Envisioning the Future: the challenge for environmental educators

One of the main concerns of environmental education is the need to create a more ecologically sustainable future, yet environmental educators often lack the expertise needed to explore alternative futures in this way. However, there is much of value that can be learnt from futures studies and from the work of futurists. In particular futures studies is interested in how people view the future and ways of cultivating clearer images of preferred futures. One established strategy for this is the futures workshop and examples are given of work by Robert Jungk, Warren Ziegler and Elise Boulding in this field. It is suggested that a valuable cross‐fertilisation of ideas could thus occur between environmental educators and such futurists.