It is the era of global concern over environmental change. While few contest the importance of reacting to these changes globally there is concern that the issues hardly touch the everyday lives of people locally (Karjalainen 2006; CBD 2009; see also UNEP 2009). Education is called in and ecological or environmental literacies are presented as key sets of skills to be developed in recognizing the significance of a functioning interdependency of all life on earth (King 2000; UNEP 2009). Yet worldwide the levels of such literacy of pupils (e.g. Hye-Eun et al. 2007) as well as teachers in training (e.g. Yavez, Goldman, Pe’er 2009) keep raising concerns. I argue that contributing to this there are two pitfalls in the mainstream understanding of environmental literacy: 1) the subjective experiences and relations to the environment that people have in their everyday lives are not addressed, and 2) the creative agency of people in using language is not addressed. Environmental literacy is often about mastering functionally the language – phenomena and processes – of natural sciences. Revisions have been formulated from mere functional to critical ecological literacy. In addition to sound scientific knowledge of ecosystems, Roger H. J. King (2000) for one proposes an environmentally literate person to also possess sound knowledge in history and social sciences of one’s culture as well as a capability of sound moral inquiry. Even with these amendments the subjective experiential as well as creative dimensions are missing. In this paper I ask “How is a conception of environmental literacy to be amended so that it addresses also subjective experiences and creative agency?” To answer this question I present my PhD thesis with emphasis on the further directions stemming from it. The thesis addresses particular people’s aesthetic relations to their everyday life environments (Rautio 2009a, Rautio in press, Rautio forthcoming). In this research I exchanged letters with four individuals from one small village. The letters cumulated over a year’s time with an instruction to write about “What do you find beautiful in your everyday life?” The theoretical frame for the PhD research leans on Wittgenstein’s (e.g. 1966; also Taylor 1992; and Lakoff & Jonhson 1980) notions of language use: language is woven into everyday life, used not only to describe but to act on and transform the world.

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