This paper analyses the main theoretical and methodological approaches to environmental education from a critical perspective within the historical dialectics. It problematizes the functional and organic formulations, produced in the field of theory of systems, and the holistic vision that dilute the political, social and cultural aspects inherent to the environmental complexity, establish an abstract unity among nature and society and, in some of its propositions, segregate the whole in relation to the parts. In the end, the relevant categories that define the emancipatory or transformative views of environmental education are brought forward in an approach that emphasizes citizenship participation, the re-signification of the environment, and the social transformation as structuring principles bound to the process of re-qualification of the human in the nature.
Environmental Education; Praxis; Emancipation; Social transformation; Complexity