The emancipating and critical environmental education demands that knowledge must be adequate, build up in a dynamic, collective, cooperating, continuous, interdisciplinary, democratic and participating way directed to the construction of self-maintaining societies. This paper deals with environmental issues as generating issues for an environmental education inspired in Paulo Freire's pedagogy. According to him to educate is to know the reality in its experienced situations, as an ongoing critical process of closeness to the reality itself: to understand, to ponder, to criticize and to act are the intended pedagogical attitudes. The generating issues are strategic methods of a process of awareness about an oppressive reality in unequal societies. Such issues are the starting point to the process of building up a discovery. The generating issues spring out of the popular knowledge, taken from the daily life of the educating ones in order to replace the traditional contents. The political aspect of Paulo Freire's pedagogy are to be seen in the generating issues insofar as these ones contemplate the social and political contents that are meaningful to the life of the educating people. In this way all the educating proposals should take into consideration the local environmental issues as generating issues to the desired consciousness. Finally, it is important to say that the educating people should take part in defining and determining the issues that represent their interests as the content for an environmental and social action.
environmental issues; generating issues; environmental education methodology; awareness