In November 2023, Taiwan Public Television (PTS) reported that a whistleblower at Formosa Plastics' Sixth Naptha Cracker informed a local legislator about the forging of certificates of fire safety of petrochemical equipment: https://news.pts.org.tw/article/668279
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.
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)
“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)
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.
“An expansion plan for the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Plant in Mailiao now has been turned down by locals and environmental activists because of the accident in Kaohsiung. Petrochemical companies are bleeding dry Taiwan’s rivers and ruining much of the island’s remaining wetlands. As Mingyi Wu claims, the petrochemical industry overlooks generation justice, environmental justice, and class justice (qtd. in Lu).” (Chang, 2023, p. 179)
“Wu and Wu’s book ends with an appeal to people to buy wetlands in an attempt to save Taiwan’s dolphins. They can do this through a trust fund set up by the Changhua Environmental Protection Union and other environmental groups (Wu and Wu 233). Chia-yang Tsai and others set up this national trust fund, the first of its kind in Taiwan, when they became aware that if regional plans were approved by the government, 2,000 hectares of tidal mudflats could be sold to Kuokuang Petrochemical at the low rate of NT$100 per square meter (Nelson).” (Chang, 2023, p. 177)
“The operators of the trust competing with Kuokuang project stakeholders offer to purchase land from the government for NT$119 a share. If enough people buy a share, the land can be saved from industrial development (Nelson). As Rui-bin Chen says, “[o]ne share or 100 shares, anyone can be a landowner!” (qtd. in Nelson). The national trust fund represents the power of the general public, and it stresses spontaneity and participation in maintaining the commons (ecological environments and cultural and historical sites).” (Chang, 2023, p. 177)
In his 2011 op-ed, Winston Dang 陳重信, Taiwan's former Environmental Protection Administration minister, calls for the re-evaluation of the Kuokuang Technology Co's eighth naphtha cracker complex and Formosa Steel Mill, both supposed to be built in Yunlin County. The Kuokuang project was eventually proposed for Dacheng, Changhua County, where it would threaten wetlands, but the project was later stopped. The Formosa Steel mill, in turn, was built in Central Vietnam.
During my fieldwork, I learned that one argument made by economists engaged in the anti-Kuokuang campaign was that the petrochemical products would be exported to China, leaving Taiwan only with the pollution, but not the products.
The book "Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island 濕地、石化、島嶼想像" (Wu and Wu 2011), see also the review by Wen-Ling Tu (2011) and book chapter by Kathryn Yalan Chang (2023), quotes below.
“Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island represents the voices of regional residents, environmental protection activists, artists, cultural critics, and university teachers and students from around the country. It offers an insight into grassroots bioregionalism through its mixture of local voices, place-related poetry, songs, essays, analyses of the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Plant (1991) in Yunlin County, discussions of the environmental impact assessment of petrochemical technologies in Changhua County, records of community events, and details of environmental activism. Wu and Wu and the other authors represented in the collection share the same concerns about how the petrochemical industry has greatly impacted the environment and public health.” (Chang, 2023, p. 163)
“What counts as the Taiwan environmental imagination in the event of the anti-Kuokuang campaign? The environmental imagination in Wu and Wu’s book is not an exclusively anthropocentric one; rather, it takes into consideration the threats to nonhuman species and the habitats of these species.” (Chang, 2023, p. 166)
“As Taiwanese culture continues to be influenced by liberalization, modernization, and westernization, social movements and political reforms are not taking, and need not take, the form of a radical political revolution or violent acts against the government. Anti-Kuokuang campaign actions include spiritual blessings and ceremonies, music videos, and social media petitions against Kuokuang Petrochemical Corporation Factory. Wu and Wu’s Wetlands, Petrochemicals, and Imagining an Island is also particularly significant, for it provides a historical and political environmental analysis of the Kuokuang. Even if a reader has no idea about the Kuokuang project, he/ she can learn about the project through the more creative material in the book such as poems and other creative writings.” (Chang, 2023, p. 172)