My aim in this essay is to wonder "where" in the world I am now as a scholar of place and a lover of places, and to give some shape to where I have been. I begin by reflecting on how I came to discover that "place" matters--at a historical moment (the 1990s) in which academic interest in place surged. Next, I address some of…

Making people aware of the interconnections between personal consumerism and its environmental consequences is fundamental for motivating them to engage in more environmentally responsible consumption practices. This interpretive study, conducted in 2018, explored how transformative sustainability learning is implemented in waste education…

The global COVID-19 public health crisis has driven policies of lockdowns and social distancing that have had negative social and economic impacts, worsening inequalities and social exclusions, and mixed environmental impacts. This study engaged children from schools with diverse environmental pedagogies in online focus groups about nature and…

Urban environmental education helps students to recognize ecological features and practices of cities. To understand the value and practice of developing such ecological place meaning, we conducted narrative research with educators and students in urban environmental education programs in the Bronx, New York City. Narratives showed that educators…

The authors developed a framework of empirically grounded curricular goals for water-science literacy and documented the challenges that students face in achieving these goals. Water-related environmental science literacy requires an understanding of connected natural and human-engineered systems at multiple scales ranging from atomic-molecular…

Researchers tested whether writing increases ecological literacy in undergraduate elementary education students. The authors asked students to write 3 guided essays addressing the cognitive, affective, and behavioral domains in response to news articles on hypoxia. Of the 22 students, 64% improved their ecological literacy from the 1st essay to…

The New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) Scale, published in "The Journal of Environmental Education" by R. E. Dunlap and K. D. Van Liere (1978), has become the most widely used measure of environmental concern in the world and been employed in hundreds of studies in dozens of nations. This article tells the story of the NEP Scale, beginning…

From its inception, environmental education (EE) has shouldered the imposition of impartiality on its methods and practices. Considering the reality of global climate change, the author urges the adoption of the more accurate theory of humans' relation to the natural world. This theory necessitates partiality toward healthy, functioning natural…

Presents a summary of the research literature on students' ecological conceptions and the implications of misconceptions. Topics include food webs, ecological adaptation, carrying capacity, ecosystem, and niche. (Contains 35 references.) (MKR)

Finds that ecological and moralistic attitudes toward the environment correlate with talking about the environment at home, watching nature films, and reading about the environment. (Author/CCM)

This paper looks in detail at the "natural" causes of extinction as compared to the "technological" causes of extermination (abrupt niche-emptying), using examples of species that are both extinct and exterminated. Ways are suggested that can put a halt to extermination. (BT)

Changing attitudes of man toward many animal species are viewed as one aspect in stabilizing ecosystems. This research study attempts to indicate a hierarchy among attitudes toward animals, particularly for the purpose of developing positive attitudes toward rare and endangered species. (BL)