Editor’s note
This revised chapter, like the earlier version it updates, is provocative and challenging. The links between Australia’s sustainability and Aboriginal and Torres Islander (that is, Indigenous) perspectives on country – both past and present – are clear but complex. Melinda G. Miller, a non-Indigenous author with a background in early childhood education and whiteness studies, challenges those of us working in ECEfS to resist privileging the environmental dimension of sustainability over social, economic and political dimensions. Particularly for Australian early childhood educators working in EfS, she challenges us to make reconciliation (bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians) a central tenet of our thinking and pedagogies. Melinda asserts that, as interest in this field heightens, ECEfS offers a unique opportunity for early childhood educators to put reconciliation front and centre and, in so doing, contribute to repairing the Earth, healing the shared but fractured histories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and creating new and sustainable futures for all Australians.
Introduction
The uptake of sustainability initiatives in early childhood education curricula continues to gain momentum in Australia and internationally. Growing awareness about the fragility of natural environments in local and global contexts, along with the prioritising of sustainability in educational policy, has resulted in more broad-scale responses to sustainability in early years settings. To address issues of sustainability, many childcare centres and schools focus on environmental initiatives, such as garden projects, recycling and water conservation. While important, such initiatives respond to just one dimension of sustainability. Taking a broad definition of sustainability into account, the environmental dimension of sustainability sits alongside social, political and economic areas of concern.