Environmental education (EE) has expanded in Brazil in diverse educational settings, both formal and non-formal. This text considers EE as provoking political change, stimulating an ethical and ecological rationality and promoting personal values and attitudes, as well as social practices, compatible with the sustainability of life on earth. From this perspective, the principal objective of the article is to reflect on the expansion of environmental education in Brazilian universities in the last twenty years; discuss the changes in public educational policies, since the 1988 constitution; and to consider the possible influence of social movements in organized society, as well as the networks of local, regional and national EE, together with the generalized use of computer technology, as impulses in its expansion. Environmental education constitutes and formalizes itself as a foundation for national policies that contribute to its permanence and deepening in the spaces where it already exists and promotes its inclusion in the other contexts of organized society.
Environmental education; University; Public policies; Networks; Social movements