53 ISSN:0814-0626 © Australian Association for Environmental Education “Holding Environments”: Creating Spaces to Support Children’s Environmental Learning in the 21 st Century Karen Malone † RMIT University Introduction Growing up in the 21 st century will present significant challenges for children. Worldwide industrialisation, population growth, poverty, environmental degradation, uncertainty and risk are impacting on children’s childhood experiences. The urbanization of the world – the rise of rural-urban drift means the city landscapes are becoming more and more congested – green spaces becoming a rarity. Those spaces left in cities, particularly botanical gardens, have become key holding environments for the shared botanical diversity of the globe-like zoological gardens they are often represented as the global “Arks”. These green spaces in the urban landscape are key places for children and their families to fully experience and engage in living with nature (albeit a human constructed and designed nature). They have also become the “holding environments” for children’s environmental learning. I will begin this paper by providing a short summary of the changing global landscape in terms of both the implications of population growth and inequitable use of resources, and the introduction of the key United Nations policies informing Abstract For many children across the globe, whether in low or high income nations, growing up in the 21 st century will mean living in overcrowded, unsafe and polluted environments which provide limited opportunity for natural play and environmental learning. Yet Agenda 21, the Habitat Agenda and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child all clearly articulate the importance of urban environments as the context for supporting children’s sense of place, community identity and empathy with the natural world. I will argue in this paper that these attributes are all key drivers for supporting children in their role as future decision makers and environmental stewards. Extending Winnicotts’ concept of “holding environments” beyond the social and cultural aspects of communities as sites for placemaking I draw a link to the value of botanical gardens and other green spaces in cities as the “holding environments” for children’s environmental learning. I will construct an argument around the premise that to participate in, and contribute to, global sustainability - our children need places and the opportunity to engage, connect and respond to nature. † Address for correspondence: A/Professor Karen Malone, School of Education Senior Research Fellow, Globalism Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Email: karen.malone@rmit.edu.au Australian Journal of Environmental Education, vol. 20(2), 2004