25 years on: looking back at environmental education research
William Scott
Abstract
This is a personal reflection on the first 25 years of the journal, Environmental Education Research. It begins in the 1990s with the ideas behind the need for a new journal and explores the journal’s early years as it established itself. The paper then looks at two quite different papers from Volume 1 of the journal that identified issues that remain pertinent today, albeit in the very changed social context that we now experience where rapid climate change demands national and international responses from governments and educators. The paper then draws on three recent studies published in Environmental Education Research to examine what research might now focus on. It ends with a personal reflection on how all those involved in the journal are bound together by more than the professional imperative to publish; that is, by a need to address great questions of our time that are now much more urgent than they were when Environmental Education Research was started, or when the modern environmental movement and environmental education as we know it today began.