This project seeks to challenge, dilate, and peer through the porous border between prison and the world outside it.
We are not alone in our lived environments or even our own bodies. We touch and interact with other objects and other creatures, and our bodies themselves are intimately connected with microorganisms like the bacteria in our guts that help us digest our food.
Our bodies are vulnerable to disease and poison, and they take in medicines, nutrients, and various radiations. Even the ink of our tattoos has seeped permanently into our largest organ—our skin.
Our bodies are porous. So too the walls around us.
Nature is not just the wilderness; it does not end at the prison gates. Even in prison, incarcerated folks interact with all sorts of flora (plants) and fauna (animals) every day, even as we may not notice the lone dandelion growing through the crack in the pavement of the yard.
Our goal is to train our senses to recognize the natural world around us. In an increasingly urbanized world, green space exists and thrives in connection with the human world. Whether we are incarcerated or free, there is no way to disconnect ourselves from our lived environments.
Toward this goal, we will use the four interconnected approaches to thinking about the environment, prison, and justice described below. We see them as united by our central idea: that ecology—the study of plants, animals, microorganisms, and people in relation to their environment—can help us understand ourselves, our lives, and our worlds more completely.
We offer the following approaches to our shared and collaborative mission—
Supporting Intersectionality
1. Foster conversations around intersecting and sometimes divergent justice claims (across gender, sexuality, race, etc.).
2. Consider greater-than-human networks and our responsibilities toward environments, animals, climates, and other human beings.
Sharing Stories and Arts
1. Understand literature and art as valuable ways of thinking about the world around us and asking important questions about justice, humanity, and beauty.
2. Respond to readings and the world around us through personal creativity—collect, grow, cook, sing, play, write, draw.
Seeing and Thinking Ecologically
1. Support a critical engagement between incarcerated folks and the environments they inhabit.
2. Ask people in and outside of carceral spaces to think about prisons as sites that are entangled with politics and environments beyond the walls.
3. Share stories, art, critical responses with those outside of prison.
Rethinking Boundaries
1. Challenge the commonly accepted boundaries between inside/outside prison.
2. Build connections, collaborations, and friendships between animals, plants, and people across and through the wall.