Reviews

Arjen E.J. Wals makes two pertinent points in the acknowledgements section of this excellent book that have significant bearing on the selection, structure and quality of the 27 chapters that follow. First, he expresses surprise that his academic friends would take time to write a chapter for an edited book—rather than reserve their writing time for a refereed journal. The fact that so many authors so willingly wrote chapters speaks to the growing importance of the concept of social learning in sustainability thinking. Indeed, this book is the third to be published in recent years on this topic. The others are Leeuwis and Pyburn’s Wheelbarrows Full of Frogs: Social Learning in Rural Resource Management (2002) and Keen, Brown and Dyball’s Social Learning in Environmental Management: Towards a Sustainable Future (2005). While there is some small overlap between these books and this one, Wals’ book is the only one to take an explicitly educational approach to the theme. The other two come at it from natural resources management or sustainability angles. Social Learning towards a Sustainable World represents an evolution and maturing of the field as evidenced by the choice of notables to write the Foreword and Afterword, the environmental philosopher-turned-ecoliteracy educator, Fritjof Capra, and the radical educator Michael Apple, respectively. The second significant point in the acknowledgements is that social learning is a ‘fuzzy field’ despite its growing importance and all the current research and writing about it. Wheelbarrows Full of Frogs and Social Learning in Environmental Management accepted this fuzziness although the editors of the latter identified five braided strands in social learning processes (reviewed in Chapter 8 of Social Learning towards a Sustainable World) as a way of distilling a baseline conceptualisation of the field. REVIEWS AND RESOURCES Reviews