Article begins
A few days before Christmas 2025, I met with my colleagues over pasta and sparkling water to celebrate the year’s end. A senior coworker, dressed in a bubble-gum pink cardigan dotted with cherries, leaned over to me quietly. She asked if I had some time to look at a “weird” proposal coming from our newly merged United States team. “Something to do with health, you’ll understand it more than me, I’m sure.”
I arrived home lethargic as the dim grey light of late December seeped into my office nook. I hoped this proposal wouldn’t be too much of a lift before the holidays set in. But there, in my inbox, was an email in bold, orange all-caps. It boasted of proposed work in the Gulf of America. Beside that controversial new geographic label was the request that I provide a short statement on the feasibility of human health impact assessments for this project in relation to offshore drilling initiatives. My pasta-filled stomach immediately curdled.
I’ve seen dozens of industrial project proposals in my five years working as a human environment consultant, but none with such an explicit message about its intentions for the environment. The proposal was vague, and indeed weird. There were many potential options for offshore drilling locations in this region, and it was unclear if it was state-driven or federally proposed. The bid left me in a stunned state: there was a collective corporate hesitancy around the wording, everything bubbling up under the surface of those shouting orange letters. If it was for an American gulf, what would that imply for any cultural health work unearthed around it? Whose lives would matter here?
To begin a proposal in such a cautionary state is not typical of the work I do as an applied medical anthropologist. I recoiled thinking about how to describe the work I’d want to do in this American context. Typically, health impact assessments look at the potential environmental impacts that industrial projects will have, adding profiles of physical community health trends of a region. Additionally, my expertise maps onto more culturally driven baselines of health: how they relate to food and water security, psychosocial stressors, social and economic constraints, relationships to land and treaty rights for Indigenous Peoples, and cultural and spiritual areas that maintain community well-being. How could I write about this with any confidence for an administration that routinely slashes funding if certain taboo words are used?
Towards Holistic Community Health Assessments
On paper, my job as a social scientist within a corporate environmental consulting company is to provide technical expertise relating to matters of community health, socioeconomics, and Indigenous rights and interests. The reality is that I am more of a mediator and knowledge translator for industrial clients and corporate scientists, taking the “woo-woo” out of their equations of my domain as much as I can, and ensuring that communities are respectfully and ethically represented in our analyses.
Social elements of environmental assessments explore the potential of industrial projects to impact the existing ways of being, living, and experiencing a community, should these projects be successful. It can take varied forms: how might a salmon run be affected by the reconstruction of a large underwater tunnel along the Fraser River in British Columbia? How might a mining project impact the water flow of rivers that First Nations in the region use for fishing and plant gathering? How might the addition of man camps in isolated regions of the Yukon where the Porcupine Caribou Herd roam exacerbate an already precarious situation for remote communities navigating high levels of drug poisonings and violence against women and girls?
To explore these issues fully, I rely heavily on my own power of translation. Anthropologists are quick to recognize and understand the social determinants that inform health, the forms of structural and soft power dynamics that perpetuate barriers to care, or the ways that environmental racism becomes embedded in the physical and cultural health experiences for generations. Engineers and biologists, however, do not know these terms, and laugh a bit when the idea of “experience” is investigated rigorously. Proponents—or the industrial clients running oil and gas, mining, nuclear, wind, liquified natural gas, or roadworks and infrastructure projects—have little interest in the words of social scientists. Or at least in the way we speak among ourselves.
To translate it in my Canadian working environment, I take the regulatory framework of the 2019 Impact Assessment Act and look to its focus on increasing engagement with communities, and the more robust inclusion of Indigenous Knowledge. To me, these support more intersectional lenses, more holistic approaches to community health and well-being, and more diverse knowledge forms. It’s a good thing, but the academic jargon doesn’t stick the landing in application, even on a good day.
Under the Canadian regulatory framework, this means that I take the approved framework known as “Gender Based Analysis Plus” as the tool to explore social determinants of health. What I would understand as intangible cultural heritage spaces for Indigenous communities becomes reframed to align with the Application Information Requirements check listed for each novel project. This might translate to a requirement to assess “potential changes to quality of experience relating to traditional sites of habitation or cultural use.” This means that I’m able to take an important cultural concept, such as Stó:lō Peoples’ use of shxwelí (a life force that connects Stó:lō Peoples with everything within their traditional lands), and ensure that impacts to this connection are assessed.
It’s exhausting and imperfect, but there is power in knowing you can jump between worlds to ensure more cultural concepts are maintained in the words of the corporate-minded. I jump through aligning, optimizing, mitigation, circling back, triaging document comments (as if a Word document is a medical patient). There is a whole dictionary ascribed to the work that makes my skin crawl. But I love the potential for this work to reflect momentum towards something more holistic for community health. The trouble lies in applying this when government guidance itself is mercurial.
American Environmental Health Proposals
To perform a community health assessment for oil projects in America is daunting on a good day, but on a day where the Gulf of Mexico is proudly renamed to reflect the delusions of an aging leader is another entirely. That simple phrase gave me considerable pause. Do I even want to support a proposal bid for a project that clearly has devalued the history and culture of a region through a name change?
Consulting as a social scientist has been a place of constant negotiations. While clients tend to be industrial proponents (such as oil and gas, or mining, or nuclear energy), my eye is always focused on the impacts of these projects to communities. In the context of the Gulf of Mexico, recent research has found that surface waters in the Gulf have increased at a rate almost twice that of global ocean surface waters between 1970 and 2020. A 2025 study of wind projections using a regional climate model predicted increased intensity and height of waves in the Gulf as the weather gets warmer, too. Climate-sensitive health effects are already disproportionately affecting the more vulnerable and disadvantaged people within communities or states, such as ethnic minorities, migrants or displaced people, those with lower socioeconomic status, youth and elders, and those with underlying health conditions.
Together, these considerations would typically inform how I would approach an environmental assessment report on the potential effects an offshore oil project would have for socioeconomic or health indicators. I’d look at the intersection of risk and build an assessment that encouraged more action, strategy, and intervention supportive of those most at risk. But a look at a list of words banned by the federal government (compiled as of March 2025 by PEN America) revealed to me that my work was in trouble before it even began: accessible, air pollution, Black, climate change, Indigenous community, Latinx, mitigation, gender-based violence, housing affordability, minorities, pollution, queer, racial, safe drinking water, science-based, sociocultural, trans, vaccines, water storage, and women. All these words would be necessary to ensure a comprehensive health and well-being assessment could be completed for any potentially impacted communities.
Other banned words have more immediate regulatory impacts, such as mitigations. In environmental assessment work, there are measures put forward that eliminate, reduce, or control negative environmental effects of a project. This could look like building more fish habitat in areas that a community approves of to ensure they can continue fishing without too much day-to-day change. It could also look like providing workers with naloxone training to reduce risk of employee drug poisonings at camps, or adding tele-healthcare options for regions where services might get overcrowded with workers moving in. To ban “mitigation” implies a lack of interest in reducing the severity of impacts.
My attempt at language to appease the unknown American proponents in this era were destined to fail, too. I circumvented calling out specific demographics, choosing “subpopulation” to act as a vague umbrella for the communities with higher risk of exposures to environmental contaminants from offshore drilling. I argued these would be “communities primarily affected by a designated project through geographic proximity, vulnerabilities, or elevated risks.” I noted these vulnerabilities may be informed by socioeconomic status, or other factors that reflect social disadvantages. But the word “community” is on the banned list. So too are contaminants of environmental concern. How can I look at the specific impacts of oil drilling on the health and wellbeing of immigrants, queer communities, or Black neighbourhoods if I can’t so much as name them?
This reflects a radical transformation of what can even be proposed for assessment. If there is no room to use words that reflect the health experiences of those most vulnerable to industrial projects and their shaping of the land, how are we able to even think about the work?
Even in watering down my approach against my better practice, this was not enough to win a proposal bid. If I can’t use the words to describe the existing conditions that communities face, or the health challenges that may come with new industrial projects, it is impossible to write an analysis that fairly represents the situation.
This, to me, is the point. For every word taken away, so too is the subsequent line of inquiry. The language of restriction, the fear invoked with an ever-expanding list of taboo words, speaks to epistemic loss. This will not fall neatly into the loss of one singular offshore oil project. Each project lasts at minimum ten to fifteen years, times where communities can face vast boom-and-bust cycles as industry temporarily infuses local economies, only to abandon them when the oil literally or metaphorically dries up.
The forced omission is terrifying in its vast scope and intergenerational influence—seeing both the self-censorship of researchers before ideas even make it to paper, and the government pressure to corrode living experiences for those nearby industrial projects. It is daunting to think of the profound losses of health knowledge and experiences that come with the power of these new language taboos.