"Environmental education" is a terminology that could cover a set of diverse conceptual categories including 'education about environment,' 'education for environment,''education in environment,''education through environment,' and 'education with environment' (Suzuki, Z, 1996, 157). Yet, much of environmental education that the international community has gone through has been limited to the first, "about" type. In this kind of learning, pupils and students are taught about environmental issues, typically through textbooks in classrooms, and evaluated by teachers, normally through taking paper examinations. Similarly, much of environmental education that many adults have experienced is also the "about" type, attained by listening to radio, watching TV, and reading newspaper articles. In formal as well as informal educational opportunities, the learners interact with the natural environment only indirectly.

　 Such mainstream environmental education has marked both success and failure. The major achievement is the fact that many members of the human community have become aware of the environmental issues. For example, according to a 1996-98 survey on high school students in nine countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the majority of students in most countries were able to give correct definitions to a set of eleven key environmental terminologies including "ecology," "greenhouse effect," "ozone," "sustainable development," etc. (Sykes and others 2000, 189, 197-99). It has also been reported that children, who attain up-dated environmental information at schools, often transmit that knowledge to their parents at home, hence contributing to environmental awareness of the citizenry as a whole (Bhandari and Abe 2000, 64).

　 Although conventional environmental education has thus made remarkable progress in the dissemination of knowledge, the international community has envisioned its function as being far greater than that achievement. The participants of a UNESCO workshop produced the Belgrade Charter (1975), that proposed a universal framework for environmental education, and provided an influential definition of its purpose as follows:

　

The goal of environmental education is to develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations, and commitment to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones. (Underline mine)

　

　 In other words, the purpose included much more than mere awareness raising, and involved the promotion of a new "pro-environmental personality" who is ready to actively dedicate oneself for the environmental causes with effective concrete skills. A similar "trans-academic" notion of environmental learning was underlined by the Agenda 21(1992), the major action plan accepted at the "Earth Summit" (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development), and confirmed by the United Nations Millennium Declaration (2000). It articulated that formal and non-formal education is "critical for achieving environmental and ethical awareness, values and attitudes, skills and behaviour consistent with sustainable development and for effective public participation in decision-making" (underline mine. Agenda 21 1992, Par. 36.3). Again, the defined goal was the promotion of actively pro-environmental personalities with effective skills, and not just those having general abstract knowledge about the issues.

　 In view of such broader and higher definitions of the purpose, mainstream education cannot be described as a success story, because many citizens in the world, who are well-aware of environmental problems, nonetheless adopt life-styles against Earth's ecological systems. Gardner (2001) elaborated as follows:

　

Americans, for example, are among those who consistently express support for an improved environment, yet a growing share drive gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and live in ever-larger homes....

　A key and consistent finding of environmental psychologists is that people do not recycle more, drive less, conserve energy, or make other environmental behavior changes simply as a result of hearing about the adverse impact of their current behavior. (194)

　

　 Regarding the reasons for this disappointing phenomenon, specialists have pointed out various factors such as emphasizing "doom and gloom" without offering solutions; unpopularity of the provided solutions; teaching a global perspective that makes "the issues appear so immense that whatever we do as individuals will have little effect on a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut", etc. (Suzuki, D.1996, xi; Hawthorne and Alabaster 1999, 26; Gardner 2001, 195). And they unanimously agree that conventional environmental education "has not been able to make the quantum leap towards preventing, stopping and reversing environmental degradation" (Bhandari and Abe 2000, 76).