Analyze

From Tu (2020): "In Taiwan, the community air-monitoring projects often have difficulties in identifying the specific pollution sources due to the historical patterns of industrial development that tend to set up dense clusters of different factories in the industrial parks along the west coast (Liu 2012).3 The agglomeration of polluting facilities complicates pollution identification that further creates significant knowledge gaps between the predicted emission, the actual emission, and the community sensory experiences throughout the policy process. This pattern of development has somehow constrained Taiwan community air monitoring to target the specific polluters."

This event was the City Council meeting for the City of Santa Ana on february 15th 2022. The meeting took place in the city of Santa Ana council chambers. This meeting was organized by the city and city council. The purpose of this event was to award community members, pass agenda items, and listen to community concerns.

Council members Phan, Penaloza, Lopez, Barcerra, Hernandez, and Mendoza were all present along with Mayor Sarmiento. It is important to note that during agenda item number 26 Councilmember Phan left the chambers due to a formal complaint filed against her. During public comments on agenda item 26 Council members Hernandez and Penaloza left for unexplained reasons and missed the majority of public comments. Councilmemebr Lopez was not present for MPNA comments and a few oteh republic comments. I think that Councilmembrs Hernandez and Penaloza leaving during public comments on thai matter indicates a lack of interest and support for community members.

The most notable speakers at this event were community members who talked during public comments, city council, and the Mayor.

Many public comments were made on this matter with many written letters sent to the council which were not read during the meeting. The most notable public comments were made by the director of OCEJ, executive director of MPNA, attorney with the environmental law clinic at UCI,

Consensus amongst most commenters was that the city should not be moving forward with the GPU until they conduct better community engagement and address the EIJ in more detail. 

After public comments the mayor started off the council comments by saying he was not prepared to move forward on the city plan. He did however say that he would like to move forward with the general plan by the next meeting. He explained how the council immediately stopped pushing the general plan when they received a letter from the attorney general telling the city they must engage with the community on EIJ concerns. He also pointed to how after this letter the council held hundreds of meetings with EJ groups. After saying these things he said that in all this time there has not been enough movement and at this point the EJ groups are delaying the city plan which has been nearly 7 years in the making. He finished by saying that the EJ groups are hurting the communities that they want to protect and that there will be one more meeting and we are done.

Council-member Bacerra said we need to pass the plan tonight and that two more weeks will not do anything. He said that the EJ groups keep demanding to move the goal post further and are not offering any solutions, all they want is more time.

Council-member Penaloza agreed with Bacerra’s statements and further stressed how the council has held hundreds of meetings. He stated that in all of these meetings all the EJ groups wanted was more time and when given the time they offered no solutions to EIJ.

Council-member Lopez did not want the plan to move forward. She cited lead pollution data sources to show how the city needs to do more in regard to the GPU. She said tha too many of her constituents have concerns over EJ in the city plan so she does not want the GPU to move forward.

Council-member Hernandez did not say a lot other than agreeing that the plan is taking too long and should be moved forward.

Council-member Mendoza agreed with Lopez in saying that the general plan does not cover enough EJ problems and said the plan should not move forward.

After these statements Council-member Penaloza then tried to present a notion to pass the general plan. Bacerra then said he would want to make some amendments first before passing the plan which was done on the spot. Most amendments changed some language in the GPU EJ section. The most notable amendment was the adding of a permanent EJ staffer on the city staff. After these amendments were made Penaloza attempted to pass the notion which failed with a 3-3 vote. Council-members Lopez, Mendoza and Mayor Sarminto voted against the notion. 

The mayor stated the amendments were hastily put on the GPU and that the council needed to wait 30 days before passing the plan. With this the Mayor attempted to pass a notion giving EJ groups 30 days to come up with bullet points on what they wanted passed. This notion also failed with a 3-3 vote. Council-members Hernandez, Bacerra, and Penaloza voted against it.

This resulted in the agenda item to be later discussed at the next town council meeting.

Groups referred to by Councilmembers and the Mayor were Madison Park Neighborhood Association (MPNA), Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ), and the University of California, Irvine (UCI). EJ groups such as MPNA and OCEj were mentioned by council members to explain which groups they have worked with. The mayor called out these groups to identify the EJ group that must provide the council with bullet points on their concerns. The mayor also referenced UCI to explain his disappointment in the school and said that he would expect better from the institution.

Meetings with these EJ groups were also mentioned heavily from council members Bacerra, Pendaloza, and Mayor Sarmiento. The point of referencing these meetings was to show council has held hundreds of meetings with EJ groups and still have not been offered any solutions or given any ideas for what the city plan update (CPU) should have in its EJ section.

The concept of environmental justice was the most discussed concept.

Mayor Sarmiento said the city can not engage with all 330,000 citizens in Santa Ana when it comes to EJ concerns. This was in response to community comments saying that the city needed to better engage the city. They said that a poll that reached less than 1% of the population and was not in Spanish was not enough.

The city council meeting showed me which council-members were for or against EJ groups further delaying the plan in order to put in policies that would improve EJ in Santa Ana. It showed how the City Council as a whole is prepared to be done with the process of the GPU. Some council members however are more willing to give EJ groups time to send finishing touches to the council whereas some members want to pass the GPU as soon as possible.

META: Water seems to be one important medium through which NOLA envisions the “impacts” of the Anthropocene—scarcity, abundance, temporalities and spatial distributions, management of, and hazards that emerge in its context. Less is said about the causal or attributional aspects of the Anthropocene. How might water function as an entry point into the assemblages of local anthropocenics?

I found the NOLA Hazard Mitigation Plan for 2018, which frames the impacts of the Anthropocene as an intersection of weather extremes amid climate change and evolving vulnerabilities of its people. Four of seven items in the executive summary note water as central to local interventions: flood awareness, flood repair, flood mitigation, flood infrastructure. Too much water or water in the wrong places and the aftereffect of water on infrastructure and lives. One expression, then, is preparedness.

MACRO: Mitigation is an interesting analytic for the Anthropocene. In the US mitigation plans are shaped by the 1988 Stafford Act (which amended the 1974 Disaster Relief Act). Constraints on communities come through rules, regulations, policies, (dis)incentives, and surveillance by state and federal authorities. Much of this is bound by economic and administrative discourses.

Goals are set in this document—broken out by timelines, activities, priorities, and capabilities. Another expression is classification of anthropocenics by subfields and accounting metrics. How do we measure progress and what is deferred to the future, 5-10 years out from today, a goal that has no tangible accountability but is named and acknowledged. What are the practices of naming, responsibility, and making (in)visible in the Anthropocene?

BIO: One new initiative, Ready for Rain, in particular is of interest to me as it highlights the more neoliberal vision for how the public should self-regulate risk and mitigate harm. I hear this as an extension of a government agency program to make the nation Weather Ready. Other bullets highlight “green” buildings, energies, and infrastructures. These could be examples of how the city envisions the Anthropocene feedback loop of humans changing/planning for climate alterations, which is a fairly typical lens.

Some questions: What does the water do? What does the water know? If we trace water in all its instantiations (e.g. historical water, flow of water, chemistry of water, application of water, temperature of water), what do we learn about the future imaginaries of what NOLA will / could / ought to become?

Resilience is a term that is widely embraced by many in city management and planning. It holds the positive gloss not just of recovery but bouncing back better. To my ears, it has become one of many anthems of the Anthropocene, a kind of restrained tempo thrumming along through communities that will adapt to climate change (or seasonal-to-subseasonal climate variability post Trump). They will mitigate, innovate, transform, strategize in order to endure unanticipated shocks, both chronic and acute.

NOLA is one of 100 Resilient Cities named by the Rockefeller Foundation sometime in 2013. Like others selected across the globe, the city of New Orleans would benefit from the resources of a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO), an expert in resilience to be hired to work within city governance to develop a strategic plan; NOLA's was published in 2015. Selection of the cities for the "100 Resilient Cities" initiative was difficult, a competitive bid for resources based primarily on a city's recent experience with disaster, usually connected to a weather or climate extreme (e.g. hurricane, flood, etc). Resources were provided via the hierarchy of the CRO, sometimes to hire staff, develop training for the community, and create working groups and to write the stratetic plan. As one former directer of NOLA RC said of this opportunity provided by Katrina, the disaster that qualified NOLA for Rockefeller monies, it demonstrates the need for an the age of resilience. In what ways is resilience measured, accounted for, adjudicated and managed through or in spite of this strategic document? 

The language of resilience includes many terms that I think of as a collective imaginary of utopian preparedness, a vision for a nation that is--in the parlance of the weather prediction community in which I work--weather ready. Through the filter of resilience, then, vulnerability (another problematic term) is eradicated through individual action, community engineering, and adherance to strategic policies like 100RC. Yet how does this image of NOLA, one of "mindful citizenry" engaged in "partnerships" around the city (terms used in their summary video), match with the realities of living in NOLA, today and in the everyday future?

Resilience is also a term widely critiqued in STS and the broader social science and humanistic disciplines. For good reason. Common questions in this literature: What counts as resilience? Who decides? At what costs? Resilience against what? What does resilience elide? How has the discourse of resilience reframed individual and community accountability? What is the political economy of resilience? I'm interested in the discourses of preparedness and planning, and "the eventness" of disaster, as Scott has highlighted many times. But my concern is not just to critique and tear down concepts like resilence (or vulnerability). I worry that we then evicerate common lexicons of hope and imaginaries of the future that do some good. How are we as field campus participants and those who re-envision or reveal the quotidian reflexive? How do we triage the Anthropocene amid our own state of compromise--as scholars, participants in Capitalism, in post colonialism, humans? What are our ethical commitments? How do we make good?