As the new century is still at it’s beginnings we tend to look back, to observe, and reconstruct. As we do so we discover serious imbalances, unfulfilled promises. The destruction of ecosystems, climate change, increasing air, water and soil pollution, the demands of those who lack access to resources, all tell us of the need for urgent solutions to ongoing problems. We still find it vital to step back and think about exactly how to move ahead.

We are now living a global crisis, a crisis which requires a change of direction. Its fundamental feature is its complexity. This demonstrates itself in many ways, has many heads, appears and disappears wherever order and disorder cannot easily be separated, where what is apparently positive actually has harmful side-effects and where risk often constitutes the precondition for progress. Identifying the causes is then an intellectual exercise that must be tackled with humility, but also with the penetrating lucidity that precedes any change of tack, whether personal or collective, when the gravity of the problems so requires.

It is necessary to approach a new paradigm shift in science. We need to open ourselves to a new way of understanding, one where we recognize that the evolution of the living world requires a description that combines deterministic with probabilistic approaches. It entails recognising order and disorder, not as antagonist but as complementary elements. The arrow of time re-appears as the creator of structures. It brings History into the scientific discourse and with it, incorporates two fundamental elements for a complex interpretation of the world: subject and context. Fortunately, through the XX century this shift towards an emerging paradigm has come about in Experimental Sciences, as Ethics, Social Sciences, Human Sciences, Art, Education, etc. and has brought forward questions for which the Experimental Sciences lacked any answers.

This is the reality that confronts the new emerging Science and, of course, the Universities in which such Science is taught and researched. Environmental Education, as part of a movement and in compass with this change of paradigm, is incorporating the key principals of the new, emerging Science. Because of this, we can consider Environmental Education at higher level as a tool for transforming the way students think. It opens them to new models of understanding, and will be basic in the future for resource management. This is one of the beginnings of the possible “rewriting” that will help us to discern and construct ways out of the crisis.