Environmental justice is geoscience. How should we teach it?

A wave of social activism in recent years has raised the profile of environmental justice, leading to a proliferation of new research and funding, as well as some governmental backlash. The geosciences occupy an interesting place in the landscape of environmental justice, as many geoscience topics have implications for environmental justice, but environmental justice has not typically been included in geoscience curricula. In this paper, we explore the teaching of environmental justice in a geoscience context. We discuss the relevance of environmental justice for geoscience, including the history of the environmental justice movement and what we identify as core competencies that geoscience students need to meaningfully engage with environmental justice. These include knowledge of anthropogenic systems and geologic processes, a broad conception of data literacy, incorporation of ethics, comfort with interdisciplinarity, and the ability to work with nonacademic audiences. We provide curricular examples of incorporating environmental justice into geoscience courses, including single-day interventions, a unit on geomorphology and environmental justice, a student-developed final project considering subsidence in Mexico City from an environmental justice lens, and a semester-length course. These examples emphasize the multifaceted connections between geoscience topics and human action. As geoscientists continue to consider the role of environmental justice in the discipline, we urge instructors to focus on the skills and knowledge that students need, to develop open-access teaching resources to be shared among instructors, and to foster interdisciplinary and nonacademic connections.