Abstract: The devotion of this special issue of EER to the language of environmental and sustainable developmental education (SDE) serves as a timely reminder that SDE cannot simply be seen as a culturally neutral or value-free package that can be ′delivered′. In a variety of ways, contributors to this volume address the issues involved in re-engineering the discourse of environmental education, and education more broadly, towards an overriding concern with sustainable development. These various approaches assume certain epistemological positions, particularly in relation to language and referent meaning. This article sketches out a possible typology of such positions, and attempts to locate other contributions to this issue, using this framework.