Exploring Complexities of Political Ecology in the Research and Practice of Environmental Education

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores educational fallout from the realisation that the world system has planetary boundaries as limits that are real and that require different thinking and governance concerning how human beings ought to inhabit the planet. It will be difficult to have billions of people think about global concerns when they are focused on their own well-being. And so it comes to governance, locally, with bigger things in mind. Environmental education rhetoric has already begun to expand thinking to engage world systems as groundings for the politics that underpins decision-making above and beyond levels of theory/praxis. The educational challenge will be to lay out background theory and guidelines as we find ways to engage politically the problems amidst the power and control of the people that we elect as “leaders” at each level of educational and political systems. However, the challenge has been taken up and environmental education has created openings for exploring complexities of political ecology within environmental education.