In this paper I examine two activities which are often attributed with a role to play in social transformation, namely environmental education and research, for their potential to contribute to collective change. I do so by drawing on the results of a recent empirical study in southern Africa, in which I distinguished four orientations to research in/and environmental education. In exploring the transformatory roles of research and environmental education, as conceptualised in these four orientations, I conclude that the most prevalent orientations reveal modernistic assumptions which limit their potential to contribute to social transformation.

The decision to interpret the results by focusing on social transformation grew out of what I regarded as the most significant dimensions of the context of the study. These are the global and regional calls for social transformation in response to the environment crisis, the dramatic political changes in parts of southern Africa, the need to improve education in the region, and finally, less obvious global epistemological shifts in the conceptualisation of science, education and social research.

Ecotourism associated with wildlife is becoming increasingly popular. The effects on wildlife of this increasing popularity are causing concern. Environmental interpretation programs may be a means of minimising negative effects if they are able to change tourists' behaviour. A review of cognitive psychology literature and theories of learning shows that simply increasing information and understanding does not necessarily result in more appropriate human behaviour. However, there are several techniques, such as the creation and resolution of cognitive dissonance and the use of the affective domain, which may create more effective interpretation. This paper reviews relevant theories of learning and offers guidelines for the creation of effective interpretation programs in the context of tourist - wildlife interaction.

It seems ironic that the amazing breakthroughs and successes of scientific methods of enquiry of the past century that were supposed to enhance the quality of human life are currently looked on as being at the root of many of the pressing environmental and social problems of our time. Conventional approaches to science and technology that enabled humankind to manipulate and exploit natural resources led to a sense of authority and command which gave rise to a sometimes blind belief in ‘…the triumphs of natural science in seeking to develop the social understanding that would allow human beings successfully to harness the forces thus released to their own self-betterment’ (Giddens 1982, p.69).

This extension of the apparent success of natural science as ‘… an ideology, a culturally produced and socially supported, unexamined way of seeing the world which shapes and guides social action’ (Carr and Kemmis 1986, p. 132) seemed very appropriate at the time. Inevitably, the trusted logical positivist and reductionist approaches permeated social sciences to such a degree that they dominated Western views on education for a long time. Popkewitz (1984, p.23) refers to the effect on education in which ‘…human engineers … act upon educational affairs as though there are no difficulties or uncertainties; …educators are to manipulate and control children as physical scientists manipulate objects of the physical world’.

Historically the values of schools and colleges have mirrored those of the larger society. Not only has education uncritically accepted the association of progress and the unfettered growth economy, it has trained engineers and managers, performed the research and developed the technologies which in aggregate have had such a devastating impact on the environment. A fundamental reorientation now needs to occur with the development of new assumptions undergirding education which treat the interaction of ecological processes, market forces, cultural values, equitable decision making, government actions, and environmental impacts of human activities in a holistic, interdependent manner (Berberet in Fien, 1993).

It is important to distinguish between two sorts of greenies. First there are those who think that the environmental problem can be solved by more attention to clearing up, or minimising in future, the damage caused by industrial-affluent society. Most environmentally concerned people are in this category, calling for things like more pollution control, but having no recognition of any need to question our affluent lifestyles or the rate of producing and consuming and economic growth their society involves. The first part of the following discussion argues that this common position is mistaken, that there is no chance of solving the environment problem without facing up to drastic reduction in GNP and ‘living standards’.

Unfortunately there are at present few greenies of the second type; people who realise that environmental damage is just one more huge problem being generated by our unsustainable ‘growth and greed’ society. There is no more important issue for environmental educators to focus on than the question of whether it is sufficient to patch up the damage being caused while plunging on down the track to ever-greater affluence and GNP, or whether the problems can only be solved by fundamental transition to a very different society, a radical conserver society. The argument below is that there is no chance of solving the environment problem nor any of the other major global problems facing us unless we move to lifestyles, patterns of settlement, values, and especially to an economic system which permit us to live well on far lower rates of per capita resource use and environmental impact that we have at the present in countries like Australia.

Environmental education is only at a developmental stage, having originated in response to the environmental problems which have been most pressingly felt in the last thirty years or so. There is a general concern that we do not unconsciously carry into our new philosophies and methodologies the very dysfunctions which led to our environmental problems in the first place. Consequently there has been a search for paradigms of knowledge and enquiry which are adequate for the new problems that we face, paradigms which recognise the essential interrelatedness of all forms of life and the fact that enquirers are themselves part of environments, not just external observers as it is considered in classical rationalist science. The philosophy and method of critical evaluation which goes by the name ‘constructivism’ declares itself to be a way which can lead us beyond the mistakes of earlier theories of knowledge. I will be contending that, rather than being a way beyond rationalism and positivism, the constructivist approach is entirely bound up with that which it seeks to criticise, even if it assumes a radical posture. Out of this critique of constructivism and by way of the ideas of the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and the scientific methods of the poet and ‘nature-philosopher’ Johann von Goethe, I will adumbrate an approach to a new form of environmental education which I believe can satisfy our concern that the problems of the past are not perpetuated in a new guise.

Cognitive representations play a fundamental role in governing the relationship existing between the natural world and the human world. It is important, therefore, to analyse some ideas which, in our culture, condition in a non ecological way the relationship which have with the natural world. This is the premise for the development of an ecological education.

In this perspective, the thought of Hannah Arendt revealed itself as fundamental. An interpretation of the arguments developed in her fundamental works (Arendt, 1987; 1989) permit the tracing of the genesis of some mental attitudes which have contributed to the development of a culture indifferent to the environment in which we live and, further, permit new categories of thought from which to begin to reform environmental education.