sharing environmental education stories:a critical incident in a canadian community

abstract

in this article i present environmental education as a sharing of contested stories about the human-nature relationship. i suggest that the most vigorous story telling occurs in non-formal and informal education, and the contestation reflects polarised environmental ideologies. by way of introduction, and in keeping with my experiential epistemology, i summarise my own environmental education story. for the major part of the paper i try to do the same for a canadian urban community, using the listening, observing and reflective strategies of an ethnographic evaluation research methodology. i identify five major themes, or discourses, relating to the way the peterborough community is addressing its human-nature relationship. in terms of the evaluation part of my methodology, i make two observations: one concerned with who will be the "keeper" of peterborough's environmental values, and the other about how "green" these values will be.