Sustainable development, environmental education, and the significance of being in place

This paper begins by locating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the context of education more broadly and identifies some key concepts that form a backcloth to understanding it and some tensions and curriculum issues to which it gives rise. The paper examines some of the strengths and problems of different interpretations of ESD and argues that its future as force for good depends on it becoming disentangled from the scientism that characterises much modern and late-modern thinking. It is further argued that this can be achieved by a focus on the character of our engagement with place and that this can reveal what is truly environing, including the intrinsic normativity, agency and value of transcendent nature.