| Abstract: |
While engineers have been understood as people who protect and improve the safety, health,
and welfare of people in/and the environment through the use of their knowledge and skillsets,
the practice of engineering has often been misaligned with this understanding. Engineering has
had and continues to have an active and uniquely central role in global environmental injustice,
particularly through its maintenance of extractive industries and infrastructures such as fossil
fuels. Transitioning from extraction-based, “cradle-to-grave” infrastructures towards
environmentally just, sustainable “cradle-to-cradle” infrastructures is an imperative of
engineering education.
Designing EJ engineering curriculum offers opportunities for engineering students to learn from
this history of engineering environmental injustice and its present day impacts while forefronting
examples of engineering that align with the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice. Through
collaborations between universities and K-12 schools, the authors developed and worked with
K-12 instructors to implement EJ StoryMaps modules focused on the intersection between
transportation infrastructure and impacts on humans and the environment. These EJ StoryMaps
were implemented through a Creative Engineering Design (CED) introductory-level high school
course pilot and leverage ArcGIS StoryMap technology to explore real-world spatial
environmental justice data. In this paper, we highlight how the principles of environmental justice
guided the development and implementation of EJ StoryMaps related to air quality and public
health, how transportation affects the environment and equity, and EJ impacts of lithium
mining/extraction for electric vehicle batteries. We also discuss potential updates to those
existing EJ StoryMaps modules that have been implemented and additional modules under
development focused on transportation infrastructure that cleans water and heals land.
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