ABSTRACT
The phrase the environment can have very specific meanings or can mean absolutely everything that surrounds us. During a research project on education for sustainability in Africa in the 1990s, an 80-year-old Malian woman, Mrs Samake, was asked what she understood by the term environment. The downsides, in terms of an atomised and utilitarian view of the world, not to mention pollution and habitat loss, were already apparent in the nineteenth century when the Romantic movement sought to value the environment for its own sake. In the 1990s, IUCN produced estimates of the economic value of the environment and proposed solutions such as debt-for-nature, where poorer countries were paid to retain high levels of biodiversity. The work of environmental education has for years sought to develop our environmental literacy, in other words, our knowledge, skills and dispositions in relation to the environment.
