{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04974666052510364, 'fraction_numerical': 0.037770612620912025, 'mean_word_length': 5.6422018348623855, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Environmental education: a field in tension or in transition?

Since its acceptance as a pedagogic field, environmental education has experienced divergence and antagonism in its theoretical and methodological approaches and standpoints. Over the last decade, it has drawn on numerous discourses ranging across the teaching of ecology (as a branch of the natural sciences); conservation education; approaches heavily loaded with civic content; and citizen education (González-Gaudiano & De Alba, 1996; Mrazek, 1996); moral and ethics education; political considerations (Robottom, 1987) arising from, for example, a critical analysis of globalization, social inequity, and north–south relations and the rural dimension (Toledo & Castillo, 1999; Altieri, 2004); approaches linked to scientific knowledge (Castillo, 2000; Castillo et al., 2002; Jenkins, 2003); aspects of Oriental philosophy (Guha & Martínez-Alier, 1997; Guha, 2000); and the broad map of eco-spirituality (Berry, 1988; Hallman, 1994; Scharper, 1998). The last decade has also witnessed the emergence of education for sustainable development (ESD). Unsurprisingly, this has also been controversial as it has been taken up for a variety of reasons, including those who assume it to be a superior version of environmental education that will make potent contributions to the solution of today’s problems (see Smyth, 1995), and by those who see it as offering a structure that will be able to transcend the ‘limited’ scope of environmental education (Fien, 1993; Tilbury, 1995) elevating educational processes to a level at which ideologies deep inside environmental education may be surpassed (Huckle, 1983). Sterling (1996, p. 19) asks if ESD could be ‘a convergence of all those “adjectival educations” oriented towards social change, citizenship, peace and health, as well as political, human rights, multicultural, environmental and development education’. There are also those who perceive ESD to be something quite different, though indistinct, and even in harmony with the dictates of neo-liberalism (Sauvé, 1997). Sachs (1993), for example, warns of the risk of sustainable development becoming ‘mere