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"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)

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.

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