Road to Ahmedabad

Abstract

In his speech at the inaugural session of the 4th International Conference on Environmental Education, Ahmedabad, India, in November 2007, Charles Hopkins, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of environmental education (EE) at the 1st International Conference on Environmental Education in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1977, reflected on how EE has progressed over the past three decades. When the International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP) was born in the 1970s, pollution and the emerging scarcity of resources were the paramount issues, but those issues have now faded in the face of global poverty, climate change and economic issues. However, the architects of the early EE documents, including the well-crafted Tbilisi Declaration, envisioned many aspects of EE—including poverty eradication, cultural pre-servation and social justice—that are relevant today. Looking back, it is interesting to observe how environmental educators themselves have risen to the broad dreams of the Tbilisi Declaration writers.