Environment education, according to Ivan Hattingh, begins at the cradle. ``Environment is not just talking of the huge, hairy endangered species that hogs the limelight, but of the 90 per cent micro organisms and animals smaller than the hen's egg that are threatened too...,'' he feels. He is of the opinion that environmental education should be through everyone's life, parents, friends, schools and where they live.

Sensing danger in devoting a subject for environmental studies which children might shun or may develop a distaste for, he advocates a novel method of introducing it through other subjects like maths, history, geography, chemistry, physics,language and literature.

``There is environment in mathematics, too,'' this highly energetic pioneer of a new kind of environmental education says. ``It can be used in problems, like saying two workmen can dig a hole big enough... how much time will it take for another hole of a bigger size....'' or in calculating ``how much CO2 emission a single car emits and calculate the air pollution or for the pollution of one tannery and a whole lot of them.'' It's worked successfully in UK where there was initial resistance to his ideas, he said. The latest in the whole series of musicals produced by him speaks of trade in coffee with an entire sequence on funding, history of coffee and importantly the history of exploitation.

``I don't believe in providing answers for kids,'' he says, pointing out that in England, schools were rich in computers and the website provides a whale of opportunities to hold debates and interact on issues.Speaking of the difference in approach, he said the education programmes earliershowed tapes on Africa or some similar thing and ``teachers considered it time to correct notebooks when the WWF man was holding fort!'' he says, adding that the call-frequency (the number of visits) of the wildlife instructors to the schools reduced to once in three years. The new curriculum-based environmental education, he champions, believes in an interactive participation of students and teachers.

However, he fears that the privileged children, who already had the exposure, were getting a chance in this exercise. ``For example, a programme shot in Zambia on wildlife was so expensive that the Zambians found it difficult to pay for watching it. They could afford just 50 pounds -- reportedly not enough for the breakfast of a BBC salesman!''

Several success stories of Hattingh's efforts can be seen in the environment education programmes adopted by schools in Britain, Argentina, Brazil, Vietnam, China, Peru and in South Africa. For India, which he says is a ``host of countries rather than one country,''an integrated system of environment education is better than one single subject of the kind, he suggests adding, ``anyway I don't believe in this idea of experts and consultants (from abroad)''. Do what's best suited for you, that's his answer.