The twenty-first-century planetary challenge orbits around three integrated Earth system trends—species extinction and threats to biodiversity, rapidly changing biospheric circulations, and altered biogeochemical cycles. These patterns are the template for the proliferation of natural resource extraction, accelerating consumer demand, and the challenges of global wealth distribution. Meanwhile, the extraordinary synergistic advances of global communications networks, computerization, miniaturization, and instrumentation provide humanity with the daunting prospect of simultaneously exacerbating these challenges while offering the means to solve them. Since the late 1960s, and to some extent before then, environmental education has taken on this challenge, assuming that by expanding awareness of ecological relationships, natural history, and the human impact on natural systems, it would better equip people to perceive, understand, and manage these issues. Implicit in this assumption is the sense of grandeur and wonder that accompanies this awareness. With greater appreciation of the magnificence of the biosphere, people would be more inclined to protect and preserve what they have grown to love. Deeper awareness motivates ecological citizenship. The holy grail of traditional environmental education is formulating a robust ethic of care. Its great conceit (or naïveté) suggests that if they (those we educate) only knew what we know, they would...