Expanding Environmental Education: Thinking Critically, Thinking Culturally

ducation is often understood as a E slow, cumulative approach to environmental problems, an approach that can take generations to physically improve the land. What education can do that other less culturally oriented strategies cannot is build the foundations for an ecologically sustainable culture at the level of perceptions and practices that transcend generational boundaries. Environmental problems result from environmental practices, and environmental practices are cultural activities. To change cultural practices, in the long run, an environmental education (EE) initiative that works comprehensive understandings of nature, culture, and the ecological consequences of human practices into every area of the curriculum is needed. To do this we need to change, deepen, and complicate individual and cultural perceptions of the world. Although many call for the inclusion of multiple disciplines in EE, in the end, the cultural dimension is narrowly understood and seldom a part of the practice of EE. The culture that is