She can see clearly now the institutions that were responsible for making her not just the ecological other, but a societal other. ‘the’ are the numerous groups that had a part in shaping the experiences Connie had, from the socioeconomic class was a part of to her inability to thrive in the polluted wilderness. 
 Connie realizes that she had always been set up to be a disposable resource, one that can be used up and thrown away like everything else in her time. She has internalized what it means to be ecologically other, where even in death her body is a threat to the environment. 
These thoughts about polluting the earth, however, weren’t a concern of Connie’s in this way when she had been in the wilderness of Mattapoisett and of her own time. Mattapoisett allowed Connie to see what her life could have been like, allowing her to see them not just as the future, but an alternate reality where people who looked and felt like she did weren’t subject to perpetual punishment. Even though Mattapoisett based their existence as Wamponaug Indians off of an environmentalist caricature of what Native Americans were, they allowed Connie the ability to see a place where her mental illness, size, race, and age didn’t define her like it did in the mental institution. She was allowed to see a future she wouldn’t get to live in and experiences the pain of knowing that even if things get better, she won’t be able to participate. Connie’s life doesn’t take on qualities of garbage simply because she is the ecological other, but because in her being the ecological other, the doctors who perform the experiment can fully remove Connie from anything natural as they pollute her brain. This is what I believe motivates Connie to poison the doctors. 
Connie poisons the doctors with Parathion, an insecticide from her brother Luis’ nursery. The nursery he runs isn’t marketing an environmentalist take on flora, but rather imports and grooms plants to make them as tame and marketable as possible. Connie gets to experience this artificial nature when she gets leave from the ward to visit her brother and he has her pick out some plants in the nursery for him. There she comes upon the Parathion, steals it, and sneaks it onto the ward. Triggered by her treatment by both Luis and her doctors, Connie pours the Parathion into their coffee, taking revenge against those who removed her from the environment and dehumanized her, turning her from person to pollution. She is acting out a sort of ecological justice, preserving the wilderness, the diversity of others, while trying to guarantee the utopia’s existence by killing the doctors who are unknowingly working to destroy it. 
But her environmentalist act goes further, attacking the very institutions that the doctors represent. They acted out the desires of control over the “other,” of people who didn’t fit into the expectations that their institutions desired, demonstrated best by those who were kept on the ward and forced into the experiment. Connie, who was placed there for violence, isn’t alone. A gay man, a black woman, Connie’s friend who was a witch, and others are deemed irreparably broken, and so instead of fixing the society that sees them this way, doctors are allowed to “fix” them. Unlike the utopia that had accepted Connie even though she was the ecological other, Connie’s time would rather make people like her into human garbage if it meant that they were controllable and better fit the cultural expectations of them. Originally, Connie was the ecological other because she couldn’t subscribe to the Ecological Indian ideas that Mattapoisett had, but realizes that what was the reason for her discomfort was the institutions that wanted to keep her oppressed. Her actions are done in defense of a pristine wilderness she will never reach again, and a polluted environment that with the help of an ideological shift and time, could turn into the utopia that she is shut out from. 
