New Publications

  • Working together?

    I wrote an article for Issue 4 of Elephant Times, the new venture from Tide~.  It ended with a challenge to organisations promoting development education and global learning: –  remember that tackling climate change and environmental issues is vital if all humans...

  • QAA ignores students

    Steve Martin, who writes the Transformative Future Learning blog has written about the new guidance on ESD from QAA and its friends.  It's fair to say that he's underwhelmed.  This is how the post ends: " ... in 2014, the...

  • Dasgupta 1

    The Dasgupta Review was published last week and can be downloaded.  It has been widely welcomed.  The Review said that schools should “introduce Nature studies from the earliest stages of our lives and revisit them in the years we spend in secondary...

  • The problem of ESD Groupthink

    The reason the QAA's latest ESD Guidance is such an egregious irrelevance must have something to do with the narrow range of people whom it choses to be advised by.  Here are the job titles of the university-based members of...

  • ESD in HE – QAA has another go

    Heaven help me but I've been reading the latest attempt by the QAA and its friends to get academics to take ESD seriously.  You'll find it here, and there's a 10 question survey to give your feedback.  Good luck.  The survey begins...

  • Our missing book Chapter

    In our new book –Learning, Environment and Sustainable Development: a history of ideas – that was published last week, Paul Vare and I wrote about Virgil's Georgics which were written between 37 and 29 BCE.  The Georgics outward theme is farming and rural...

  • Remembering Sean Carson

    I recently read parts of Environmental Education: principles and practice, published by Edward Arnold in 1978, and edited by Sean McBride Carson.  Odd, you might think, given its venerable 33 years ageing on my bookshelves, but I dived into it for...

  • Environmental education in England 1960 to 1979 – a pen picture

    In the book Learning, Environment and Sustainable Development: a history of ideas – written by myself and Paul Vare, and published by Routledge/Greenleaf on the 12th of November 2020 – we present a number of time-line sketches of some of the significant events...

  • Wordsworth's weak link to the East India Company

    I wrote last week about the National Trust's Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery.  Subsequent to this, I wrote to the Trust about this passage...

  • Go on, rewild yourself

    Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding ways to make nature more visible is a wonderful book by Simon Barnes with lovely illustrations by Cindy Lee Wright.  Published by Simon & Schuster UK – ISBN: 978-1-4711-7542-8 – at a cost of £8.99 (p.back).  You...