With the death of the Queen, the second Elizabethan era comes to a close. Along with the very many tributes that have already been paid to her there have been several that have looked back to the early 1950s when her reign began, in order to chart how things have changed both in the UK and in the wider world. But very few of these have focused on the environment, a cause which members of her family felt strongly about, and aspects of which she cared deeply about. This post looks at the changes that have occurred in that time and some of the significant events that have taken place. It is, of course, a partial view, and we welcome additions to it either through comments or separate posts.
The main themes of any look back to what sometimes feels like almost a pre-modern time are those of a growing awareness of the environmental problems facing us; the growing understanding that people in developed economies have caused these problems; a shift from awareness to concern and then to anxiety; and finally, the realisation that things have got to change.
Here, then, are a 50 of those milestones which have brought us to the present:
1948 The UN International Declaration of Human Rights was agreed.
1948 The International Union for the Protection of Nature [IUCN] was established. Thomas Pritchard’s speech was notable for an early use of the term environmental education.
1949 The Nature Conservancy was formed; a key point it made was to stress the need for an educational policy to protect the countryside. The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act is passed.
1957 The Civic Trust was founded. It campaigned to make better places for people to live.
1958 The Council of Nature was formed and, through developments such as National Nature Week, highlighted problems faced by nature.
1958 The Schools and Countryside Report and The Study Group on Education and Field Biology (1963) contributed to the growing interest in schools in nature studies and other countryside focused activities.
1960 The National Rural Studies Association was formed to promote rural studies and natural history in schools. The National Association for Environmental Education, emerged from the Association in 1972. Its journal, Environmental Education, is still published.
1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring to acclaim by the conservation movement and condemnation by the US chemical industry. Carson warned about the over-use of insecticides in agriculture and their effects on wildlife. This led to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.
1963 The Observer Wildlife Exhibition illustrated the lack of leadership in relation to promoting effective policy about conservation. This led (in 1963) to a series of study conferences (The Countryside in 1970) that were designed to encourage conservation and countryside amenity organisations to work together.
1965 The Keele conference focused on education with a conscious use of the term environmental education. A recommendation was that this ought to become an essential part of education programmes to ensure that everyone had an understanding of the environment and to promote a scientifically literate society. The Council for Environmental Education began in 1968. Emerging out of the Keele conference, this brought the education and environmental sectors into one body.
1967 The SS Torrey Canyon ran agrpund on the Cornish Coast spilling btween 90 and160 million litres of crude oil.
1967 The Plowden Report re-confirmed the value of the environment in the education of young children.
1969 The Reith Lecture given by Frank Fraser Darling focused on Wilderness and Plenty and is given the credit for taking ‘the environment’ into the public discourse.
1969 UN Secretary-General’s report on Problems of the Human Environment says: “If current trends continue, life on Earth could be endangered.”
1970 The Department of the Environment is set up; for the first time environmental issues can be considered by one ministry.
1970 The Schools Council Project Environment began and explored the relevance of rural studies to education. The National Association for Outdoor Education was set up.
1970 The Ecologist magazine was launched. Its Spring 1971 edition put forward a socially-radical Blueprint for Survival, with the term eco coming into popular usage.
1970 Earth Day was launched. This began as a teach-in to raise public awareness on critical environmental issues.
1971 The National (later North American) Association for Environmental Education [NAAEE] was founded as a professional association for environmental educators of all kinds.
1972 UNEP was established after the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm.
1974 The first World Environment Day.
1976 NAEE published A Statement of Aims which set out learning targets for all school age groupings.
1977 The Tbilisi intergovernment conference resulted in the Tbilisi Declaration which proved a strong influence on international environmental education.
1979 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate published Curriculum 11-16: supplementary working papers. This said that environmental education “is to be regarded as a function of the whole curriculum, formal and informal … furthered through established subjects and by courses in environmental science and environmental studies which in varying degree are interdisciplinary.”
1979 Three Mile Island nuclear incident occurred.
1980 The World Conservation Strategy was launched.
1980 The Journal of Environmental Education published Goals for Curriculum Development in Environmental Education.
1982 The US Environmental Justice movement begins.
1984 The Bhopal Disaster occurs.
1985 The thinning of the ozone layer is observed over the Antarctic.
1985 The Vienna Convention for the protection of the ozone layer was agreed.
1986 The Chernobyl disaster occurred.
1987 All 197 United Nations Member States adopt the Montreal Protocol.
1987 Our Common Future was published.
1988 The IPCC was launched.
1990 Environmental education was designated as a non-statutory cross-curricular theme within the new national curriculum for schools that had been set up in 1988. Curriculum Guidance 7 on environmental education was published by the National Curriculum Council.
1992 The First Earth Summit was held in Rio.
1995 A joint Department for Education / Department for the Environment conference was held, and a Government Strategy for Environmental Education was published.
1996 Teaching Environmental Matters through the National Curriculum was published.
1998 The Education for Sustainable Development Panel was set up by government and issued its first report (Education for Sustainable Development in the Schools Sector): a report to DfEE / QCA).
2002 The World Summit on Sustainable Development took place in Johannesburg, with a focus on improving people’s lives and conserving our natural resources in a world that is growing in population.
2004 NAAEE published Excellence in Environmental Education: Guidelines for Learning (K-12).
2005 The UN Decade on ESD was launched.
2006 Government launched its Sustainable Schools Initiative which placed the child “at the centre of its concerns for a healthy, just and sustainable society.” This was not mandatory and there was no focus on biodiversity.
2012 UNEP Member States launched the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
2015 VW’s exhaust emissions cheating was revealed in the USA.
2015 The Paris Climate Agreement was signed.
2015 The Sustainable Development Goals were agreed.
2019 The United Nations General Assembly declares 2021—2030 the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
2022 A Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy is published by the DfE.