Prof Ripan Malhi has been awarded a Levenick Teaching Sustainability Fellowship for AY 2021-22.  Dr Malhi joins an expanding cohort of sustainability educators on campus eager to introduce new ideas and strategies to the classroom.  The fellowship program is administered by the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and the Environment (iSEE)

Description of Proposed Course

The working title for Prof. Malhi's new course is Transforming science from colonial to sustainable practice. The course is organized into three sections. In the first section, this course presents the history of Western science, its association with European expansion, colonialism and extractive practices. The second section details remnants of colonial ideas in today’s scientific practice and how this epistemology contribute to problems of discrimination, exclusion, and unsustainable practices identified in science today. The second section reviews a broad array of cases including examples from environmental science, health, genomics, conservation biology, informatics, physics, and more. The third section of the course highlights emerging scientific programs, practices and policies that are transforming scientific fields to be sustainable. In this third section, the course discusses scientific studies that use local and Indigenous knowledge, community-based methods and other sustainable practices.