ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of education for sustainable development (ESD) through the work of mopet sanctuary network, a non-governmental organisation seeking to achieve sustainable community development in Hokkaido, Japan. Global organisations have also recognised the importance of taking a community-based approach such as Local Agenda 21, the united nations-sponsored action plan for local autonomies. Education functions to effect social transformation, creating waves not only from the global to the local but from the local to the global and from the periphery to the centre. The chapter shows that how the problems facing one Ainu fisherman were shared with people in the wider community, and it investigates how residents learned and changed through this process, thus suggesting the significance and the role of informal ESD. According to Y. Inoue and M. Imamura, 'the debate on "sustainability" and "sustainable society" in environmental education can be realised only when the educators intervene in areas of effort that are often regarded as radical'.
