Can environment students in secondary schools embrace a deep ecology philosophy?

This study investigates ecocentrism in secondary schools and challenges the anthropocentric view of conserving natural resources for future humans. It aims to reveal whether sustainability education in schools is driven by a narrow science focus or whether there are deep ecology perspectives also operating to solve environmental problems. This study also seeks to determine the collective thought of the school communities studied regarding the more philosophical aspects of sustainability, as seen through the lens of deep ecology. The study drew upon aspects of grounded theory to organize the data into themes. Strategic coding of the themes led to a coherent model for the socio-cultural responses to the research questions. A deep ecology scale (DES) was devised and used to measure ecocentric inclinations of the respondents. The data showed that students were more aligned to an ecocentric philosophy than the anthropocentric lifestyle.