ABSTRACT
When Prime Minister Helen Clark arrived at the Johannesburg Sustainability Summit in 2002 she was reputedly shocked by the gap between much New Zealand practice and best practice elsewhere in the world in many spheres of sustainability activity. Two key reports released within a year of the Summit, however, the Sustainable Development Programme of Action (2003) and Education Priorities for New Zealand (New Zealand Government, 2003) failed to give education a role in sustainable development. More recently, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE, 2004) argued that without some fundamental changes in education’s legislative, organizational and learning frameworks, any outcomes represented as sustainable development are most likely to result from chance or be cosmetic at best. The PCE (2004) report actually confronted issues that have haunted the environmental education literature for decades. It argued that “Our dominant value systems are at the very heart of unsustainable practices” (PCE, 2004, p. 4) and that the “Culture of consumerism is … a major barrier to getting people to think about, and to act on, sustainability issues” (PCE, 2004, p. 17). Further the PCE reported that before the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, it found strong evidence that “New Zealanders cannot see how they are contributing to many problems, or how they could be contributing to solutions” (PCE, 2004, p. 33). Still optimistic about education, the PCE went on to affirm the UNESCO position that education is the most effective means that society possesses for confronting the challenges of the future… Yet despite these misgivings the PCE (2004, pp. 4–5) held that “We could, and should, be the first in the world to become a truly environmentally sustainable nation… As a signatory to the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD) … New Zealand has a huge opportunity to show global leadership in this area.” But as Williams (2005, p. 7) remarked after the 3rd World Environmental Conference on ‘Educational Pathways Towards Sustainability’ in Torino, October 2005, we “need to be challenged and concerned about New Zealand’s ‘low level of future-thinking for learning for sustainability’ compared to other countries”.
