Eco-Roundup: How Activists Used a New NASA-Funded Toxic Prisons Map to Respond to Helene
Happy Haloweeeeeeen. Every month, I assemble a round-up of stories I’m following and issues I’m covering, with palate cleansers at the end.
Earlier this fall, this badass researcher I've been in touch with for ages, Ufuoma Ovienmhada, helped launch an interactive map of environmental hazards impacting prisons. Part of the reason I'm so excited about this project is that the mapping team incorporated data from me and Akil Harris's Climate and Punishment prison mapping project. They went far and beyond what we did at The Intercept, though.
Ufuoma worked closely with Fight Toxic Prisons, an organization led by people directly impacted by incarceration, which focuses on the intersections of prisons, health, and ecology. I'd say they're best known for their rapid-response support for people in prisons whenever major hurricanes hit the South and Appalachia.
Unfortunately several opportunities to use the map for disaster response arose in the immediate wake of its launch. An organizer with Fight Toxic Prison's disaster team shared a list, through Ufuoma, of the ways they used it to support people in prisons during the devastating hurricanes this fall:
- Getting a first look at which facilities lie in the possible landfall of a storm (Francine and Helene)
- Using the underlying ArcGIS layers + others such as the Florida evacuation zone layers to identify facilities at risk (Milton)
- Ultra-rapid-response during Helene to check for facilities downstream of dams reported to be failing in Appalachia
- Estimating number of people incarcerated in certain facilities
- Getting phone numbers and addresses for facilities
I interviewed Ufuoma about the origins of the project. Here's an edited version of our conversation:
How did you get interested in looking into environmental issues inside of detention facilities and their ecological impact?
In the year 2019 to 2020, I was the co-president of the Black Graduate Student Association at MIT. And through being part of DGSA I got interested in a lot of advocacy and organizing, especially in the middle part of 2020 after the murders of George Floyd and of Breonna Taylor. We started to really interrogate policing and the impact of policing on campus. I got really passionate about the policing, prison context. Through that rabbit hole of about half a year I ended up stumbling upon some of David Pellow's work on prisons and environmental injustice.
And at the time — this is late 2020 — there was very little quantitative work out there, and so, given the skillset I already had in satellite data, I thought it was a great opportunity to try and put that to use in a different context. Yeah, that was the origins of my personal interest in this, coupled with just being a Black American woman with loved ones who've been impacted by incarceration.
From there, how did this project emerge? I'm especially curious about your work with Fight Toxic Prisons.
I knew about FTPs work very early on. I shared about this topic with a peer colleague at MIT named Darien Williams, who had organized with FTP for some of their disaster response stuff around prisons in the past. Darien was like, oh, you got to meet these folks.
I ran some GIS workshops with them in fall 2021 that ended up being relevant during Hurricane Ian and its impact in Florida. So that was really cool. I was just trying to be in community with them and things they were already doing. Then this opportunity came up through NASA. Due to the Biden-Harris administration's investment in environmental justice, there are a lot more funds available to do environmental justice relevant research. NASA, for the first time ever, had a solicitation that explicitly mentioned the terms "environmental justice." So I asked FTP, do you want to do this thing? And they were hesitant at the concept of this grassroots organization pursuing funds from a federal government agency. But we did it, and I guess they liked our proposal. They funded us.
We allocated about $40,000 to go towards FTP as co-laborers in this project. They've been paid for this work. All of the folks we've interviewed, formerly incarcerated people who've been interviewed, have been paid to support this work.
We'll see how long this season lasts, pending the results of the upcoming election, but right now it's an exciting season, because it gives an opportunity for involvement of people who have historically not been part of the academy. Environmental justice started as a social movement. And it still is, but it's also in the last few years been more institutionalized into research spaces. You have these people doing these studies looking at the intersections of like heat and race, and then we're calling that environmental justice.
But really environmental justice, from its origins, was meant to be about movement work, about organizing to actually change the kind of physical realities that people are living in when it comes to environmental burdens. NASA in this past solicitation, they actively encouraged people to partner with community-based organizations. It was an unwritten requirement in some ways. To see that actually be encouraged, it helps to take EJ research back to what it was really meant to be in the first place — academics partnering with communities who have the most knowledge, through lived experience, of these issues. Combined we can produce really compelling work, really impactful work with scale and significance, et cetera.
Can I ask how much funding you got from NASA?
I think it was like $250,000. Half of that gets slashed from overhead at institutions. And then the rest of it was between the different collaborators on the project.
We actually just got awarded another grant to continue this work, from NASA. I think it's also around 250.
Can you just talk a little bit about the the tool itself? Like, what does it do that you're most excited about?
Yeah, sure. The tool right now in this beta version is split into three components. We have the hazards tab, the insights tab, and the storytelling tab.
The hazards tab — this one focuses on real-time environmental hazards. So things like heat forecast over the next few days, active wildfires, current air pollution and forecasted hurricanes or storms. This is really meant to support organizers. We hope it can help to support organizers who do things like disaster response the way FTP does. So they might hear, oh, there's a hurricane coming. They can look it up on this hazards tab. The tool would show you the cone of the forecasted hurricane track, and then from there you can see all the facilities that are in the line of sight for the hurricane to hit. From there, you might say, hey, let's do a phone bank campaign.
And the tool includes the information on facilities' phone numbers and websites. We know that some of this information may be out of date — it's constantly changing — but they could then use this tool to quickly triage the facilities that they might want to focus on in the face of an environmental risk.
At the same time, family members who may not identify as necessarily activists can also use this to keep tabs on the things their loved ones may be experiencing. For example, if the hazards tab shows heat forecasted for the next three days then you might say let me send in some extra money so that my loved one can purchase water from commissary. So that's how I imagine the hazards tab being used.
Then the insights tab — this is where my own kind of personal like PhD research has gone in. So here is more like spatio-temporal, historical analysis of different environmental burdens and prisons. In my PhD, I looked at air temperature, I looked at land surface temperature, and I looked at particulate matter — air pollution. And then I also bring in some data sets from the Intercept's Climate and Punishment map on flood risk and wildfire risk. And I bring in a dataset from a team at Colorado State University, Caitlin Mothes and Carrie Chennault, who developed several environmental indicators related to prisons. I pulled in, specifically, one on proximity to toxic facilities. The idea here is that this insights tab can be used to get more insight about the general patterns of environmental risk that carceral facilities have been facing, and this can be used to plan more longer term strategy.
For example, in California, CURB or Californians United for a Responsible Budget released a People's Plan for Prison Closure that's basically suggesting facilities that should be closed and should be prioritized for closure. Part of what they used to prioritize those was environmental risk as a lens. And so I hope that this could be used for other states and other organizations trying to develop similar types of strategies around closure or where to advocate for decarceration and things of that nature.
Lastly, the storytelling tab is where you can just engage more directly with people who have been directly impacted. It's something that I'm really excited about. A tension actually in the development of the project was how to present people's narratives. The default in academia when it comes to a lot of research with sensitive or vulnerable populations is anonymity. However, FTP felt early on that it was important actually in the consent process to give people agency to choose, do they want to be anonymous? Do they want their names identified? Especially because incarceration as a process strips people of so much agency and dehumanizes them so much. This was just one small opportunity to restore agency over something to people.
We have people's direct audio, if that was what they wanted, and in other cases we have pseudonyms and their narratives as text form. But the hope here is for people who may have no idea about this to just engage more directly with the humans that are being impacted, and hopefully develop a lot more empathy and more complete understanding of what it really looks like or sounds like to experience living in these toxic facilities — because no one deserves that.
I highly encourage readers to check out the Toxic Prisons Mapping Project here.
In case you missed it:
I was so thrilled to edit an investigation for Drilled by my good friend Danielle Mackey this month. She worked with reporters at the Honduran outlet Contracorriente to expose documents showing that the U.S.-based steel giant Nucor maintained a quiet relationship with a controversial Honduran iron ore mine even as mining opponents were repeatedly assassinated. The story reveals a pattern that goes beyond this one case: So often, when opponents of polluting industrial projects are assassinated no one is ever held responsible, and the companies behind the projects remain silent or even hidden. Danielle and coauthor Fernando Silva dug deep into the tactics of repression faced by those fighting to protect the Guapinol River against the Los Pinares mine.
Other stories I’m following:
“The Israeli military repeatedly destroyed agriculture and water resources across Gaza.”
Forensic Architecture just published its own map — this one illustrating why Israel’s genocide in Gaza is also an environmental justice crisis. Their conclusion: “The patterns we have observed concerning Israel’s military conduct in Gaza indicate a systematic and organised campaign to destroy life, conditions necessary for life, and life-sustaining infrastructure.” One of their areas of analysis was “Destruction of Agriculture and Water Resources.” They found that in Gaza, since October 7, the Israeli military destroyed 83 percent of all plant life, 70 percent of agricultural land, more than 3,700 greenhouses, more than 65 percent of water tanks, and every single wastewater treatment facility.
“There are a number of bots on social media that are accusing us of having ties to armed groups”
In recent years, Colombia has developed a reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the world for environmental activists and Indigenous land defenders, with one of the highest rates of assassinations of people organizing to protect ecosystems. Those extreme acts of repression tend to start with a type of attack that is more common around the world: disinformation and intimidation spread via social media. The Colombian organization Verifico tracked 41 cases of online stigmatization and disinformation targeted at environmental activists in the country. “These messages not only encourage violence against those who defend the rights of marginalized communities and territories, but also produce delegitimization and clashes within the social movement they lead,” the group wrote.
An opposition research firm called Argus Insight is working to dig up dirt on participants in an Oregon lawsuit accusing Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, McKinsey & Co. and others of causing a heat wave that killed dozens. The firm is filing public records requests that seem to be meant to discredit people involved in the case, reflecting tactics the tobacco industry once used. The company is run by three partners, one of whom, Adam Kennedy, is senior vice president for the conservative PR company CRC Advisors, which is led by the legal activist and "Supreme Court puppetmaster" Leonard Leo. A second partner, Zach Parkinson, used to be the Republican National Committee's research director, and the third is former Axios reporter Lachlan Markay.
The FBI has been going after animal rights activists using the framework of countering weapons of mass destruction or WMDs, according to a report by journalist Grey Moran. At a virtual conference for the Meat Institute, an FBI agent for Dallas’s WMD program said that, "minor criminal actions associated with animal rights activist extremism have a tendency to escalate toward substantial direct actions, to include the unintentional introduction of biological materials, toxic chemicals or other hazards into a herd and/or flock.” He added that the FBI has considered charging animal rights activists using criminal statutes related to biological WMDs.
Palate Cleansers
I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.
Something Delicious: Reporting trip snacks
I spent a good chunk of October on a reporting trip in North Dakota. I've developed a practice of hoarding snacks when I go on these journeys, so there is no chance that I could ever become hangry. Two discoveries that I'm going to carry with me for the foreseeable future:
Dot's cinnamon sugar pretzels. Holy shit I am obsessed. I'm not a pretzel person so I ignored the Dot's thing. But these are extremely addictive and wonderful.
Bob's Red Mill peanut butter, coconut and oats granola bars. I make a point to test new granola bars when I go on these trips. This one was a surprise and delight.
Garden Update:
Probably dead? I don't know I'm gone all month.
Community Bulletin Board:
Just a public service announcement to please take care of yourselves next week. It's a serious and upsetting time. Drink water. Eat nourishing and delicious food. Take walks. Plan time with people who make you feel supported. And maybe think about how you might support the people in your community who are extra vulnerable right now.
Member discussion