Analyze

Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements.  Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering. 

Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and  community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.

“Akwesasne residents’ main criticism of the Mount Sinai study was that at its conclusion, the researchers packed up and left, and community members felt they had not received any useful information.” (76) 

“As scholars of tribal health risk evaluation Stuart Harris and Barbara Harper explain, among most tribal people, individual and collective well-being comes from being part of a healthy community with access to heritage resources and ancestral lands, which allow community members to satisfy the personal responsibilities of participating in traditional activities and providing for their families.” (96)

“By placing “race/ethnicity” on a list of diabetes causes without qualifying why it is there, the CDC neglects the underlying root cause—that race/ethnicity is often associated also with class, education, levels of stress, and access to health care and fresh foods.” (231)

“Chaufan argues that to counter the focus on the medicalized aspects of diabetes, which has led to the individualization and depoliticization of the issue, a political ecology framework needs to be applied to the disease, one that is concerned with the social, economic, and political institutions of the human environments where diabetes is emerging.39 Such a framework would highlight how diabetes rates among Mohawk people are influenced more by changes in the natural environment and home environments than by genetic makeup.” (231 - 232)

“Understanding community conceptions of this intertwined “social and biological history” is important because, as Juliet McMullin notes, examining the intersections of health, identity, family, and the environment helps to “denaturalize biomedical definitions of health and moves us toward including knowledge that is based on a shared history of sovereignty, capitalist encounters, resistance, and integrated innovation.”61 The inclusion of this knowledge can lead to the crafting of interventions that community members see as addressing the root causes of their health conditions and promoting better health.” (249)

Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department

“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)

Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118) 

“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)

Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)

Elizabeth Hoover is an anthropologist and associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkley, who long claimed to be native (receiving grants and research access under this assumption) but has recently admitted otherwise. She has a PhD in anthropology from Brown University  with a focus on Environmental and critical Medical Anthropology. 

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. 

The goal of the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy is to:

“…achieve increased resilience in communities and individuals impacted by natural and manmade disasters. Such leadership is guided by the ethics of the Triple Bottom Line: Equity, Environment, and Economy.”

The Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy emerged from the breakdown in leadership during the 2004 Katrina super storm disaster.