Environmental education for the eighties

Excerpt

IT is not only fashionable but appropriate following this tenth anniversary I year of Earth Day to reflect on the progress of environmental education during the past decade, assess its current stitus, a i d project what the new decade may portend. But this task of projection must be approached with caution. A number of projections from 1970 have already proved wildly inaccurate (33).

Nonetheless, the task is an interesting one. If Winston Churchill's admonition-those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it-is honored, the approach of the computer-armed futurist in analyzing how the past has created the present and how they together propel us into the future (3) may be instructhe in examining the question: What kind of environmental education for the eighties?

Earth day, an amalgamation

Of course, it is no more accurate to suggest that environmental education was born on Earth Day 1970 than it is reasonable to define it as education for environmental activism. Pre-1970 predecessors of environmental education have commonly been identified as nature study, conservation education, and outdoor education (20, 31). What occurred in 1970 selectively absorbed the content, techniques, and …