Education for Sustainable Development: From Environmental Education to Broader Views

Background

Some argue that the diversity of definitions and understandings of ESD across research and education contexts can be attributed to its early definition being given not by educational (or research) communities but actually by people within the policymaking field. Indeed, education for social development and environmental sustainability has its roots not in the educational community, but in larger social debates over environmental ethics which emerged in developed Western contexts in the 1960s and 1970s. Before this time, environmentalism consisted largely of land conservation, such as in the formal establishing and protecting of lands as modern public parks in western societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet as Light and Rolston note (2003), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, heralded a new ecological consciousness in western societies, which rejected the liberal Enlightenment view of the natural environment as infinitely exploitable for human purposes. With the book notably increasing public awareness of the toll of pesticides on animals, plants, and human health, a critical and postmodern environmental movement emerged alongside peace and civil rights movements that argued for reorganizing of human life with greater consideration of the natural world.