This paper presents results from 15 little publicized state and national environmental surveys in the US that used similar questions. Our analysis reveals trends in adult understanding of environmental issues. These trends indicate that many may have difficulty making informed decisions about environmental policy as citizens, voters, and…

There is a long-standing debate in Scotland over the use of upland areas, as initiatives to restore the native Caledonian pine forest are vying with traditional moorland management for shooting. Our study set out to improve our understanding of argumentation processes with regard to these issues. We conducted semi-structured interviews with a wide…

This article is a transcript of the author's Keynote Address to the Fourth World Environmental Education Congress, Durban, July 2007. He has been asked to speak about environmental education research since Tbilisi, to explore what environmental education researchers might learn from this work, and look ahead to the challenges that now face them as…

The breadth and depth of the environmental crisis and the consequently wide and inclusive interpretations of "sustainable development" has promoted a disparate range of academic responses encouraging a loose interpretation of environmental education and Education for Sustainable Development. This in turn reduces the capacity for the…

In 2007, "Environmental Education Research" dedicated a special issue to childhood and environmental education. This paper makes a case for "early childhood" to also be in the discussions. Here, I am referring to early childhood as the before-school years, focusing on educational settings such as childcare centres and…

Can we avoid inheriting serious issues from research related to environmental education when the researcher community is addressing education for sustainable development? This paper identifies and discusses three main issues: if an explicit and coherent concept of environmental education or education for sustainable development is missing; if the…

Understanding environmental learning is the first step to constructing successful environmental education programs. Little research has addressed the relation between the environmental knowledge learned inside and outside schools. Environmental educators and ethnobiologists have worked independently, without assessing how school and local…

For a generation or more, environmental education discourses have been constructed around persistent Cartesian dualisms of modernist thought that divide an "othered" category of being from that of a constituted homogeneous human identity. During the same period, both feminist and poststructuralist theorizing has acted to destabilize the…

This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing in environmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field's…

The field of environmental education research has been moving away from scientistic and positivistic discourses for some time now ("Environmental Education Research," 2000; Hart & Nolan, 1999). However, it has been noted that the meta-discourse about this research continues to draw on their framings, registers, and lexicons (Hart, 2000;…

Experience in Australia has demonstrated that problems arise when sustainability requirements appear to conflict with individual development rights or local lifestyles. Community partnering between government and the public is therefore of fundamental importance in working towards sustainable development. Unfortunately genuine partnering is only…

Getting papers published in the (largely English-language) international literature is important for individual researchers, their institutions, and the academic community, and the resulting pressure is being felt increasingly in China as a result of top-down policy initiatives. For many researchers, reaching this goal involves two intersecting…