New Terrain for Engaged Environmental Anthropology?
By	  Peter	  Little	  Frogs, butterflies, bees, flowers and vegetable gardens. These are generally not formsof life one includes when pondering the environment of the contemporary prisonindustrial complex, but there is a growing trend toward prison-based environmentalconservation and sustainability science projects in the US. As part of the generalgreening of prisons and providing science and environmental educationopportunities for incarcerated Americans—now around 2.3 million—theSustainability in Prisons Project (SPP), a partnership between Evergreen StateCollege and the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC), has become themost vibrant project in the country to mesh the cultures of sustainability science andcorrections. Fascinated by this emerging project, I began interviewing SPP staff atthe start of 2013 and use this commentary to reflect on the possible inroads foranthropology amid this new domain of sustainability science advocacy.Sustainability in Prisons ProjectThe SPP’s goal is rather straightforward: “Our mission is to bring science and natureinto prisons. We conduct ecological research and conserve biodiversity by forgingcollaborations with scientists, inmates, prison staff, students, and communitypartners. Equally important, we help reduce the environmental, economic, andhuman costs of prisons by inspiring and informing sustainable practices.” Among itsmany accomplishments, the SPP’s projects have saved corrections facilities millionsof dollars by creating recycling and energy saving programs and they have mademajor progress in restoring populations of an endangered species of frogs (eg,Oregon Spotted Frogs) and rearing endangered butterflies (eg, Taylor’s checkerspotbutterflies). The SPP’s partners continue to grow, but some prominent playersinclude The Nature Conservancy, the National Science Foundation, US Departmentof Defense, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Center for Natural LandsManagement.
Established in 2005 in Washington state, the SPP has already helped developsustainability projects in prisons in 14 states and is quickly gaining internationalattention, with three countries beginning to adopt SPP’s ecological research andbiodiversity conservation approach. Engaged in projects at minimum, medium, andmaximum security prisons, the SPP works to forge collaborations with prison staffand inmates to carry out a variety of activities, including, but not limited,endangered species and ecological restoration, horticulture, water conservation,green purchasing and procurement, zero waste garbage sorting and composting, aswell as bicycle and wheelchair restoration.
Much of the SPP’s success, it should be added, is due to the fact that one of the cofounders is now the Director of Prisons for the Washington State Department ofCorrections, and as one SPP staff explained, “without him on board and being anadvocate for this program, it would never have gotten off the ground.”Inmate Science and Exploitation AvoidanceIn Discipline and Punish, Foucault contends that “The prison has always formed partof an active field in which projects, improvements, experiments, theoreticalstatements, personal evidence and investigations have proliferated” (Foucault 1975:235). The SPP is one such project with the mission of “bringing nature and scienceinto prisons,” an interesting twist of political ecology indeed. In this sense, the SPPmight be understood as an experimental project of carceral environmentalism,whereby sustainability science is becoming a “penitentiary technique,” as Foucaultwould have it, that dovetails with the structural power and logic of the prison system.SPP staff are fully aware of the crux of meshing ecology and corrections, of meshingenvironmental science and prison culture, and they are also cognizant of the brittlepolitical-economic dimensions of their sustainable practices. As David Harveyfamously put it in his Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference “all ecologicalprojects (and arguments) are simultaneously political-economic projects (andarguments) and vice versa” (Harvey 1996:182). SPP staff are sensitive to the politicsof prison labor and “careful,” as one SPP staff put it, “not to take advantage ofinmates in the work we do.” This is where the so-called political ecology of prisonsgets interesting, the point at which the SPP’s mission “to bring science and nature toprisons” is met with a culture of caring for inmate education and advocating for theirinvolvement in sustainability and conservation projects, as well as in the productionof environmental science and knowledge. SPP staff, in this sense, are in a continualnavigation of possible exploitation and they are careful to avoid, the best they can,any form of inmate disempowerment. “It can get tricky,” as one SPP staff put it. SPPstaff continually highlight the educational component of the SPP and view inmateinvolvement in SPP projects as “opportunities to contribute” (a Department ofCorrections term) and not inmate exploitation. The educational focus, in this sense,counters the prison labor concern which is ultimately an uneasiness with what hasbeen termed “carceral Keynesianism” (Parenti 1999) or how prison labor mimics“public-work style stimulus” (Parenti 1999:217).

Beyond SustainabilityTaking an ethnographic approach to the SPP has inspired me to better understandhow SPP staff think about the work they do and how are the benefits of sustainabilityscience and education in prisons understood. From my conversations and interviewsthus far, I have found that most SPP staff are interested in environmental issues asmuch as they are driven by an ethos of community service. While advocating forsustainability practices and science is made explicit—again, the SPP ultimately aims“to bring science and nature into prisons”—many SPP staff also envision theirinvolvement as a meaningful opportunity to work with and learn from “unknown”prisoners, that “hidden population” struggling to sustain a life in a controlledenvironment where moral rehabilitation and transformation is a targetedinstitutional goal. One SPP staff, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger,explained, “I saw the SPP as an opportunity to work with a marginalized populationthat I knew nothing about.” She added, “There are a lot of inmates who show a lot ofpromise to be environmental leaders and who can go back to their communities andmake a difference. They can have a second chance. But most people haven’t been to aprison so they don’t see this side of it. I really am drawn to working with people whodon’t get the chance to learn science, to learn about the natural world, and to learnabout the place where they live.”There is also an orbiting ethos of ecotherapy (Hasbach 2012; Buzzell and Chalquist2009; Clinebell 1996) that informs much of the work that SPP staff do, that buildinginmate-earth relationships has some level of healing power. For example, I was toldby one SPP staff that, “I really feel that to have a physical connection with the planet,whether working with soil or working with frogs, it can only have a beneficial impacton your physical and mental health and wellbeing.” As a microcosm of sustainability“science in action,” as Bruno Latour might put it, the work of the SPP illustrates howspaces of incarceration are becoming simultaneously spaces of environmentalscience production and sustainability practice. Prisons, in this sense, are becomingplaces where environmental identities can be made possible and whereenvironmental education is carefully used to reduce recidivism. This transformationprocess, which the SPP is playing a central role, is a vibrant moment that calls forcloser connections between environmental anthropology and the anthropology ofprisons.

Toward an Engaged Environmental Anthropology of PrisonsLearning about the SPP has sparked my interests in a plethora of questions thatcould inspire an engaged environmental anthropology of prisons: How issustainability science informing the prison-industrial complex? How are inmatesactually becoming sustainability scientists? How are prisons becoming a microcosmfor how sustainable living and sustainable practices are done and made possible? Ina recent conversation with prison anthropologist Lorna Rhodes, she reminded me ofthe difficulty ethnographers face when attempting to do fieldwork in prisons: “theproposed project really needs to fit with the logic of the prison system. They [theDOC] are only really interested in projects that fit with their needs and interests.”Asthe primary instigator of the anthropology of prisons, Rhodes (2004, 2001, 1998) iskeenly aware of the fact that prisons have long been a topic dominated by scholars incriminal justice studies and sociology and that people in the field of corrections are,as she put it, “very aware” of her work and that of others that look critically at prisonsand challenge corrections philosophies and practices. While Rhode’s work has takena “hard look” at the prison industry, I have used this commentary to begin to exploreand take a modest look at the practice of sustainability science advocacy in anenvironment of incarceration. My approach to studying the SPP is not meant tosimply drag such sustainability science advocacy efforts through the mud to exposetrenchant power relations, but instead to honor the complexities and conundrums ofadvocacy itself, especially “advocacy” driven by “nature” and “science” education,both of which are anchoring motivations for the SPP.
As one SPP staff told me, “I don’t think the SPP has really uniformly taken the timeto define nature or science. The SPP was designed by ecologists, not socialscientists.” As an engaged environmental anthropologists working to buildfriendships with SPP staff, I am left pondering: Is this where anthropology comes in?
Is this a welcoming entry point for an engaged environmental anthropology ofsustainability behind bars? Working with the SPP to explore these questions is agood place to start any ethnographic journey into the greening or ecologization oflockdown America.
Peter C Little teaches online anthropology courses for Oregon State University.
He lives in Seattle and has general research interests in political ecology, health,and science and technology studies. His research has been published in MedicalAnthropology Quarterly, Ethos, and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. He can bereached at littlepe@onid.orst.edu.