This article will discuss the role of environmentalism in environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD) in the context of ecopedagogy. Ecopedagogy calls for the remaking of capitalist practices and seeks to re-engage democracy to include multispecies interests in the face of our current global ecological crisis. In this article, the written reports by international business students on the documentary film If a Tree Falls about a radical environmental movement will be discussed. The aim of this article is to reflect upon the question of whether confrontational questions posed by radical environmentalism can move students to re-examine certain central assumptions within their own society and education. The analysis of students’ individual writing assignments after viewing the film is placed in the context of the discussion about the aims of education in relation to environmental advocacy. This case study seeks to provide an example of how environmental advocacy and the objective of pluralistic education can be combined as mutually supportive means of achieving both democratic learning and learning for environmental sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1177/0973408215569119 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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The Convention on Biodiversity has developed the concept of ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural resources’ in order to describe ways in which humans benefit from healthy ecosystems. Biodiversity, conceived through the economic approach, was recognized to be of great social and economic value to both present and future populations. According to its critics, the economic capture approach might be inadequate in addressing rapid biodiversity loss, since many non-human species do not have an economic value and there may thus be limited grounds for prohibiting or even restricting their destruction. This article aims to examine the concept of biodiversity through competing discourses of sustainability and to discuss the implications for education for sustainable development (ESD). https://doi.org/10.1177/0973408213495606 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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