about the lethal control of introduced animals does not align with the values that should be explored and encouraged according to Aotearoa-New Zealand’s national curriculum. We argue that conservation education, including learning about the lethal control of introduced animals, encourages children to explore and encourage these values, namely valuing the diversity in their heritages, ecological sustainability, participation for the common good, equity, innovation, and respect for others.

We are living in an era of market-driven, globalised economies characterised by reduced public investments in what, until now, have been considered public goods and services. In Australia and elsewhere, education, and higher education in particular, has seen steady declines in government funding. This has prompted universities to become much more entrepreneurial and to seek out new funding opportunities to support their teaching and research activities. This paper reflects on the personal and professional dilemmas and challenges we faced as two early career environmental education researchers who were commissioned to undertake research for a private corporation. As a result of issues raised during this process, we engaged in a critical reflection of our perceptions and feelings about our involvement in the project. In essence, dilemmas and challenges centred around two issues: (1) control/ ownership of the research; and (2) the clash between corporate and university values. This paper explores these issues and suggests that greater mindfulness on the part of individual researchers as well as the development of better university-corporate partnership processes and protocols might provide useful starting points for overcoming such dilemmas and for moving forward with university-corporate research partnerships.

The underlying ideologies which support higher education have received only limited attention in relation to our desired goals of social and ecological sustainability. This paper examines the current ideologies which drive higher education, and proposes a different ideological framework which can be used to support a sustainable higher education. Firstly, a criticism of the current convergence of utilitarian and neo-liberal ideologies is presented from the perspective of sustainability. Secondly, building upon the educational theory of John Dewey, an alternative perspective termed “environmental progressivism” is outlined as a possible ideological framework for a sustainable higher education. The paper concludes with some preliminary remarks as to the practical implications of environmental progressivism.

When I first read Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson's (2002) intriguing collection of resources, Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World, I anticipated writing a short and enthusiastic review in which I would recommend it unreservedly to the attention of anyone involved in social and environmental education. But when I put my hands to the keyboard, I realised that I wanted to say more about why critical appraisals of globalisation are so important at this moment in world history and, thus, why this book's significance lies as much in what it stands for as its actual contents.

Having ascended the water-powered cliff railway that takes us from the carpark up to the main site we stand on the cantilevered deck of the upper station looking out across the hills and autumn colours of the wooded Dulas valley below us. The branches on the silver birches are whipped by a cold wind blowing in from the Dovey estuary as we turn to walk across the old slate workings that are now the site of one of the best known eco-centres in Europe. Later, having been given a guided tour of the site, we retire to our self-catering cabins where we split and stack the wood that will later keep us warm. The annual Gobal Futures fieldweek at the Centre for Alternative Technology has come round again.

This article is critical of the Infusion of pseudo-spiritualities in the form of non-legitimised indigenous wisdom and activities in environmental education. Drawing on a definition of true ecospirituality, the doctrine of the world soul, a teaching from western traditions, is presented as a viable alternative in the search for re-enchantment. Implications for environmental educators are addressed.

Environmental education in New Zealand (NZ) was born out of the environmental movement during the 1960s and 1970s. During that time it became increasingly apparent that we needed to know more about ourselves, our surroundings and the interactions between these two. The central impulse of environmental education is to help develop people who are knowledgeable of, concerned about, and motivated to do something for, the environment. This involves being:

1. Knowledgeable about the physical, social and economic environment of which people are a part;

2. Concerned about environmental problems; and

3. Motivated to act responsibly in enhancing the quality of our environment as well as our life.

In NZ a common misconception held was that environmental education is the same as outdoor education. It is not. Environmental education is concerned with those aims listed above, whereas outdoor education is now taken to mean, and is officially called, ‘Education Outside the Classroom’. Obviously the two are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive (Dowling 1986). In the school context, environmental education has traditionally been considered as any teaching about ‘the environment’. Today, however, it is being understood as a process which is multi-disciplinary in approach and for the environment at heart.

It is important to distinguish between two sorts of greenies. First there are those who think that the environmental problem can be solved by more attention to clearing up, or minimising in future, the damage caused by industrial-affluent society. Most environmentally concerned people are in this category, calling for things like more pollution control, but having no recognition of any need to question our affluent lifestyles or the rate of producing and consuming and economic growth their society involves. The first part of the following discussion argues that this common position is mistaken, that there is no chance of solving the environment problem without facing up to drastic reduction in GNP and ‘living standards’.

Unfortunately there are at present few greenies of the second type; people who realise that environmental damage is just one more huge problem being generated by our unsustainable ‘growth and greed’ society. There is no more important issue for environmental educators to focus on than the question of whether it is sufficient to patch up the damage being caused while plunging on down the track to ever-greater affluence and GNP, or whether the problems can only be solved by fundamental transition to a very different society, a radical conserver society. The argument below is that there is no chance of solving the environment problem nor any of the other major global problems facing us unless we move to lifestyles, patterns of settlement, values, and especially to an economic system which permit us to live well on far lower rates of per capita resource use and environmental impact that we have at the present in countries like Australia.

Vocational education and training (VET) is often considered the enigma of education. For those that work in or research sustainable education within the schools and higher education sections, VET appears somewhat like the mysterious second cousin: often difficult to access and difficult to understand. VET differs quite markedly from the other education sectors. Its industry, skill and competency foci have been established through a distinct range of national and international drivers. Both the limited understanding of how VET operates and its institutional characteristics has bound the integration of sustainable education practices within the sector. This paper provides a brief overview of the VET sector within Australia and provides some insight into how sustainable education practices are being developed in VET. The recognition of elements of common ground between VET and sustainable education are proposed as an entrée into the sector that can influence the adoption of sustainable practices by industry.

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.

This article was prompted by a Ministerial veto (2021) of the Australian Research Council’s decision to fund a research project by the authors to explore the student-led climate movement in Australia. It was also prompted by criticism of the veto which accused the Minister of bringing “politics” into what was represented as a scholarly matter. It addresses two questions: How should we understand this idea of “politics” in the context of Australian climate politics since the 1990s? Secondly it considers dominant ways of thinking about “the political” devised by ancient Greek writers and politicians which still inform the European liberal tradition. We question how fit for purpose this approach is in the Anthropocene? Our key argument is that the western tradition of thinking about “the political” is deeply anthropocentric. Historical traditions have encouraged inegalitarian and anti-democratic accounts of who can be political by excluding different kinds of people from political life. The Anthropocene requires a new, critically reflexive account of “the political” that is inclusive of people currently marginalized and excluded as well as nonhumans and nonliving components of ecosystems on which we all depend. This extends the idea of democracy beyond the human and points to a politics of climate justice.

This article explores my relational learning reflections with the Laitu Khyeng Indigenous community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh, focusing on Indigenous perspectives on climate change education. Implementing a relational theoretical framework, I share my reflections on relational learning in this research as part of being accountable to the Indigenous community. Through exploring Indigenous land-based climate change research, five central themes emerge Indigenous land rights, relationship with the environment, community-led relationality as collaboration, intergenerational relational knowledge and relationality as ethical reciprocity. The findings explore the intrinsic connection between Indigenous communities and their ancestral territories, emphasising the significance of upholding Indigenous sovereignty over land for sustainable adaptation to climate change. In this article, I highlight the importance of relational learning as a form of education, fostering resilience rooted in preserving traditional practices and spaces. Relationality with the environment is central to Indigenous climate education, promoting understanding and reciprocity with the land. In my learning, I learned that community dynamics and collaborative learning are essential for effective climate education, emphasising collective action and diverse perspectives. In relational learning, inter-generational knowledge transmission ensures the preservation and sharing of traditional land-based knowledge across generations, forming the foundation for sustainable adaptation strategies. Ethical engagement and reciprocity guide research interactions, emphasising mutual respect and cultural sensitivity. By centring Indigenous perspectives and knowledge systems, this study advocates for community-led approaches to climate change education, fostering resilience and environmental stewardship within Indigenous communities.

The School Strike 4 Climate New Zealand (SS4CNZ) movement have organised and led four strikes between 2019 and 2021. With each successive strike, adult support for students’ demands increased. Their most notable achievement was garnering sufficient support to pass Aotearoa New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Bill into legislation. However, tensions with SS4CNZ led to the Auckland Chapter announcing its disbandment in 2021. There were mixed responses to their decision. In this reflective essay I argue that this disbandment was a positive move forward because these youth were showing their willingness to re-build relationships with their Māori and Pacific Island activist peers. By disbanding, not only were these young leaders enabling their Māori and Pacific Island peers to lead future actions, they were acknowledging the connections between racism, colonialism and climate justice; responding to our relational crisis by demonstrating the importance of re-building robust and reciprocal relationships between humans and more-than-humans when advocating for ways to navigate towards a climate-just society.