'Everything has to die one day:' children's explorations of the meanings of death in human-animal-nature relationships

Children's experiences of death are a potentially vital component of their developing sense of relatedness to non-human others and nature. Environmental education theory and practice would benefit from a broader understanding of how children view death and loss within ecological systems as well as within human-animal-nature relationships, but such research is currently lacking. This paper focuses on children's own descriptions of the deaths of companion animals - a largely ignored category of non-human others in environmental education - and explores three emergent, ecological themes. These themes indicate that death experiences within the home space are significant in ecological learning.