Description: Reid and Stables consider the perennial 'nature vs. nurture' dichotomy, embracing the structuralist perspective that each of these terms must be understood in the context of the other, regardless of which is privileged within any particular text or discourse. Drawing on texts in both philosophy and imaginative literature, they reveal the range of ways in which the dichotomy has been 'played out' within Western literary culture, from the perspective that all 'nurture' is a product of nature (Polixenes, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, discussing the interbreeding of plants), to the assertion that everything that is natural is corrupted when it falls into human hands (the opening of Rousseau's Emile). Assuming 'nurture' to be ipso facto educational, the implications for policy and curriculum are explored in terms of the necessity for all education to be 'nature-related', with the argument made that education within liberal societies should not seek a consistent synthesis of the nature-nurture dialectic, but should rather use its various traditions and manifestations as a springboard for personal exploration within transpersonal, suprapersonal and cosmic contexts. 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.