Environmental Education, a genuine education for sustainable development

The United Nations declared the decade of 2005 to 2014 the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and entrusted the UNESCO with the task of making it so. Both institutions' documents acknowledge that ESD does not focus on any particular sphere, but covers fifteen very different fields, such as peace, health, sustainable development, AIDS and the market economy Due to this breadth of scope. ESD is meant not to take the place of any existing educational movements, but rather to become a widespread call to all of them (education for health, for interculturality, for responsible consumer behaviour, for peace...) to incorporate the dimension of sustainability. That means sustainable development should be incorporated into other subjects and, due to its breadth, cannot be taught as an independent subject (UNESCO, 2005). This paper presents environmental education (EE) as a type of education that is decades ahead of the call, since it is the only educational movement that can boast of a career which spans over 30 years dealing with the linkages between the environment and development. Our thesis is based on the declarations of the founding processes and documents of environmental education (1975 Belgrade Workshop and 1977 Intergovernmental Conference at Tbilisi), as well as on the entire subsequent career of EE theory and practices. The text provides a historical overview, showing the involvement of environmental education with the ecological, social and economic approaches that propose keeping development mindful of the limits of the biosphere and social equity, i.e., sustainability. The historical career and current instances of fulfilment in this educational movement allow environmental education to be regarded as "a genuine education for sustainable development.