The great challenge of the twenty-first century may well be achieving sustainable development – which is ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs’ (WCED, 1987: 8). Children stand at the heart of this definition in two respects. First, concern for future generations, which takes form in each new cohort of children, motivates development of this kind. Second, if practices consistent with sustainable development are to be carried forward through time, then children must be the bridge conveying their value and ways. For these reasons, many municipal governments and agencies that work with children are currently experimenting with approaches to integrate children into environmental planning.

What is lacking in these efforts, however, is a coherent theoretical framework for investigating the question that these practical initiatives raise: what experiences prepare children to value and care for their local environment and join in community decision-making? Although there have been many surveys of young people's environmental attitudes and knowledge, much less is known about environmental learning as children engage with their localities, or about how children learn to take collaborative action on behalf of the places where they live (Rickinson, 2001). Drawing on ideas in ecological psychology, we propose a framework for research on this topic. We submit that one impediment to advances on this front resides in dominant assumptions about the nature of perceiving and cognition.