Introduction

This chapter explains the book’s main aim: to identify how education can contribute to creating environmentally responsible citizens in Indonesia. It is vital that young people be made more environmentally knowledgeable and responsible via the creation of a collective environmental subjectivity.

There is a lacuna in our knowledge of environmental attitudes and knowledge, and of environment education in countries of the Global South. Indonesia’s status as a large country in the Global South, and the particular economic, governmental and cultural configuration of Indonesia, affect the way environmental education (EE) is taught (and not taught) in schools in Indonesia. As a resource-rich, developing country, Indonesia is focused on creating prosperity; there is not yet widespread concern that its pollution of the environment and reckless use of its natural resources is a problem. The chapter argues for a view of society embedded within the earth’s life-support system and introduces the idea of “environmental responsibility”. The chapter then describes the team project and field research which produced the ethnographic data presented in the book.