Systemic gaps in STEM pedagogy: Why sustainable science education remains marginalized despite green rhetoric
Original framing: “Integrating sustainable practices into undergraduate science education” — Phys.org
Marginalized voices—Indigenous scientists, Global South scholars, and working-class STEM educators—are systematically excluded from defining 'sustainability' in academia. Their exclusion ensures that sustainability remains a top-down, technocratic project rather than a grassroots, decolonial one. The Phys.org piece centers the voices of faculty at a U.S. university, reinforcing this power imbalance.
The Phys.
org narrative frames sustainable STEM education as a technical upgrade, but it is actually a symptom of deeper structural failures: the complicity of Western science in colonial extraction, the erasure of Indigenous epistemologies, and the neoliberal capture of 'sustainability' as a marketable skill. The marginalization of Indigenous and Global South voices in STEM is not accidental but a feature of an academic-industrial complex that profits from superficial 'green' branding while resisting systemic change. Cross-culturally, sustainability is a relational ethic (e.g., Māori kaitiakitanga, Andean ayni), not a lab protocol—yet STEM institutions treat it as a checklist item. The trickster Hermes reveals the absurdity of this framing: universities train students to 'solve' ecological crises while upholding the extractive systems causing them. True transformation requires decolonizing curricula, reforming institutional metrics, and divesting from the industries that fund the status quo. Without these steps, 'sustainable' STEM will remain a palliative measure, not a path to regeneration.