Sage on Stage is not sustainable: participatory pedagogy for a change

At the cusp of the 21st century natural resource educators face a bewildering variety of crises and contradictions. First, tomorrow does not replicate today, let alone yesterday. So not much is achieved by maintenance learning-the learning of fixed rules for recurring patterns. Secondly, learners are apt to behave like consumers and can secure access to education without having to endure the indignities of tyrannical teachers, capricious requirements, lectures or other manifestations of a transportation model of education. Thirdly, there is doubt about the extent to which progress can be wrought from the calm certitudes of tested knowledge and objective science. Indeed, in some places, there is suspicion that natural resource education is part of the problem-corporatism, environmental degradation, collapse of communities - and not part of the solution to what ails the planet. With these factors in mind the author maps approaches to education about natural resources and argues that there should be a migration from techno-rational or functionalist perspectives towards humanist, radical humanist and radical functionalist approaches