In 1984, the Australian Journal of Environmental Education commenced. At that time I was 6 years old, in my first year of primary school at Tieri State School in Central Western Queensland. I knew nothing of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education (AJEE), or environmental education for that matter (at least not in a formal sense). In many respects, I was perhaps part of the intended audience (the future generation). As was the case with many children of my generation (Generation X, on the cusp of Generation Y), environmental education at school was largely incidental. Having grown up in a mining town (from 1983 to 1991), environmental conservation was certainly not a welcomed perspective. All the same though, my childhood was free, untamed and unsupervised in the Australian bush. It was that pastime or playtime where my environmental consciousness began its emergence.

Skimming back over the 1980s volumes of the AJEE, it becomes clear that children and young people's voices are missing. It appears that children and young people were taken for granted in the preponderance of articles. The focus appeared to ricochet between school-based environmental education (from a teacher's perspective) to deep ecologies (nature studies) to early research positionings (research agendas). It was not until the early 1990s that children and young people became part of the AJEE discourse, cognisant with two distinct and significant developments: (1) the international and national recognition of a human-induced environmental crisis (or ecological crises drawing upon Orr's work); and (2) the acknowledgment of a new sociology of childhood (aligned with the children's rights movement). By way of example, in Robottom's Reference Robottom1991 editorial he referred to the ‘Greenhouse Action for the Nineties’ Conference, which considered the theme (among others): ‘And how we will rear our children – Community Outreach and Public Education’ (p. 1). Robottom's Reference Robottom1991 editorial and a consequent smattering of articles thereafter focused on children and young people brought an additional emphasis (albeit somewhat minor) to the AJEE (Connell, Fien, Skyes, & Yencken, Reference Connell, Fien, Skyes and Yencken1988; Wals & Evert, Reference Wals and Evert1992).

Payne's (Reference Payne1998) seminal article ‘Children's Conceptions of Nature’ considered children's views about nature and environment. He eloquently argued:

Payne (Reference Payne1998) signalled the dawn of the impact of the technological revolution on children and young people's experience in/of nature and environment (at least in the Australian context). At the time, he cited CD-Roms, the internet and television as high technologies, but perhaps Payne (among many other researchers) did not fully appreciate the social and cultural complexity of the technology that was yet to come, namely the advent of social media, smart technologies and virtual worlds. He also signalled that ‘Children's lives are hardly natural anymore’ (p. 20), again in the Australian context. While this was before Louv's (Reference Louv2005) infamous ‘Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit-Disorder’, Chawla (Reference Chawla1999, Reference Chawla2002), Sobel (Reference Sobel1996), Kahn (Reference Kahn1999), and Kahn and Kellert (Reference Kahn and Kellert2002) echoed similar arguments to Payne (Reference Payne1998). In more recent times, Kahn and Hasbach (Reference Kahn and Hasbach2013) contended:

Kahn and Hasbach (Reference Kahn and Hasbach2013) opened up a dialogue focused on children's wild experiences or lack thereof. Such dialogue is not overly visible in the AJEE. What is even less visible though, are children and young people's direct voices. In other words, where are children positioned as the researchers — as experts of their own lives — in the AJEE? This is juxtaposed against a wider research trend where educational researchers have made significant headway in involving children as participants and/or co-researchers (Bell, Reference Bell2008; Morrow, Reference Morrow2008; Skelton, Reference Skelton2008). Indeed, Flutter and Ruddock (Reference Flutter and Rudduck2004) noted that ‘there is clear evidence that the political and social climate has begun to warm to the principle of involving children and young people [in research]’ (p. 139). Despite such acknowledgment, ‘research agendas involving children are still often conceived of and led by adults, particularly as it concerns environmental education and its research’ (Barratt Hacking, Cutter-Mackenzie, & Barratt, Reference Barratt Hacking, Cutter-Mackenzie, Barratt, Stevenson, Wals, Brody and Dillon2013). Barratt Hacking et al. (Reference Barratt Hacking, Cutter-Mackenzie, Barratt, Stevenson, Wals, Brody and Dillon2013) challenge:

While slow to mount traction, children and young people are becoming more vocal through social movements such as the ‘Australian Youth Climate Coalition’ (see http://www.aycc.org.au/). However, the crossover from such activism to research is, by and large, absent in the traditional genres of environmental education and its research. The latter is generally ‘adult business’. How can we change this, not only in the AJEE, but in environmental education research more broadly? Perhaps one day, not only will children and young people be authors of original research, but possibly a child or young person will edit a child-focussed environmental education research journal, perhaps even a part of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education. What a wild and crazy idea that is!