queer your STEM spaces by introducing earth sciences to them
I love math and physics but they're just so fucking divorced from the world we live in and so incredibly abstract and general and Universal, the way they're generally approached. they're forms of science that are particular to our own culture, one that seeks to disengage from the world around us and that seeks to be "greater than" it in some way
and meanwhile the sciences of indigenous people, not called "science" but "ancestral knwoledge", are deeply entrenched in how their environment works.
unusual weather phenomena, mycorrhizae, creatures like the okapi which white people didn't even know about until the 20th century (and also didn't believe existed when they were told about it). archaeological events preserved through oral tradition, that occurred tens of thousands of years ago. extinct megafauna.
it's been wonderfully eye opening to become (slightly) less of a computer-dweller in the last year and learn some basic facts I wish I'd had the environment to learn as a kid. simple things like how to tell which direction you're facing based on the sun, the shape of the land you live on. the ways water flows, what different cloud patterns mean.
Learning about like, category theory and writing in Python and shit is fun, and certainly we can retool a lot of that to fit in with the natural world— there's a book called Ethnomathematics which talks about ways various cultures play with patterns and rules, and there's projects like the Cree# language. But the focus on the abstract and Universal in the sciences makes them seem so much less alive than they should, and focusing on the specifics of the dirt beneath us and the water beside us is something painfully underemphasized in STEM spaces in general.
As a system of people who kin as forest animals... we would love to learn earth sciences, because it would allow us to feel a lot more "in tune" with nature... but we just aren't in the situation for it.
Our host body lives in a highly populated area with mostly artificial/useless structures around it and everybody is totally absorbed in technology and society and all that stuff.
We never had the opportunity to really enjoy nature or learn any earth sciences or hang out with anyone else who cares.
That's pretty sad, in my opinion. We're literally too sheltered to have even been able to learn about the world we live in.
Maybe it's why we are all forest animals inside... because it's a life that we never got to live for real.
