The Environmental Education community is at a very exciting time in its development with the strides the profession has made in formalizing the discipline, which include recognition from state and national organizations. There appear, however, to still be significant misconceptions about what Environmental Education is in the settings in which it is placed. These misconceptions are what Environmental Education practitioners are facing while the leaders in the field put in place an infrastructure of support. This article characterizes the position Environmental Educators commonly find themselves in and what can be done to better create environments for them to succeed. The article begins with a brief description of common perceptions that the environmental nonprofit organizations and formal school environments have of Environmental Education professionals. This is followed with recommendations that aim to help dispel misconceptions and aid Environmental Educators to meet their own needs.

Can environmental education goals be incorporated into the National Science Education Standards?

UrbanSim(link is external) is a software-based simulation system for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment. It is the result of over 15 years of active research, and has been applied to planning processes of over a dozen regional governments and large cities. Recent improvements to UrbanSim include an accessibility engine to compute walking-scale accessibility metrics over a metropolitan area in less than a second, and the ability to run real estate pro formas on the complete set of parcels in a region to understand real estate development feasibility the way a developer might. The new methodology has also received interest from the travel modeling community, and a consortium of regions has funded a pilot to create an activity-based travel model using the same core framework.

Synthicity(link is external) will be releasing UrbanCanvas publicly in spring 2015. UrbanCanvas is a 3D urban design platform that allows the editing of proposed developments which can be used to create scenario inputs to UrbanSim, as well as to view UrbanSim outputs as prototypical buildings. Synthicity hopes that UrbanCanvas can become a transformative technology that allows planners and citizens to weigh in on proposed developments early enough in the process to positively affect social, economic, environmental, and aesthetic outcomes of future population and economic growth.