ABSTRACT
As we seek to re-orient education to enable humanity to find some kind of dynamic balance with the planet that hosts us and all life in the universe as far as we know, it is good to look ahead and explore emerging forms of learning and innovation, but also to have a sense of history by looking back. First we will look back at two somewhat parallel ‘evolutions’ that share some common characteristics: the evolution from nature conservation education to sustainability education on the one hand, and the evolution within science and higher education from environmental science to sustainability science on the other. We realise that the interpretation of history is somewhat biased as we do so from our own, mostly Western, vantage points which blind us from seeing history from a different socio-cultural perspective that might be just as or perhaps even more informative. Nonetheless we hope that readers who come to this Handbook from a different perspective will still find merit in our attempt to make sense of the past and the way we use it to inform possible future orientations of higher education.
