Another reading of the history of Environmental Education and some notes on the present crisis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to “deconstruct” the trajectory of Environmental Education (EE) in order to try to go beyond the lineal historical view, decontextualized, without subjects and without con flicts, that predominates in the literature on this field. The institutional versions usually begin with the Stockholm Con ference (1972) and finish with the last celebration established by the United Nations system, a milestone that is nowadays held by the 4th International Conference on Environmental Education Tbilisi + 30, held in Ahmedabad (India) in the year 2007.

In this itinerary, a central position, equivalent to a founding myth, is held by the con ference that took place in Tbilisi in 1977 and the recommendations that came out of it. The goal of this historical and critical approach is to shed some light -or at least a different light- on the task of unraveling and understanding the alleged -or real- crisis that is being felt in the field of EE and the role the myth of Tbilisi plays in this situation. As a methodological resource, the analytical approach taken is halfway between Foucault’s archaeology of the discourse and Bourdieu’s social analysis.