It has received a good deal of attention since 1968 and creates positive images while conveying little in the way of substantive information or direction. Renewed interest in environmental education affords an opportunity to reconsider and highlight the interrelationships between environmental education and environmental literacy and to define the latter so it can be a useful term and concept. At present, as in the past, educational leaders show little direct interest in education about the environment, except as it may be subsumed by traditionally defined curricular areas. The 1970 Environmental Education Act, for example, received essentially no priority from the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, where it was housed. Over the years, significantly greater interest has been demonstrated by conservationists and environmentalists.
Environmental quality is their priority, and they see education as a mechanism for promoting it.
For this reason, the 1990 Act is receiving significant attention from its host unit, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, and from conservationists and environmentalists, in general. The promotion of citizenship education, often for adults as well as school children, is typically identified as the primary task of schooling. To achieve this goal, the development of both general and specific literacies is essential. We each have, and indeed fail to have, many different literacies. Literacy then is less about reading and writing per se, and is rather about ways of being in the world and ways of making meaning with and around text.