Environmental education has increasingly become part of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curriculum worldwide. This article analyses 26 EFL textbooks used in Japan, to discover what kind of environmental education they offer, and what this says about intercultural communication in the teaching/learning process. The results show how textbooks, by concentrating mainly on technical solutions to environmental problems, fail to open to criticism the cultural values at the heart of the environmental crisis, and direct attention away from important alternatives rooted in the deep ecological insights of traditional Japanese culture. The conclusion discusses ways to move away from unidirectional transfer of technical knowledge, towards a productive intercultural dialogue on ecological issues.