Environmental Education

Roots of Mainstream Environmental Education

Environmental education has its early roots in nature studies (the study of the natural world) and field studies (study of history, geography, and biology in the field) in the early to mid-1900s. These perspectives on studying the environment largely included learning in the natural sciences and romanticized notions of the environment as personal experience with nature. As early environmentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir brought attention to the beauty of the natural world and spoke out against its destruction, the early environmental [Page 800]agenda was set toward preservation and conservation. These foundations in nature study and conservation have remained in mainstream environmental education, which has traditionally defined environment as the natural wilderness and included the voices of those traditionally most involved in the environmental movement—predominantly White, middle and upper class, and highly educated. This definition of environment is divorced from issues of race, class, and social inequity.

Environmental Justice and Environmental Education

In the 1980s and 1990s, communities of color were starting to mobilize against inequitable exposure to environmental pollutants. In a study released by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in 1987, race was presented as the most reliable predictor of living near hazardous waste sites in the United States. Twenty years later, in 2007, the United Church of Christ published a follow-up study and found that racial disparities had become even more pronounced than previously reported. The new report found that race continued to be a stronger predictor than income, education, or other socioeconomic factors for living near a hazardous waste facility and that people of color remain disproportionately clustered in communities with the highest numbers of hazardous waste facilities. The original study mobilized communities of color around unjust and racist environmental practices on the part of industries and led to the environmental justice movement. Robert Bullard was one of the leaders in this movement and documented unjust environmental policies and the declining quality of life for people in affected communities in his book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality.

Against this backdrop of grassroots organizing of communities of color, there was a corresponding shift in the 1980s and 1990s in environmental education to see environment as extending beyond the natural world and including in its definition the places where people live and carry out their daily lives. In 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit brought together more than 300 delegates internationally to challenge the cultural assumptions of environmentalism and environmental education. The summit took as its central focus issues of environmental justice and challenged organizations such as the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) to take on issues of cultural and social justice that were previously overlooked in official definitions and goals of environmental education. The NAAEE released a statement in 2007 stating its commitment to diversity in both its membership and the field of environmental education more broadly.

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