Europe has been a time for many personal landmarks - cooking meat or flying minus airport counters, for instance. Another recent first, but by far more important was an officially assigned class. In the past, it has been I who offered lectures to an audience that was captive to various degrees. Last year's class on Policy Memos was an official affair, but still entirely my idea and counts less as it was to my peers, each of whom could teach me a lot back. No, the classes I gave that week meant more. They were not my initiative, the students engineering undergraduates and it was part of their formal visit to IIIEE. Though it will not count towards their grades - that would be another landmark, but probably not more remarkable than landing a tenure teaching position.

Facing the recently outlined challenges we should be exploring innovative ways to conceptualize multidisciplinary environmental education in the international context. One such perspective views the environmental arena not as a profession implying a standard set of skills and knowledge, but as a practice, focusing on ‘mind-set’ of environmental practitioners, the way they should think about environmental problems.

I ended the last entry with a question:

Will general environmental education of the type provided by MESPOM become unnecessary in the future? Will it be replaced, on the one hand, by ‘mainstreaming’ environmental knowledge into other professions, such as law, economics, engineering, medicine and on the other hand by proliferation of specialized courses in say, water resources management, climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity protection etc.?

May be.
Or may be not.