A better knowledge is possible: Transforming environmental science for justice and pluralism ☆

This article offers a critical analysis of environmental science that develops the argument that science has itself become an obstacle for the transformations that are needed to ensure human-ecological well-being. Due to dominant norms and conceptualizations of what science is, how it should relate to policy and society, and what it is that science should contribute to, environmental science is set to continue to serve vested interests and seems unable to break free from this pattern. This deadlock situation is related to persistent patterns of inequality and marginalization in science that keep these dominant norms and conceptualizations in place and that marginalize alternative forms of knowledge, including critical social sciences and humanities, that are better equipped to support transformation. Inspired by feminist and anti-colonial scholarship, I suggest that transforming environmental science will require explicit refusal of dominant norms of science and conceptualizations of the environment, and a commitment to justice and pluralism.


Science, capitalism, colonialism
We are in trouble.The worlds in which we live are rapidly changing under the influence of intersecting crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and global inequality.These crises share the same root causes and these root causes are accelerating.The continued fixation of our economic policies on growth, indexed by the flawed metric of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), continue to drive overproduction and overconsumption and the exploitation of people and nature.Despite promises to the contrary, our governments continue to fund and incentivize the destruction of our planet at scales that dwarf investments in environmental protection and conservation.
This unfettered continuation of exploitation and destruction is rationalized through powerful narratives: that economic growth is necessary and beneficial for all; that we can rely on technologies and on corporations to fix our problems through voluntary measures; and that climate and nature are expensive and therefore bad for jobs and people.These narratives are false.We know that GDP growth disproportionally benefits an increasingly small part of the population, that trickle-down economics does not work, that, at best, corporate sustainability initiatives only slow down environmental degradation, and that there is no evidence of the decoupling of GDP growth from the use of resources, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss (Stiglitz et al., 2009;Raworth, 2017;Jackson, 2017;McElwee et al., 2020;Turnhout et al., 2021).So, if we have this evidence that demonstrates the decline in nature and the lack of effectiveness of current approaches, how can this situation persist?Gramsci's (1971) notion of cultural hegemony is useful here.This concept highlights that the domination of people and nature operates not just through physical or material processes, but also through ideas.The false narratives I mentioned above are continuously being promoted by corporations, the state, the media, and education systems, and they have been so successful that they are seen as natural and as common sense.Cultural hegemony leads to a situation in which people develop a concept of success and well-being that serves the interests of those in power.Consequently, the unjust and destructive consequences of these narratives are either hidden from view, cast as individual choice or failure, or accepted as natural and inevitable.
Science is, and has historically been, an important foundation of this cultural hegemony.I do not dispute that scientific research is important to provide criticisms of these false narratives and develop alternative ideas and actions.However, by and large, science is failing us.Anticolonial and critical scholarship has pointed to the intimate connections between science, colonialism, and capitalism, arguing that science is not just a neutral tool that can be used in colonialism or capitalism but a core foundation (Luke, 1995;Ghosh, 2022).As Smith and O Keefe (1980), cited in Castree (2015), p. 58) put it: "science is a commodity used to make other commodities".Specifically, the worldview of science has historically, and continues to enable and justify exploitation and extraction by casting nature as separate from humans, by expressing nature as things (Césaire, 1972)-as natural resources or, more recently, as services -and by applying calculative methods to optimize the production of these resources and services.It is important to emphasize that this pattern of science supporting the economic and political interests of economic and political elites can also be found in those sciences that purportedly aim to protect nature and environment.Examples include the setting of conservation (de)priorities; the development of metrics for biodiversity off-setting and other trading schemes, or the calculation of thresholds that define the limits of what nature can take (Liboiron, 2021;Robertson, 2006;Wyborn and Evans, 2021).
The similarities between the concepts and practices of the sciences and those of colonial and capitalist forms of exploitation and extraction are by no means a coincidence; priorities in scientific research have developed in parallel with priorities of economic and policy elites, with science providing the knowledge and tools to optimize the production of those aspects of nature that are considered most valuable.The continued cultural hegemony of the worldview that underpins these scientific priorities is one reason why, despite the fact that in some sense colonialism as a political project has ended, it continues by other means.As Sultana powerfully points out, uneven patterns of exploitation and extraction continue to follow colonial lines (Sultana, 2022).We see a continued extraction and exploitation of resources and labor from the Global South to create wealth in the Global North (Hickel, 2021), resulting in the creation of sacrifice zones -spaces where environmental harms are allowed to accumulate and where human and non-human communities are rendered disposablein those parts of the world that have been historically marginalized (Sultana, 2022).
It is increasingly recognized that addressing the polycrisis in ways that are not just effective but also equitable and just will require deep transformative change of political, economic and cultural structures, paradigms and practices.As I will argue in this essay, this has to include the transformation of environmental science 1 as well.While much of environmental science has as its mission to contribute to environmental sustainability, I will demonstrate that dominant environmental science has become an obstacle for transformative change.I do this by illustrating parallel patterns of inequality, marginalization and injustice in society and in science and by analysing how these parallel patterns are maintained through problematic norms and conceptualizations of what science is, how it should relate to policy and society, and what it is that science should contribute to.Drawing on feminist and anti-colonial scholarship, I end by developing a conceptualization of a better knowledge based on guiding principles of justice and pluralism.

The troubling politics of neutrality and relevance
The problematic role of dominant environmental science in supporting and reproducing capitalist and colonial values and enabling the extractivist practices that result from them, can be traced back to a set of powerful norms of what science is and how it should relate to policy that is known as the linear model.According this model, science should be independent from policy in order to produce what is seen as objective truth and speak said truth to power.This model has been extensively criticized for failing to recognize the multiple ways in which science, policy and society are entangled and shape each other (Owens, 2015;Beck, 2011;Jagannathan et al., 2023;Maas et al., 2022).Despite these criticisms, scientific initiatives, including global environmental organisations that synthesize and assess existing evidence to support policy making like the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) or the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), continue to fashion their institutional set up to fit with this model.As I will illustrate in this section, this way of working results in a troubling politics that serves vested interests and reproduces the status quo.
First of all, dominant environmental science operates on a dangerous illusion of neutrality.In this quote, Steinberger discusses the use of socalled negative emission technologies in IPCC modelling: within these models we have … imaginary technologies, like carbon removal from the atmosphere, that are only in the models in order to protect existing powerful industries.And … we are told within the IPCC [that] you shouldn't be political, you shouldn't be policy prescriptive.But we are acting in a politicised domain.Climate change has been politicized by these industries … we have to give ourselves the right to not just observe … If we don't fight to expose these in-terconnections… we will reproduce them and we will constantly be contributing to make things worse. 2  While it is well known that the technologies that Steinberger refers to, including direct air capture, carbon storage, or massive tree planting are extremely unlikely to ever be effective as sufficient scale (Dyke et al., 2021), the existence of these technologies in modeling does mean that their imagined, potential climate benefits can be calculated, and these imagined benefits can be used to avoid and delay the reduction of emissions (Low and Boettcher, 2020;Carton et al., 2020).Yet, as Steinburger explains, the IPCC's requirement of neutrality implies that there is little place for critical questioning.As a result, the IPCC serves vested interests and reproduces the status quo while operating on the problematic assumption that the incorporating of these technologies in modeling is neutral (Turnhout and Lahsen, 2022).As this example shows, neutrality is not just unattainable, its pursuit is actually harmful (Campbell, 2012;Turnhout and Lahsen, 2022;Saltelli et al., 2023).As many scholars and activists have pointed out, 3 being neutral in the face of unequal power relations means siding with the powerful and this is no different in the case of science.
Second, much of environmental science has the ambition to be relevant; to inform decision making that will contribute to sustainability.While this desire is understandable, it can create problems that are not well recognized due to an underappreciation of power and framing.Clearly, facts do not and cannot speak for themselves.Rather, facts and values entwine in frames (Turnhout et al., 2019).Since framing is inevitable, it is impossible to disentangle facts and values. 4Frames have consequences; they define not only what the problem is, including what items the problem consists of and how they are related, but also what solutions are possible and rational, and what knowledge is relevant.Thus, the production of knowledge that is considered relevant, is knowledge that conforms to the singular frame that binds scientists and 1 When I use the term environmental science, I mainly refer to dominant positivist and reductionist approaches and paradigms as they are enacted in the natural sciences as well as in specific social science domains.In several of the examples, I focus on global forms of science, what Castree (2015) refers to as 'global environmental change science'.While I recognize that these global forms of environmental science are in many ways quite specific, I do believe my arguments have broader significance for environmental science in general.I will follow Liboiron in using dominant environmental science to acknowledge diversity in science.
policy makers together.However, due to existing power inequities, some frames can become more dominant than others to the extent that alternative frames can even disappear from view.What we see here is a process of measurementality where dominant frames increasingly structure what knowledge will be produced and what decisions will be made (Turnhout et al., 2014(Turnhout et al., , 2015)).The concept of ecosystem services plays such a role, shaping not just research priorities in environmental science, but also science policy relationsthe term is explicitly included in IPBESand resulting policies such as payments for ecosystem services or REDD+.Many scientists and policy actors celebrate this alignment between science and policy as an example of an effective science policy interface but this is a mistake.The example of the IPCC and carbon removal technologies provides a useful reminder of this, but there are more examples of how seemingly usable knowledge and effective science policy interactions create bad political and societal outcomes.For example, Halffman and Pastoors (2019) demonstrate how, despite clear limitations, dominant frames in European fisheries policy prove to be resistant to change and exclude alternative forms of knowledge.Similarly, Benton (2023) argues that despite recognition of the need for food systems transformation, science continues to support dominant frames that focus on mainstream economics, and technology development and innovation.
While the open questioning of dominant frames, particularly when these frames contribute to inequality and environmental destruction, should be a key task of environmental science, the norms of neutrality and relevance provide strong incentives to refrain from this as this would not just risk losing policy relevance, but is also likely to be seen as political, thereby risking loss of auhority.This creates a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.As frames institutionalize, they will become naturalized; instead of fact-value entanglements, they will be taken as objective reality and the policies that result from them will be taken as rational and inevitable.In so doing, both the environment and environmental policy become more and more depoliticized, resulting in policies that become increasingly difficult to contest and in the marginalization of alternatives.Environmental science, including organisations like IPBES and IPCC, finds itself in such a locked-in situation.As the linear model dictates, science should provide neutral knowledge that is relevant for policy makers and this is knowledge that fits with the dominant frames and assumptions of these policy actors (Turnhout et al., 2016;Gustafsson and Hysing, 2023;Castree, 2015;Swyngedouw, 2010;Smith, 2009).Believing that this is what it means to be neutral and relevant, dominant environmental science continues to subject itself to power and reproduce the status quo.

Whither sustainability?
Recognizing the political importance and consequences of framing in science, I now turn to the some of the specific consequences of framings of the environment and sustainability.In the 1990s, under the influence of neoliberalism, sustainability has been chopped up into three supposedly equally important pillars of people, planet, and profit.This was appealing since it enabled a managerial and scientific approach in which each of these pillars could be assessed by means of indicators resulting in policies that would optimize benefits in each of these categories.Yet, this frame also enables reductionist approaches that put people against nature and that make both subject to trade-offs.These approaches come in at least two competing flavors.First, we have so-called ecomodernist interpretations that aim to maximize economic benefits with science being put in the role of calculating how much can be taken without jeopardizing the resource base on which these benefits depend, and providing technical solutions that enhance effectiveness and efficiency.In this approach, profit is not just seen as compatible with but as essential for the conservation of nature.According to this view, nature, but also values of justice and equity, will have to suffer until enough profit has been made to take care of them (Valladares and Boelens, 2019).Others argue that nature is the condition for people and profit.
This interpretation inspires different versions of misanthropic, eco-fascist, eco-nativist, or eco-totalitarian discourse (Thomas and Gosink, 2021;Campion, 2021;Escobar Fernández and Hart, 2023).According to this view, the urgency of protecting nature before it is too late is so great that it justifies sacrificing values of justice and equity, sidelining democratic procedures, or installing overpopulation control or anti-immigration policies.What these two interpretations of sustainability have in common is that, in contrast to the original integrative ambition of the notion of sustainability, they justify the de-prioritization of equity and justice, either because of a belief in growth and profit as beneficial for all, or because the urgency of nature's decline supposedly demands it.
A different way in which sustainability discourse, and associated scientific practice, can end up overlooking justice and equity is through its global framing.This frame manifests in frequent expressions referring to a single planet inhabited by a global human population.Although there exist large inequities between those who are most responsible for environmental degradation and those who are most vulnerable to its consequences, expressions that refer to a 'global we', such as the wellknown phrase that is often uttered in global climate negotiations 'we are all in the same boat', obscure this inequality (Demeritt, 2001).Dominant environmental science supports this global frame by its use of quantitative global modeling.This form of knowledge occupies a prominent position in IPCC and IPBES to assess the state of the planet and identify the main drivers of change.For example, the IPBES Global Assessment uses global aggregates and metrics such as land-use change, global population, or consumption and production and calculates the expected impacts of these drivers on global biodiversity.However, these aggregates lack specificity in the way in which they attribute causality and this obscures inequalities within these aggregates and it allows actors to evade their responsibility for environmental destruction (Pascual et al., 2021).Moreover, global aggregates enable inadequate problem framings that promote unjust solutions, for example when luxury carbon emissions are made equivalent with carbon emissions used to meet basic needs, when population is cast as the main cause of environmental degradation, or when reductionists metrics are used to structure and define biodiversity conservation priorities (Sultana, 2022;Wyborn and Evans, 2021).
All in all, sustainability discourse makes possible, and is made possible by, the perpetuation of the coloniality of environmental science (Todd, 2016).This coloniality is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the current discourse of Anthropocene.As Yusoff (2018, p xiii) writes: If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism.The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.The Anthropocene as a politically infused geology and scientific/popular discourse is just now noticing the extinction it has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom.
As this quote illustrates, the discourse of the Anthropocene celebrates the ability of dominant science to diagnose the incumbent end of the world and announce a new era, while remaining blind to the many worlds that have already ended and continue to end.These dystopic narratives are perhaps in the future for the scientists that mobilize this discourse, but they are past and present-day realities for many others (Yusoff, 2018;Sultana, 2022;Davis and Todd, 2017;Whyte, 2020).
Moreover, Yusoff (2018) suggests that science furthers colonialism as it subsequently casts the West -a West that has now woken up to the fact that it might no longer be able to protect itself against its destructive tendencies -as the savior of the world.This, as Yusoff (2018, p 27) puts it: indicates a desire to overcome coloniality without a corresponding relinquishing of power.The responsibility for the world is articulated anew as the white man's burdena paternalism that is tied to a redemptive narrative of saving the world from harm on account of others.
The proposed ways of saving the world are those that fit the policy agendas and priorities of the dominant elites of the West; they are first and foremost proposals aimed at saving their world.As I also touched upon earlier in this essay, we see this clearly in the proliferation of techno-fixes or stop-gap solutions that address the symptoms of the polycrisis but that leave its root causes untouched, thereby continuing to rationalize ongoing exploitation, extraction, and the destruction of people and nature.This is what sustainability has become.
By continuing to hide behind neutrality and relevance, uncritically serving power and upholding technocratic and reductionist framings of environment and sustainability, the role dominant environmental science has been reduced to the accountant of destruction5 ; a detached bystander that calculates and reports on the end of the world as accurately as possible.Its subsequent calls for action are not just stunted, but also elitist and unjust.

Marginalisation and inequality in science
There are certainly parts of science that do not fit with, or actively resist the problematic discussed in the previous section.In the critical social sciences and humanities, 6 we do see approaches that question dominant frames, that analyse power relations -including in scienceand how these allow dominant actors to benefit from the status quo and obstruct change, that reject modernist paradigms that consider science as a superior form of knowledge, and that aim to serve public values and the needs of societal actors that are not part of dominant elites.These approaches are fundamental for transformative change because they can provide the tools to expose and dismantle dominant power relations and develop radical alternatives and just options for action.This importance is also increasingly recognized and there are efforts to enhance their contribution in environmental science, including in research programming as well as in IPCC and IPBES.
Despite this recognition, however, these approaches continue to be marginalized and there remain large inequities between paradigms and knowledge systems (Rayner, 2012;Stirling, 2019;Arora-Jonsson and Wahlström, 2023).I will give two examples.First, a recent article in Nature states that only 5% of total global research funding in agriculture is relevant for smallholders (Nature, 2022) while smallholders make up 70% of global farmers and are essential for food sovereignty and food security.Supporting the urgent transformation of food systems requires that we transform food systems research and address these knowledge inequities (Turnhout et al., 2021).Second, while there is broad recognition that sustainability challenges are social and political challenges, a study of climate research funding, shows that the social sciences 7 receive only 0,12% of total funding (Overland and Sovacool, 2020).
While there are signs that the situation may be changing, it is also important to recognize that progress has been slow due to a variety of mechanisms that keep existing inequalities in knowledge in place (Lahsen and Turnhout, 2021).A first mechanism is funding.To receive funding, social scientists are compelled to fit with dominant perspectives and frames, solve problems that are assumed to simply exist, and provide knowledge that is seen as neutral and objective according to dominant positivist paradigms, even if these paradigms support extractivist and dehumanizing practices (Smith, 1999;Chilisa, 2019;Watson, 2021).
Second, collaborative forms of science are often small scale and take the form of pilots.While it can certainly be useful to create safe spaces for experimentation and co-production, we need to recognize that their transformative potential is limited by design (Asiyanbi and Massarella, 2020).Pilots exist because institutional change is not seen as desirable or possible.They exist because they are harmless and because they do not threaten dominant actors, interests, and institutions.
Interdisciplinarity is a third mechanism through which critical social sciences and humanities continue to be marginalized.Interdisciplinary spaces in environmental science, such as research projects, grant committees, or global integrated assessments, continue to be dominated by natural scientists with social scientists in a minority position.This is not just about numbers of people at the table though.More important is that these spaces are dominated by particular natural science-based and positivist integrated frameworks that define what counts as interdisciplinarity.These frameworks define the puzzle, so to say, within which the different disciplinary pieces should then (be made to) fit.The logics and concepts in these frameworks, including for example a linear conception of causality or the concept of drivers, however, often do not fit well with critical social sciences and humanities research (Svarstad et al., 2008;Breslow, 2015) and this constrains what knowledge is integrated and how (Klenk and Meehan, 2015;Ludwig and El-Hani, 2020).Knowledge that does not fit within these frameworks, resists integration, or criticizes these supposedly integrated frameworks will be excluded.The ironic result of this is that interdisciplinary research will consider the reduction and co-optation of diversity as a requirement for success.
Through these mechanisms, dominant environmental science appears as a disciplining enterprise that functions to either erase or marginalize alternative epistemologies, or mold and co-opt them according to predefined frameworks, expectations, and criteria (Quijano, 2000;Mignolo, 2017;Grosfoguel, 2013).As McKittrick (2021, p. 38) has argued, discipline is empire: The rigid and restrictive underpinnings of disciplinary thinking 8 become apparent when we notice that categorization -specifically the method and methodology of sustaining knowledge categoriesis an economized emulation of positivist classificatory thinking (thinking that is produced in the shadows of biological determinism and colonialism).Discipline perpetuates marginalization.If your value is not evident to those in power, they will see this not as a result of marginalization, but as a reason for further marginalization.And this, in turn, will justify further inequality between forms of knowledge, resulting in even stronger pressure on critical social sciences and humanities to either accept marginalization and exclusion or instrumentalize their role to fit in predefined frameworks, serve as problem solvers, or create public support for science and technology.Openly questioning whose problems should be solved and whether science and technology actually deserve support risks exclusion, while inclusion effectively becomes conditional on the willingness to submit to and be coopted by dominant discourse.Either way, critical social sciences and humanities are left without a voice.This is one reason why Spivak (1988) poses the question whether the subaltern can speak, and why she answers it with an unequivocal no.
Marginalization is reproduced in academic institutions through the same cultural hegemony, and its values of effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity, that is destroying the planet.The sense of self of many academics has been profoundly shaped by these values, including how they view their own worth and success, and how they compare (2019), and Michler (2020). 6Here, I refer to forms of research and scholarship that draw from alternative relational, critical, poststructuralist, and constructivist paradigms, including feminism, posthumanism, decolonial and Indigenous scholarship, science and technology studies, and political ecology.
7 While this percentage is already very small, it is important to note that this number includes also mainstream social sciences, including economics.
8 Following my argument, this includes disciplined interdisciplinary thinking as well.
E. Turnhout themselves with others.In fact, there are remarkable parallels to the inability of science to transform itself and its inability to support the kinds of transformative changes that are needed for people and nature.Neoliberal discourse has turned both science and sustainability into objects of management, to be broken down into performance targets and indicators that can be objectively assessed, controlled, and optimized.Since these targets and indicators are the tangible operationalization of underlying goals, they inevitably come to stand for and replace those goals (Van Thiel and Leeuw, 2002); a process that intensifies when targets and indicators are tied to incentives.We know from research in the management of the public sector, including academia, that such a focus on measurable targets and indicators has enabled practices that actually corrupt underlying objectives, even when they meet targets and indicators (Craig et al., 2014).
At the core of this system is a presumedly self-evident and benign ideal of academic excellence, which in practice reinforces existing patterns of marginalization and power in science and breeds competitiveness (Stilgoe, 2014).Competition is a core foundation and principle of current research systems, not an unfortunate side effect of scarce resources as we often prefer to think.In turn, competition breeds precarity, exclusion, and injustice.After all, not everyone can be excellent, so is the belief.Governed by the illusion of meritocracy and a general lack of fair and transparent procedures, academic institutions create all kinds of oppression, violence, and exclusion on the basis of not just paradigm, but also gender, race, neurodiversity, or health.Despite all the care and commitment that many of us bring to our job, our institutions, to paraphrase Jaffe (2022), do not love us back.In case of a perceived threat, the main interest and kneejerk response of the institution will be to protect the institution.And as Ahmed (2021) has pointed out, in practice this means that it will protect specific people, those who hold power in our institutions, over other people that are seen as disposable.9

A better knowledge is possible
What I have argued so far is that dominant environmental science, guided by a false ideal of neutrality, aiming at a depoliticized notion of relevance that is blind to power inequities, and in pursuit of a technocratic understanding of sustainability, reinforces dominant values and interests, enables the continued exploitation and destruction of nature, and reproduces the coloniality of science.I have also demonstrated how similar mechanisms perpetuate and justify the exclusion or co-optation of marginalized perspectives and forms of knowledge, leading to persistent patterns of inequality in research.Through this combination of serving vested interests and marginalizing alternatives, science has in fact become an obstacle for transformative change and it also obstructs its own transformation.As a result, critical research, including critical research about science, that threatens the status will remain underfunded or dismissed.This amounts to the strategic production of ignorance about transformative change (McGoey, 2019).
Inspired by feminist and anti-colonial studies, I express the hope that a better knowledge must be possible (Liboiron, 2021).The single most important requirement for such better knowledge is to ensure that it does better things.For this, we need to put social and environmental justice center stage.Just action for humans and nature has to take priority over the accuracy and presumed neutrality of knowledge, over instrumental and simplistic solutionisms, and over the production of knowledge that is relevantor rather palatable -for elites.This implies that research must focus on the common underlying causes of our intersecting crises of inequality, climate change, and biodiversity loss, including critical investigation of the actors and institutions that block sustainability transformations and the strategies they use to keep the cultural hegemony of their false narratives intact.It also requires that science has to refuse and actively work towards dismantling dominant problem frames that distract attention away from these underlying causes including, certification, offsetting, targeting individual behavior or consumer choices, or protected areas.These solutions are not just insufficiently effective, they also have unjust consequences because they disproportionally put the burden on those individuals who bear the least responsbility for problems.Instead, it is high time to consider policies that directly target inequality and injustice, including excessive wealth and overconsumption, as environmental actions in and of themselves (Turnhout and Purvis, 2020).There can be no environmental justice without social justice.
Social and environmental justice also require epistemic and ontological justice (Fricker, 2007;Santos, 2018).This means that we cannot allow dominant research practices to continue if they are intolerant of difference; if they continue to impose the idea of a singular world that can only be known by science, thereby erasing not just alternative knowledges, but also the lives and practices that shape and are shaped by these knowledges.As Popper (1945) has famously said, the only thing tolerance cannot be tolerant of is intolerance, and this has to apply to knowledge production as well.Yet, going back to my earlier discussion about marginalization, it is clear that this is not going to be easy.Those that will try to speak out about the intolerance of dominant knowledge systems and paradigms will themselves be accused of being intolerant.After all, "when you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression".10This is why transformation requires the redistribution of power.It is time to recognize that transformation cannot happen by only elevating nice things.We need to also, and at the same time, actively disempower those that resist change, and dismantle approaches in science that are intolerant of difference.
It follows that pluralism is both a condition for and an outcome of justice.Ontological and epistemological justice can only be realized through the continued resistance against the concentration of power to secure a pluralist political space where struggles over knowledge as well as human and non-human lives, practices, and realities can take place.This is the challenge of political ontology; to shift from the oppression of a singular world to a world where many worlds fit; a pluriverse (Escobar, 2018;De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018).The pluriverse should not be seen as a solution or a utopian ideal, that would defeat the purpose.The idea is not to purify and separate multiple ontologies, but to put continuous effort into fostering connections.The pluriverse requires that we enable struggles and debates to occur in the public space (Mouffe, 2005) based on an ethics of incommensurability (Tuck and Yang, 2012).Instead of placing science outside politics or allowing science to foreclose the possibility of politics, knowledge production practices need to be become part of political dialogue and contestation (Turnhout et al., 2021).
From this commitment to justice and pluralism, I derive three concrete starting points for environmental science.The first is to elevate and support alternatives that have the potential to supplant dominant cultural hegemony.There are promising initiatives in society that are working to innovate our ideas of nature, society, and the economy and address the root causes of the polycrisis.You can easily recognize them by the way in which cultural hegemony continues to ridicule, marginalize, and erase them.They will be seen as left-wing hobbies, not constructive, anti-freedom or communist, irrational, anti-science, or romantic.Degrowth, solidarity economics, limitarianism, and agroecology are all examples of ideas that continue to receive those kinds of accusations.This is a sign of course.If elites feel the need to marginalize and ridicule people and ideas, this is because they feel threatened by them.And this in turn means that they might be on to something useful and that they are worth joining forces with.
Second, we need to work towards improving how academic institutions are governed to counteract power concentration and marginalization within science and within society, and to equip researchers with the necessary skills to support this effort.This is a vast area of scholarship that includes complex intersecting issues related to research programming and evaluation, education, as well as diversity, inclusion and safety at the workplace.An in-depth discussion of this scholarship is beyond the scope of this article, but the arguments made so far point to the need to prioritize the development of critical thinking skills over instrumental skills so that researchers and students not just learn how to do things right but also reflect on what the right things to do are (Deutsch et al., 2023).Transformative and emancipatory approaches to teaching and learning have much to offer in this respect (Freire, 1970;Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015).They can help us unlearn harmful and oppressive hierarchical, patriarchal, and individualistic patterns and behaviours, disrupt our uncritical acceptance of exploitation and our dismissal of injustice, and foster mutual respect, care, and generosity.
Thirdly, there is a need to embrace open-endedness.The endpoint of transformative change should not be defined, and especially not by science.A key role of environmental science is to join forces with societal actors in their efforts to develop radical alternatives that support justice and well-being for humans and nature.Since processes of transformation are complex and will inevitably create unanticipated effects, knowledge and learning are indispensable.However, instead of defining endpoints, identifying key performance indicators, and developing systems of control and evaluation, we need open-ended anticolonial knowledge infrastructures that support pluralism, emancipation, learning, and adaptation.Storytelling can be a method to support these knowledge infrastructures.Stories resist hubris and detachment because they are relational, because they combine the emotional, the personal, the factual, and the fictional, and because they are incomplete and open.As McKittrick (2021, p.6-7) writes: telling, sharing, listening to, and hearing stories are relational and interdisciplinary acts that are animated by all sorts of people, places, narrative devices, theoretical queries, plots.…The story has no an-swers…Indeed, the story cannot tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell…The story asks that we live with what cannot be explained….The story asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially.(And some things we can keep to ourselves.They cannot have everything.Stop her autopsy.)They cannot have everything.
As this quote beautifully articulates, the stories that science produces cannot and should not contain everything.Better knowledge is knowledge that refuses and resists coloniality, hubris, and depoliticization.It bears repeating here that this goes against dominant conceptions of what science is and how it should relate to policy and society.Therefore, transforming science for justice and pluralism is a matter of political struggle and it will face resistance from the status quo.Yet, the rise of scholarly activism, including movements like science rebellion, makes me hopeful.It shows not only that environmental scientists are concerned with the state of the planet, but also that they are increasingly sensitive to issues of power, vested interests and inequality, and that they are frustrated with their own traditional role and contribution.Although some of this activism reproduces the very same problematic norms of science and science-policy-society relations that I seek to uproot (Rödder and Pavenstädt, 2023), the energy and solidarity that these movements inspire are an excellent place to start.

Declaration of Competing Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.