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Educating young people in Indigenous Ways of Knowing, and about Indigenous approaches and relationships with the natural environment, has a potential multiplicative advantage in the context of environmental justice. At Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) in particular, where learners will graduate and immediately take on leadership roles within the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), presenting learners with harmonious, non-extractive environmental philosophies has huge potential benefits. As educators, we labour with the objective that our classroom efforts will carry over into our learners’ individual spheres of influence during their military careers and in their civilian lives, when they are deployed across Canada from coast to coast to coast. Considering the arguably poor track record of the CAF in interacting respectfully with the environment, educating officers into symbiotic environmental philosophies may serve to motivate institutional change in the CAF, the Department of National Defence, and the Government of Canada, leading to more sustainable and respectful environmental relationships. (Image: Stainless steel pans of maple sap boiling over an open fire during an urban land-based learning/outdoor classroom session with RMC learners. Kingston, Ontario, Canada, February 2023). 

Lussier, Danielle and Gregg Wade. 2023. "Environmentally sensitive education at Royal Military College of Canada." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Facing a pivotal federal investigation into Louisiana’s relationship with petro-chemical companies, the state’s attorney general hired lawyers who were simultaneously representing one of the main corporations at the center of the investigation, documents reveal.

The revelations, contained in documents released under public records requests, have led to allegations of a major conflict of interest and come just weeks after the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] dropped its civil rights investigation.

Internal emails, contracts and payments, show that the office of the attorney general, Jeff Landry, hired two lawyers to enter closed-door negotiations with the EPA during the 14-month civil rights investigation. But John King and Tim Hardy were also representing the Taiwanese chemicals firm Formosa in separate litigation, challenging a decision to revoke the company’s state air permits. (Moran and Sneath 2023).

In the 1980s, Formosa Plastics Corporation purchased financially struggling petrochemical plants in Delaware, Texas, and Louisiana. The company subsequently shifted its operations to Texas and Louisiana, where a competitive bidding process ensued between the two states, both of which were known for industry-friendly policies (Tubilewicz 2021). As political scientist Tubilewicz (2021, 16) has argued, the politics surrounding Formosa's investments in these states were not purely motivated by profit but were also shaped by the ongoing struggles of sub-state actors such as politicians and NGOs over issues of internationalization and representation in global affairs.

An example of this can be seen in Formosa's attempt to build a rayon fiber plant in Louisiana's St. John Parish in the late 1990s, an area also known as "Cancer Alley." Protests broke out due to concerns about massive tax exemptions, displacement of Black residents, and the plant's location on the historic Whitney Plantation (Tubilewicz 2021, 11). However, the project was eventually abandoned due to declining market demand and delays. In addition, the local St. John Governor was indicted for illegal industrial rezoning of land around the plantation and receiving $200,000 in real estate commission (Tubilewicz 2021, 11).