One of the main issues in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research is how the relationship between nature and culture is being played out in formal education (e.g. Hansson 2014, Östman 2015). In this context, certain ideas of particular nature-culture relationships as beneficial for learning towards e.g. environmental wellbeing, child development, transformative behavior and identities are being put forward. Another important issue in ESE research is the question of how formal education may enable the enactment of students’ experiences in educational situations. This draws on the assumption that learning is a situated experiential and action oriented process conditioned by how student’s prior experiences are enacted in relation to the purpose of specific educational activities and content. In this, encounters between students and, for them, “new” information are a prerequisite for such an enactment. I.e., learning is considered an emerging relational process. ESE research needs to conceptualize the kind and quality of such encounters and their constituting conditions in the context of nature/culture tensions in formal education. Hence, this paper focusses on critically exploring the quality of such, potentially, educative encounters and, specifically, one such constituting conditions, the paradoxical ideal of speed, acceleration and slowness in (post) modern society.