Analyze

By Scott G. Knowles: As part of the STL Anthropocene Field Campus the research team visited the Wood Refinery Refinery History Museum on March 9, 2019. This museum is located on the grounds of the Wood River Refinery, a Shell Oil refinery built in 1917 and today owned by Phillips 66. The site is Roxana, Illinois, just upriver from Granite City, and just over two miles from the convergence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Sitting on the actual grounds of the refinery, the museum is an invitation to think across the micro, meso, and macro scales of the Quotidian Anthropocene, in terms of geography and also in terms of time. This refinery was built at the crux of the WWI, at a time when United States petrochemical production was entering an intensive phase of production, invention, corporate structuring, and global engagement. The museum is an invitation to think across temporal scales, backwards to the start of the refinery--through the individual lives of the workers and engineers whose lives defined the refinery--and forward to indeterminate points of future memory. This photo captures a key moment in an informal interview we did with one of the history guides. He had worked in the museum for decades before retiring. He explained to us that the museum sits in the former research facility of the refinery--and the glass plat he is showing reveals a beautiful artifact, a photograph made of the complex when it was built. Our guide only showed us this collection of slides after our conversation had advanced, perhaps after he was sure we were truly interested in his story, and the deeper history of the refinery. The pride in the place, the community of workers, and the teaching ability of the museum was manifest. The research team felt impressed, but also concerned about the health impacts (and naturally the environmental impacts as well) of the refinery. There was a mismatch in the scales--the memory of the individual tied to emotions of pride and knowledge of hard work done there--and the Anthropocene, global scale of petrochemicals. How do we resolve this mismatch? The glass plate is somehow a clue.

The main arguement of the film is that the development of stable and adequite public health networks is as important to the greater good of the population as the prevention of civil war.

This film is designed to have an emotional appeal. Very little scientific evidance is provided, and most of what we see are images and naratives about the effects of ebola from the public's perspective. Powerful images and stories, such as the death of a pregnant women on the side of the road, the closing of hospitals, and the turning away of patients are predominantly displayed. Much of this movie is told from the perspective of a student of the University of Wisconsin, and there was a large amount of dialouge about how he tried to get his family out of the effected zone. The only notable statistics given in the film was at the end, when the number of effected and the number of deaths were compared. 

" The dangers under which health workers try to function appear to be heightening, as frightening locals continue to blame the doctors for prepetuating the violence"

"We don't accept their prescence at all. They ae the transporters of the virus in these communities"

The author has conducted their research by being an advocate for poverty, inequality, and social justice. He is a reporter and has access to theose resources by using information gathered by his collegues who report from Africa. The Washington Post has people stationed who gather relevent information to world issues.

The stakeholders discribed in the film was the general population of Liberia. They had shared experiances of seeing the effects of ebola, innitially being in denial of its severity, then finally seeing the entire liberian public health system be overwhelmed and fail by an apparently unstopable and horrifying disease. The people effected needed to make difficult decisions about how to avoid contracting the disease, how to protect their families, and how to deal with the emotional strain placed on them by the epidemic.

The main point of the article is despite the positive impact doctors/nurses and those who advocate against Ebola, many of the citizens in remote areas do not trust those who have the resources to 'cure' or to eradicate the illness, instead they believe that these workers bring diease. Some resort to violence  to reaffirm this point through stoning healthcare workers and even killing them. This article exposes the issues on treating an epidemic, the 'growing pains' of helping thrid world countries and the dark side of helping others. The article is supported through direct quotes from healthcare workers as evidence (stats) and quotes from people that live in West Africa.

The actors that the article refer to is the healthcare workers, those who have experienced this violence. Those who feel that their perogitive to help others (and to do their jobs) is greater than 'offering themselves up' to the people of these tribes who feel that they are doing more harm then good. Another actor is people from the villages who describe what has happened. The discovery of these murdered healthcare workers and their opinions on the Ebola workers- they do not want them near their tribes at all. Outside worldwide coordinators also comment on the tradegies of the death and the affects it has on the treatment of Ebola. The Red Cross is also an actor, their workers were afraid/chased by locals due to wearing "Ebola gear".

The article addresses emergency response because it talks about the dark of helping people. The side people never hear about, those who do not want help or those who do not trust the help they are recieving. The volunteers (emergency response) that is provided is not recieved well, it says how the structure of helping these people needs to be changed so people believe that prevention will not bring diease.

Liberian emergency responders are portrayed in the film as being completely overwhelmed by the situation at hand and unable to cope with the nature of the illness, people's innitial denial to the extreme communicability of the disease, and the sheer number of patients. Most predominantly, first responders are illustrated by 2 abandoned ambulances on the side of a road and by the story of a woman saying that an ambulance was called to a dying pregnant woman and they ended up leaving her on the side of the road for an ebola crew to respond to, which came too late.