Colleges and universities are probably the most effective institutions that can provide proper education on the environmental justice conflict. According to Sustainable Solutions, “…our educational institutions need a paradigm shift that inspires students to think about the world, their relationship to it, and their ability to influence it in a completely different way”1. Colleges have the power to inspire their students with higher-level thinking in their multitude of classes. Higher education can go a long way when it comes to allowing thinking deeper about a problem and even coming up with an appropriate solution1. Institutions can touch on many topics that can touch on environmental racism and educate their studies on how to make a difference and understand what is going on in the world. 

Colleges have the power to educate their students on many different topics. There are so many different majors to choose from. Even with the major, students also have to take general academic courses in humanities, sciences, social science, human difference and global engagement, and integrative learning. Many of the courses that fall under the human difference and global engagement requirement can touch on environmental racism, especially at the higher education level. 

While the idea of colleges teaching their students ‘how to change the world’ is convincing, there can be some challenges also. While this is a good way to educate students, institutions can have some setbacks. Environmental racism is a sustainability conflict that can be solved by many organizations, or in this case, institutions. According to Sustainable Solutions, “the growing interest in and demand for sustainability in higher education have led to the emergence of several campus sustainability rankings and a fairly extensive amount of resources to support implementation” 1 One of the ranking and assessment systems, STARS, is a self-reporting framework that allows colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance. Their measurements are measured in platinum, gold, silver, and bronze1. While this is referring to sustainable campus performance, this could also be applied to teaching proper sustainability courses. This is a potential revision but maybe there could be an inclusion of courses taught, which could also be ranked. For example, a college could be ranked based on their all-inclusive courses for a sustainability studies major, and see if there are lots of topics (such as environmental racism/justice) covered. 

  1. Niesenbaum, R. (2020). Sustainable Solutions: Problem Solving for Current and Future Generations.