June 2021

Climate Emergency Manchester invited me for an email interview recently.  This is what I wrote in response to their questions: – A little bit about who you are, how you came to be interested in issues of "the environment", education and...

Michalinos Zembylas, from the Open University of Cyprus, has a chapter in a new book: Affect and the Rise of Rightwing Populism.  This is the summary: "This chapter seeks to explore how, why and under which conditions a move away from critique...

Where I searched the UK National Archive from 1960 to the present for the phrase "environmental education" I came up with 26 entries.  These started in 1972 with items about environmental education in Bournemouth, Hertfordshire and Doncaster.  Prominent entries related to the Belgrade...

I watched the launch of the UK's newest news channel on Sunday.  GB News is the UK’s first new news channel for some while.  In his opening remarks, Andrew Neil set out the channel’s philosophy: "We will puncture the pomposity...

I've been reading Stephen Sterling's opening essay in the new GTI Forum, The Pedagogy of Transition. It begins: "Formal education systems have—or should have—a critical role in the global social learning process underpinning the Great Transition.  On the face of it,...

As promised, I didn't pay much attention to the UNESCO World Confluence on ESD but I have been looking at the resulting Berlin Declaration.  "Declaration", I ask you!  The obvious and unsubtle aim here is to encourage us to think of...

An Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill has been introduced into the House of Lords to "make provision in the national curriculum regarding sustainable citizenship and protection of the environment."  It's a private members' bill and is 6th in line for debate....

Perhaps the following John Clare poem (with its unusual sing-song meter) ought to be the anthem of all re-wilding projects as it valorises the wild at the expense of the cultivated.  I came across it in WG Hoskins' magisterial The Making...

I've been observing No Mow May on my front lawn for much longer than Plant-life's recent campaign, and I always extend it into Just Grow June as well, as I watch  the 2nd law of thermodynamics bring glorious disorder.  It's good...