A recent United Nations' report claims that nearly two-thirds of the Earth's natural systems are unhealthy or failing, and many point to education--environmental education, education for sustainable development, or sustainability education--as a key means of addressing these issues. In this article, the author discusses the literary description to the ideas of Jensen and Schnack (1997), and Payne (2003) to explore, and complicate "education for the environment." Here, the author draws on her experiences of both gardening and conducting "post"-informed narrative research (see Hart, 2005) with a high school outdoor/environmental education teacher in order to illustrate and reflect on these themes. The stimulus papers by Jensen and Schnack (1997) and Payne (2003), are both concerned with what and who environmental education is for, in the sense that all environmental education is, in some way or other, education "for" the environment. Furthermore, the author examines the kinds of experiences, knowledge and ways of being that might led to environmentally-focused student action. Jensen and Schnack (1997) support the development of students' action competence, which they suggest is an interdisciplinary type of knowledge that focuses on students' abilities to envision a future they want, and reflect on and respond to current health and environmental concerns. Rather than advocate for particular behaviours where the action or outcome is already pre-determined by the teacher, Jensen and Schnack emphasize teaching to increase students' abilities to create their own visions for the future, and make choices based on those visions. They present issues around education for the environment as epistemological ones, focusing on the kinds of knowledge students gain from the experience of planning and taking action.