Writing about the challenges of and possibilities for environmental literacy has been a journey of discovery and this book chronicles the learning we experienced along the way.

Our first lessons came from the academic disciplines of biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and industrial ecology. In this chapter we review what these disciplines offer and where they, as individual disciplines, fall short in supporting environmental literacy. Given that these disciplinary realms, on their own, provide an incomplete picture about what is needed to cope with human and environmental systems (HES), we explored what it means to offer meaningful insights and solutions to environmental issues and problems. A major step was that we took a different view on the environment, which we called the anthropocenically redefined environment.