Abstract
Current trajectories of federal environmental policy will likely increase the percentage of the population exposed and impacted by environmental hazards. This likely expansion will cross existing socioeconomic barriers that help to define our current understanding of marginalized or environmental justice communities. With increased exposure comes the opportunity for increased awareness of how human actions can result in negative environmental impacts. Under these assumptions, this article looks at the opportunity for an expanding societal awareness of environmental issues by rethinking dominant nature-culture binaries, particularly in the context of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. The authors summarize a recent article they have published outlining the importance of connecting STEM education to the real-world environmental issues faced by children. The authors put forth an argument that an expansion of children potentially affected by worsening environmental conditions, although suboptimal in most contexts, can provide an opportunity to revisit our general assumptions about our natural world, how we study that world, and how our actions impact what we deem natural. The hope is that a more integrated STEM education toward environmental problems will help to better contextualize the relationship between human activities and the environment as we find it. Under such a scenario, there is the opportunity to develop more meaningful and impactful environmental policies that are equitably applied to all people.