Environmental education: Preparing students to take on the 'Invisible Empire'

The primary reason that I embarked on my career in environmental education was because I was becoming extremely frustrated by my perception that school children were being bombarded by bad news about the plight of the environment, yet were not being given the opportunity to better understand the environmental issues they were exposed to, or to take action on these issues. I believe that we need to create programs that deepen our students' ecological literacy, or put simply, an understanding of what is really going on in the world around them.