Seeing the Trees through the Forest: Navigating Toward Environmental Citizenship in Canada

Abstract

In Canada we seem to have matured from a society possessed with finding its "identity" to one which is now consumed with establishing new bearings and directions for environmental policies and education ‹ incessant orienteering. The Government of Canada, through its Green Plan, vowed to make Canada the industrial world's most environmentally friendly country by the year 2000. Through this initiative it sought to convey the new underlying realities of environmental policy. Problems were now seen as global, not just local or national. Solutions lay in changing the very nature of decision making in all institutions. A concept of sustainable development, of "planning for life," was promoted as the vehicle for establishing an environmentally literate citizenship...