Toward political ecologies of environmental education

ABSTRACT

Drawing a causal line between educational practice and ecological impact is a difficult intellectual task given the complexity of variables at work between educational event and ecological effect. This is further complicated by the anthropological fact that diverse peoples interact with nature in myriad ways. Our environmental interactions are socially organized and the result of political processes. Dominant approaches in educational research literature pay scant attention to the political-ecological aspects of producing knowledge about the environment, although recent work has begun to challenge such apolitical and acultural research paradigms. We therefore comment on the special issue articles and situate them within larger conversations currently shaping environmental anthropology and human geography. We conclude with considerations for future work toward developing political ecologies of environmental education and its research.

KEYWORDS:

• anthropology
• environmental education
• geography
• political ecology