Climate Wars: Pro-ecojustice Educators vs. Pro-capitalist Networks

Humanity and much else on earth appear to be facing existential crises, like the climate emergency, and ongoing problems like cancer that may interact with other crises and create much worse polycrises. Although fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are involved in many such crises, many analysts suggest that ultimate blame—while invariably uncertain—should be mainly directed at capitalists. It is apparent, that financiers and corporations have been highly successful at assembling massive ‘teams’ (‘dispositifs’) of supporters—including numerous other living (e.g., politicians and STEM workers), nonliving (e.g., massive extraction machines) and symbolic (e.g., ‘efficiency’) entities into extensive and deep assemblages promoting values like competitiveness, individualism and costs externalisations. Their complexity seems to make them highly resistant to change. In this article, a pedagogical schema is described and defended (with examples) that may help generate more citizens willing and able to critique relationships among STEM and other societal members and environments (STEM-SE) and independently develop and implement well-researched and negotiated powerful actions to overcome STEM-SE harms of their concern. Among many factors affecting the schema’s successes, it seemed very helpful that the local curriculum was congruent, the teacher had more holistic and critical views about science, such as regarding its economic relations, and because the teacher agreed to directly teach students, with application activities, several possibly problematic STEM-SE relationships and sample possibly rectifying actions. STEM education schema like that, however, only seem broadly feasible with concerted community efforts to build more global ecojustice dispositifs.