This article documents the efforts of three women who undertook environmental action in their respective schools in the late 1990s. Two young women pushed through a number of barriers, including peer and family pressure, to create a recycling program. A principal defended her teachers to give students space for environmental learning within school grounds. One of the barriers they encountered was a persistent cultural discourse, through which those who embodied an ethics of care were positioned pejoratively as ‘greenies’. In response, the women positioned themselves as ‘not greenies’, in order to legitimise their environmental work. Ten years later, Neus Evans and I revisited this phenomenon (see Whitehouse & Evans, 2010). Dedicated educators, who saw their task as educating young people for their future, were again careful to constitute themselves as ‘not greenies’, while they innovated sensitive and sensible action in far northern schools. I remain interested in how cultural discourses both enable and act as barriers to sustainability practice, and in how environmental educators find themselves negotiating certain discourses in order to act.

Have you heard of the White-footed Rabbit Rat, or the Christmas Island Pipistrelle? The White-footed Rabbit Rat was thought to be widespread in south-east Australia but became extinct within 3 decades of European colonisation (Tzaros, 2005). The Christmas Island Pipistrelle, a micro bat, is probably the most recent species to become extinct in Australia (Flannery, 2012).

This article represents the early collaboration of Cutter-Mackenzie and Edwards in early childhood environmental education. The article grappled with the notion of knowledge and its role in the teaching and learning of early childhood education. At that time, ‘knowledge’ was viewed as difficult to integrate with play-based approaches to learning in early childhood education due to reliance in the field of traditional theories of play as a basis for early childhood pedagogy. This meant that open-ended or free play dominated practice, where the role of the teacher was invariably to be seen but not heard.

It is 7 years since we wrote this article, yet the reorientation of teacher education towards sustainability remains a challenge. However, there have been some pockets of progress internationally and in Australia (Belgeonne, Clough, Inman, Rogers, & Warwick, 2014; UNECE, 2012).

Diversity is integral to socio-ecological sustainability at all scales and dimensions of education practice. The Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE) has published research and reports of practice from a variety of novel and established perspectives and methodologies, recognising both small and large research studies and, in the process, becoming an energetic record of what we have been thinking about gender and culture and difference over the past 30 years. The editors of the AJEE have promoted diversity, given the purpose of environmental education is to change how we think about our social arrangements and to reconsider how it is possible to act within our world. As with any long-existing journal, the articles reflect historical scholarly trends and societal change, and the publications track what has been counted as legitimate in terms of being and knowing within the academy. Many kinds of useful knowledge were delegitimised and ignored until quite recently, so one of the tasks of researchers and educators and their AJEE editors has been to redress these silences and absences. If progress has been imperfect, this is a reflection of the difficulties of the task and not a reflection of the quality of the journal.