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Environmental education and quality of life
Abstract
One of the key assumptions in environmental education for sustainable development is that environmental education should improve and ultimately sustain people's 'quality of life'. The main question the paper addresses is how we can measure 'quality of life'. Earlier debates focussed on measuring quantitative factors but more recent surveys are concerned with developing a matrix of measurement that addresses qualitative factors as well in order to give a more meaningful picture of the state of well-being in a society. The problem with such a matrix is that the factors are couched in particular cultural interpretations, which tempts us to think that we cannot have an intercultural notion of human flourishing. I argue that not only can we have such a notion, but given the assumption of interdependence which underpins environmental education, we must start to spell out a shared concept of what constitutes 'quality of life'.
