The Latin-American perspective on the debate on education for sustainability 1 By Edgar González-Gaudiano It is difficult to disagree with the lucid, well-balanced article by John Smyth published in the July/August edition of the Environmental Communicator. This essay puts forward many proposals which refresh the argument over the displacement of the concept of environmental education in favor of education for sustainability; this with a view to avoiding inopportune polarisations. Nevertheless, I feel that the voices of Latin-American educators should be added to the polemic; we have our own very distinctive history right from the establishment of environmental education to the current state of play. A few facts. Environmental education appeared in Latin America and the Caribbean almost a decade later than in the industrialized countries, principally the United States, Canada, Australia and western Europe. When the first organizational steps were taken, we found ourselves taking up diametrically opposed positions. On the one hand were Tbilisi’s recommendations as rediscovered so splendidly at several of the regional meetings held in Latin America, and on the other the promotion of the International Environmental Education Program’s educational approach, which had already been included in proposals dealing with behaviorism and the green environment; that is to say, Tbilisi heralded the arrival of a new pedagogical field closely tied to a strong political and social commitment very much in keeping with a critical Latin-American tradition of popular education projects based on the ideas of Freire, Mariátegui, Mella and Puigrróss. Nevertheless, IEEP activities, along with the wealth of published matter on the new field arriving in our countries principally from the United States, brought about an education devoid of or showing weak links with social commitments, centered on possessing knowledge of the dynamic processes of nature, and based on the subjects studied by a de-politicized science which claimed to be objective and non-judgmental. The internal ambivalence displayed by the field generated a variety of struggles. On the one hand there is the ongoing struggle of all environmental educators within our own spheres of influence because it recognizes the value and importance of environmental education as a social practice in public policies and institutions to arrest, correct and reverse the state of deterioration in which we find ourselves. On the other hand, there exists a struggle within the field itself between those who simply want to put into practice environmental education proposals formulated by well-known personalities with the backing of prestigious organisms and those who proposed to structure environmental education from qualitatively different premises which gave a better response to the Latin- American critical tradition which we suppose are more suitable for a reality such as ours, full of necessities and cultural diversity. 1 Publisher at: Environmental Communicator 1998 (28) 5: 11-12