Education is central to two recent international efforts to address an impending ecological global crisis. The Earth Charter and the UN document Decade for Education for Sustainable Development 2005–2014 challenge all people to consider the socio-ecological, ethical, local and global dimensions of human life. These documents state clearly the international community now strongly believes we need to foster through education the competencies of heart and mind required for a sustainable future. In light of the current ideology driving education today, the proposed re-orientation of education will require challenging taken-for-granted cultural assumptions and deeply re-examining our relationship with the Earth. In this article, I argue that an international effort to re-orient education is at heart a phenomenological task. Understanding the lived experience of the person-environment relationship must be the starting point of such educational efforts and the development of a language to describe person-environment relationship is essential to the goal of re-orienting education for the values of sustainability.