While our ongoing triple planetary crisis (climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste) has been gaining importance within education, recent reviews (such as Perkins, 2024), have shown that environmental education (EE) in the Global North still typically emphasises content-based learning about environmental facts and individual-based decision-making, without supporting critical engagement with this crisis’ deep sociopolitical and social justice entanglements. That is, structural issues – like (neo)colonialism’s and capitalism’s roles in driving and sustaining not only environmental degradation but also its unequal distribution across different communities – seems to still be overlooked.

However, when considering cases of environmental impact across the world, we find that most coincide with contexts of sociohistorical and political marginalisation, such as that faced by communities in the Global South; Black, Indigenous, people of colour (BIPOC); LGBTQIA+ communities; women; and so on, living anywhere in the world. For example, South American and African communities remain central to global supply chains of raw materials, while often enduring the brunt of environmental destruction and social injustices linked to such exploitation. This is illustrated by the continuous rise across the Global South in both extraction and issues of socioenvironmental nature linked to: engineering metals, such as iron for steel production (Brazil); and speciality metals such as aluminium, copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium for renewable energy industries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Bolivia, Chile) (UNEP, 2024).

Environmental education and environmental (in)justices

Faced with this this scenario, I argue in this blog post that what is missing from Global North EE is a deeper engagement with the concept of ‘environmental (in)justices’: the unequal exposure of marginalised communities to environmental degradation, impacts, and to restrictions stemming from the exploitation of land, knowledge, labour and material resources (Acselrad, 2010). In other words, our ongoing triple planetary crisis cannot be properly comprehended within education through an alignment with neoliberal discourses of preparing students for ‘green careers’ or for ‘making individual changes in their lives’ (for instance, recycling), while leaving structural environmental inequities unchallenged. As I argued with colleagues from Brazil and the UK (Gandolfi et al., 2024), education should support critical understanding of the local–global links between environmental injustices and sociohistorical systems of oppression. For instance, colonial projects across the Americas, Africa and Asia were crucial to shaping a world economy system that still remains grounded in the notion of ‘extractivism’ (of land, of natural entities, of knowledges, of ways of being) (Grosfoguel, 2016) for the purpose of accumulation of a myriad of resources (material, financial, labour), and driven by the specialisation of certain regions (colonised communities) in the extraction and production of raw materials, while others (colonial centres) became manufacturing producers (Tuck et al., 2014): one exports ‘nature’, while the other imports it.

‘Our ongoing triple planetary crisis cannot be properly comprehended within education through an alignment with neoliberal discourses of preparing students for ‘green careers’ or for ‘making individual changes in their lives’ … while leaving structural environmental inequities unchallenged.’

A decolonial lens for environmental education

My proposal here is then permeated by a decolonial perspective: to make such legacies of environmental injustices streaming from (neo)colonial extractivism visible through education. As an example, in the case of science education (my own area of expertise), instead of perpetuating purely celebratory and acritical views of techno-scientific progress, this would involve a critical understanding of how environmental injustices can be connected to such progress, particularly through: understanding science as intertwined with sociopolitical and moral elements; how complex sociohistorical processes impact the production of knowledge, technologies and developments related to the natural world and its resources; who is accepted to contribute to such knowledge-base and developments; who benefits from and who might be negatively impacted by these developments; and so forth.

It is my hope that such dialogue with ‘environmental injustices’, particularly through a decolonial lens grounded in experiences from the Global South and other marginalised communities, can provide educators concerned with our triple planetary crisis a more critical and social justice-driven springboard from which to examine it within education practice and scholarship.

References

Acselrad, H. (2010). Ambientalização das lutas sociais: O caso do movimento por justiça ambiental [Environmentalization of social rights: The case of the environmental justice movement]. Estudos Avançados [Advanced Studies], 24(6), 103–119. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-40142010000100010

Gandolfi, H. E., Rushton, E. A., Silva, L. F., & da Silva Carvalho, M. B. S. (2024). Teacher educators and environmental justice: Conversations about education for environmental justice between science and geography teacher educators based in England and Brazil. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 19(2–3), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-024-10212-8

Grosfoguel, R. (2016). Del extractivismo económico al extractivismo epistémico y ontológico [From economic extractivism to epistemic and ontological extractivism]. RICD, 1(4), 33–45. https://doi.org/10.15304/ricd.1.4.3295

Perkins, H. (2024). Beyond techno-solutionism: Towards critical perspectives in environmental education and digital technology. A critical-hermeneutic review. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 42, 100705. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2024.100705

Tuck, E., McKenzie, M., & McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.877708

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). (2024). Global resources outlook 2024 – Bend the trend: Pathways to a liveable planet as resource use spikes. https://wedocs.unep.org/handle/20.500.11822/44901