No two oil spills are the same. Logistically, oil spills are a nightmare because they are unanticipated and uncontrolled events. Oil spills present a threat to wildlife and coastal resources, concerning everyone from local residents to state environmental agencies and the federal government. Thousands of people may be involved in a significant…

RMIT is a major Australian university of technology based in central Melbourne with regional and international reach. It has made both online education and programme quality two central planks in its teaching and learning strategy in recent years. This paper proposes making the connection between these two strategic directions by working within a…

Global climate change may result in a wide array of social and environmental harms, and this prospect has given rise to an international treaty, the 1992 "UN Framework Convention on Climate Change." Scientific uncertainties, nation state politics, and economic resistance had to be addressed before this landmark environmental agreement could be…

In 1933, the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities was an exclusive learned society, out of touch with modern methods and funding, which had also failed to re-establish itself as a "centre of research". During the Nazi regime, it was at best peripherally involved in the restructuring of German academia. While some of its members…

Recognizing the need and importance of environmental education (EE) in India, recently several efforts have been made to reorient and reorganize school education and establish EE more formally. School textbooks, in all subjects and at all levels, have been revised to integrate environmental concepts. The effects of these curricular revisions will…

Mark-recapture techniques are commonly used by ecologists to estimate abundance of naturally occurring animals and are an important component of ecology curricula. This investigation teaches a mark-recapture technique using store-bought crickets in 10-gallon aquaria and provides an inexpensive way to teach students about mark-recapture in a real…

The authors report on the implementation process of environmental education (EE) in two Flemish (Belgian) teacher education colleges. One college had a long history of cross-curricular education, whereas the other college did not. Initially the implementation processes in the two institutions stagnated because of personal and organizational…

Much official environmental education policy in the UK and elsewhere makes scant reference to nature as such, and the issue of our underlying attitude towards it is rarely addressed. For the most part such policy is pre-occupied with the issue of meeting "sustainably" what are taken to be present and future human needs. This paper…

If global warming has an upside, it may be the development of an enhanced awareness of the environment and the dangers faced due to profligate and destructive habits. The ways in which most people live in the industrialized world separate those from the natural world and hence make it difficult for them to understand and care about the planet that…

In this study, the authors examine the mission statements of 136 zoos in the United States that the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) has accredited, and report on the predominant themes of education and conservation in the statements. To explore the relation between these two themes, the authors present a literature review of the roles…

Interactive engagement pedagogies that emerge from a constructivist model of teaching and learning are often a challenge to implement in larger classes for a number of reasons including the physical layout of the classroom (e.g. fixed chairs in an amphitheater-style room), the logistics of organizing a large number of students into small…

Project WetKids (www.projectwetkids.net) provides wetland, environmental, estuary, and watershed experiences with local scientists, engineers, and naturalists to Pascagoula, Mississippi students and their families. Extensive activities provide participants: (1) real world, locally relevant science-based events; (2) meaningful scientific…

As part of a curriculum development project entitled Crossing Boundaries, these authors designed an inquiry-based activity that introduces students to landscape change and potential impacts on associated biological communities. Using pairs of current and historical satellite images, students explore landscape change in a variety of U.S. and…

The International Polar Year-Research and Educational Opportunities in Antarctica for Minorities (IPY-ROAM) program was designed to increase minority participation in polar science by immersing participants in an academic program that included a trip to Antarctica. The IPY-ROAM program was focused on increasing public understanding of the polar…

Future decision makers in natural resource fields will be required to make judgments on issues that lack clear solutions and with information complicated by ethical challenges. Therefore, natural resource, environmental, and agricultural professionals must possess the ability to think critically about the consequences of policy, economic systems,…