Description: A key issue raised by environmental concern is that of our underlying view of nature. All ideas of conservation and sustainability make assumptions about the meaning and value of nature. This paper will explore some aspects of what might be involved in properly coming to know nature and some implications for both environmental education and our understandings of knowledge itself. The view that currently dominant occidental understandings of nature contribute to a situation that is both destructive of nature and human flourishing is frequently voiced, yet certain attempts to overcome this by diluting or dismissing the distinction between the human and the non-human, self and other, require critical evaluation if they are not to bring their own dangers. This paper will seek to provide such an evaluation and to develop a positive response to the issue of how we should relate to and know nature along with some of their broader pedagogical and curricular implications. Methodology: The papers will adopt a philosophical approach to the issues identified, drawing particularly on conceptual analysis and forms of evidence and analysis developed in the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions of philosophising. Conclusions: The papers will draw out some key ways in which the enterprise of taking nature seriously as a subject of knowing, understanding, and respect both challenges many approaches to knowledge embedded in conventional environmental education and also in the curriculum as a whole. It will suggest ways of thinking and of knowledge generation that overcome the limitations identified in these conventional approaches and that point to the desirability of different ways of conceiving the character and organisation of knowledge.