Education for sustainability is a challenge and a struggle to cut across traditional divisions created in the West to support a culture based on the exploitation of limitless natural resources. In particular, a new interdisciplinary logic of environmental management is needed to maintain the flows oflimitedresources. It is not adequate to simply incorporate environmentalism as a perspective within existing subjects. Ecology is the central focus for environmental management of the non-human (natural) habitats from which we draw biological and physical resources to feed our technologies. However,environmental management is a complex phenomena, which involves not just non-human habitats but also human subjectivity, and social relations, all of which are intimately interconnected. Cultural ecology brings these three 'ecologies' together as a provisional minmap to connect the natural environment with self and society.

Often, critical work on our profligate use of planet Earth's resources emerges as a series of interventions into established disciplines and practices. This reveals a fundamental need to assemble new knowledge systems which deal with the future of our species as one ecological community boxed into a relatively small niche in evolution.

This is evident in the trend to expand the boundaries of subject divisions.  For example, arising from the great diversity of modern approaches to archaeology has come the need to develop a theory of persons within a more general theory of organisms and environment.  Similarly, metallurgy includes a view of household waste as a new 'ore' to maintain a supply of scarce materials.  These trends point the way to a general educational framework that would link together subjects in a common knowledge system of human life, consciousness and environment. This would be a form of cross- disciplinary systems thinking, where social, economic and material concepts are regarded as being embedded in ecological relations.  The aim is to help build theoretical and practical bridges with the practical aim of facilitating cultural change to sustain the human condition as a global society. Cultural ecology joins up practical approaches, from many starting points, for managing the environment in an overcrowded world. There is no single cultural ecology syllabus because

each person has their own predilection and passion for a particular set of guiding principles and concepts.  The mindmap presented here is a provisional attempt of one group of people in Wales to produce a global picture where environmental management is the bridge between mass production and conservation.

Cultural ecology centres on cultural-economic and cultural materialist approaches to environment.

Cultural-economic views stress how value is created through the exchange of goods and services. Cultural- materialist approaches extend this to consider the expression of environmental values as symbols, such as sacred lands. These symbols are the educational currency for establishing social obligations to selected elements of nature as part of a social feed-back system to legitimize ecosystems that have been embodied with meaning.

Culturalecology.info has its origins in the Faculty of Science at Cardiff during the early 1970s where new cross- disciplinary degrees were created to redirect academic trajectories towards ecocentrism.

It was given a boost by the University of Cambridge Examination Syndicate in the 1980s, where it was assembled as a new GCE subject natural economy, and developed as a model for world development education with a grant from the Directorate General of the EC.    This was delivered for evaluation in the pioneering experiments with the European schools OLYMPUS satellite education programme.

In the late 1990s where the topic framework was consolidated around environmental management as part of the LIFE Environment programme.

Current developments are being made by the UK Conservation Management System Consortium in partnership with organisations concerned with bringing environmental management to the centre of education for sustainability at all levels.