Analyze

"An EJ approach could provide new and different tactics to prisoner advocates and their allies.  If we understand death row inmates to be a particularly vulnerable population, could the EPA itself become more involved in monitoring conditions, and if so, what are the benefits or risks of such an approach? " (219)

"Instead of environmentally invisible spaces, death row should be viewed as involuntary state homes and therefore particularly deserving of attention and regulation. " (220)

"the EPA’s unique powers can be characterized as (1) information gathering, and (2) enforcement actions.93  The EPA’s tools apply to carceral facilities as they would any other business or agency.  By statute, the EPA has the authority to enter and inspect facilities, to request information, and assist facilities in developing or remedying violations." (220) ...  "Individual EPA offices have at times attempted to examine the conditions of incarceration at several federal facilities, primarily through information gathering.  For example, under an agreement between the EPA and the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in 2007, over a dozen facilities were audited for environmental hazards.100  These consent arrangements can promote environmental improvement by limiting the potential sanctions for discovered violations." (221)

"Through an environmental justice lens, we may see patterns that were previously hidden.  Unlike traditional prisoner advocacy tools, environmental assessments include cumulative impacts over time and in context, rather than single isolated acts." (224) ... "A pattern-based approach may help to discern the underlying factors that result in diagnoses like Glenn’s. " (225)

"An EJ approach fundamentally centers the voices of the impacted and allows for contextual reasoning.  Although carceral facilities, and death row in particular, are externally perceived as sites of punishment, incarcerated people may have a different view.  Glenn Ford’s cell, where he was confined days at a time, was his involuntary home.  Viewing jails and prisons as homes illuminates the humanity of the people who live there.  Understanding these spaces as homes underlines the need for carceral facilities to be safe and for individuals to be protected from all types of harm, environmental and otherwise.124 " (225)

"Based on Glenn Ford’s experience, the conditions on death row in Louisiana can be grouped into the following environmental hazards:  indoor air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste, and exposure to lead." (217)

"Glenn’s story of the conditions on death row is a story about environmental justice.  His accounting forces us to see prisons as involuntary homes, where residents are held captive to environmental harms.  Yet, the experience of Glenn and others sentenced to live on death row are largely excluded from environmental justice conversations.10" (207)

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) itself has acknowledged that carceral facilities present environmental challenges.11  In 2007, the EPA noted that “[p]otential environmental hazards at federal prisons are associated with various operations such as heating and cooling, wastewater treatment, hazardous waste and trash disposal, asbestos management, drinking water supply, pesticide use, and vehicle maintenance.”12  Yet, the EPA, which is the lead federal agency for environmental justice, completely excluded jails and prisons from its 2011 planning document for addressing environmental justice through 2014.13  Similarly, the EPA’s 2020 Action Agenda for environmental justice does not even mention carceral facilities, much less recognize prisons and jails as environmentally “overburdened communities.”14 " (207)

"Data on conditions within carceral facilities is generally not available,53 and even when it is available, the data is rarely complete." (214)

test 

Adrian Martin is a professor of Environment and Development at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, UK. His prior publication, Just Conservation: Biodiversity, Wellbeing and Sustainability, calls for reassessing conservation from the viewpoint of social justice. He describes the goals of his research as being centered on informing “the management of natural resources in developing countries, particularly in relation to governance of protected areas, integrated conservation and development, participatory forestry and agricultural intensification.”

“The ‘new conservation’ camp has the advantage of rejecting segregationist and elitist approaches, but it fails to challenge the inequalities or unsustainability of current economic systems and priorities. The ‘protectionist’ camp does challenge current economic systems, but it is essentially an upscaling of a segregationist model of protected-area conservation that is unlikely to be effective and would fail to recognise other ways of knowing and living with nature. “ (Martin 142)

“First, we need to break free from some of the mental dispositions that we are currently conditioned to think with. First and foremost, this means ceasing to think with the dominant economic ideology that makes a goal of economic growth, consumerism and individualism. It is this way of thinking that now threatens the destruction of humans and the rest of nature. Second, we need to understand and embrace the many past and current cultures ‘that promote harmonious forms of co-inhabitation among communities of diverse human and other-than-human beings’”. (Martin 143)

• “Rozzi looks at the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia, including the phrase ‘Suma Qamaña’. This translates as ‘living well together’. In the Aymara language, it means to inhabit, in the sense of both living in and living with, and it emphasizes the relational value of co-habitation” (Martin 143)

• “An example of a protectionist position is the ‘Half-Earth’ call for a massive expansion of protected areas (Wilson, 2016)” (Martin 142)

• “In the last twenty years, there has been a major scientific effort to quantify the benefits that humans derive from biodiversity and ecosystem services, including the influential report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB, 2010).” (Martin 142) 

• “The need for transformative societal change that addresses such root causes is now making it into globally agreed reports such as the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report.” (Martin 135)

• A key point of the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report emphasizes the necessity for “sustainable and just economies” and the safeguard of food systems as a whole. Recovery of Vietnam’s Central Provinces will require joint commitments between Vietnam and Taiwan to prioritize the preservation of environmental resources over GDP growth. Such commitments will need to incorporate more stringent regulations for manufacturing infrastructure, greater funding for supporting recovery efforts both on the part of affected ecosystems as well as fisherman communities whose operations have been suspended, and stipulations for community consultation processes in all future related manufacturing processes. 

• “A collaborative process led by the International Institute for Environment and Development has employed the environmental justice typology of distribution, procedure and recognition to develop an equity framework for assessment in protected and conserved areas (Schreckenberg et al., 2016; Franks et al., 2018). Use of this framework has now been adopted as voluntary guidance by the Convention on Biological Diversity and is being promoted by IUCN.” (Martin 142) 

Martin’s main argument centers on the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of  anthropogenic and ecocentric framings to conceptualize methods of addressing biodiversity loss. The future of conservation, as noted by Martin, will need to embrace alternative framings of natural diversity which “deliberately integrates human and biological values into a holistic expression” (Martin 143). The importance of emphasizing “biocultural diversity”, argues Martin, serves to “decolonize” conservation via centering indigenous valuations of  “living in nature or as nature” (Martin 144) and rejecting dominant emphasis on upholding current economic systems and extreme segregationist views. While Martin does not provide an example of what a conservation scheme based on biocultural diversity could look like, he does use ideas presented in the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia to show that such ideas have in fact been gaining traction as an alternative means to framing conservation.