Sometime
in the late ’90s, after
a talk I gave at the University
of Florida about experiments we were
doing with interdisciplinary undergraduate
science programs at UBC, Buzz Holling asked
me to organize and edit a Special Feature of
the then-new electronic journal Ecology
and Society.  He imagined a set of articles
on innovative approaches to education to
educate the global ecological community
about what is possible, plausible,
achievable, and desirable
to achieve.

I’ve always
been more a practitioner
of educational innovation than a scholar,
and knew I didn’t know enough about education to
mount a broad survey of the world literature, so
my only choice was to invite mainly people I
knew, had worked with, and whose work
had significantly influenced
my own. 

I didn’t want
scholarly or academic articles,
but first-person narrative testimonials
about what they themselves had done and
what they’d learned from doing it about Educating
for Sustainability in the broadest sense of that
term. My Introduction to the Special Feature
paints the Big Picture – – how I hoped the
articles and my editing would satisfy
Holling’s hope to educate our
research community.

Edited August 2022