Environmental and sustainability education : a fragile history of the present

The terms Environmental Education and Sustainability Education arc both used in this chapter to acknowledge the historical origins of' the field and its current practices. Environmental Education was first described as a disciplinary entity in 1969 with the inauguration of Environmental Education, the field's longest standing journal. The term Sustainability gained fluency later in The World Conservation Strategy (I 980) in order to reconcile economic development and environmental conservation (Tilbury, 1995: 197). The formal move from using the term Environmental Education to Education for Sustainable Development emerged internationally with the Brundtland Report (! 987) from which arose the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-14). The field continues to be characterised by the use of the three terms-Environmental Education, Education for Sustainability and Education for Sustainable Development - depending on the geographical location of the writer and their ideological and political affiliations. These debates and their time/space/place dimensions are a continuing thread throughout the chapter.