Environmental education owes its very existence to a particular interpretation of reality. The author's purpose in this article is to examine critically the "selected fictions" on which that view of reality is based--to examine the ways in which perceptions of environmental problems and issues are "conditioned by our position in space and time". He argues that some of these perceptions constitute unsustainable fictions, and he considers some ways in which we might work towards living lives based on more sustainable constructions of human interrelationships with their environments. The author begins with an illustration of how an interpretation of reality can be changed by taking (to coin Durrell's metaphor) two paces east or west--by glimpsing something familiar from an unusual vantage point. He concludes this article by outlining three constructive approaches to environmental education that follow from poststructural thinking: (1) deconstructing the conventional wisdom of the founding texts of environmental education; (2) encouraging learners to become historians of ideas and self-reflective social critics capable of deconstructing the myths and meanings that dominate our own culture; and (3) participating in the creative reconstruction of a language that foregrounds our kinship with nature.