I hope this picture helps illuminate environmental education’s justice blind spot. Utilizing the word cloud generator wordart.com, we analyzed the 2019 edition of the North American Association for Environmental Education’s guidelines for excellence publication. Since the word “justice” was only mentioned 10 times compared to 548 environmental appearances, the former displayed in 10-point font while the latter displayed in the largest type. Educate was a distant second with 265 uses followed by student (230 uses), learner (223), and use. 

Interestingly, Community appeared 187 times and Action 163 times. Conversely, equity and race only got 11 and 5 mentions respectively. The term “civic” appeared more with 30 uses and is displayed on the top of the illustration’s tassle. The image is but one way to visualize the larger DEI problem of environmental education’s pedagogy: its typically uniformly, inequitably, and exclusively White.