Abstract An analysis of the community/science alliances forged among local academic, government, and community partners to assess the environmental health risks facing the low-income, Latino/Puerto Rican populations in the Holyoke-Springfield corridor of Western Massachusetts. As a participant-observer in this research, and the co-director of the recently formed Pioneer Valley Community Environmental Justice Coalition, I examine new trends in environmental science research and the development of new policy tools in the current era of neoliberalism, which is signified by ever-increasing environmental deregulation and privatization. These new trends and tools include the introduction and expansion of the EPA’s “cooperative agreement” model of environmental protection—community-based environmental monitoring, environmental health risk identification, and problem-solving undertaken by community stakeholders in consultation with EPA professionals. I discuss the promises and perils for the environmental justice movement of this devolution, or shifting of the responsibility of environmental regulation from “public” to “private.”