Analyze

Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.

The authors "define disaster media as a heuristic, or approach, that recognizes the ways “natural” and human-made disasters are communicated about, constructed, and variously exacerbated or relieved through media means. This heuristic is not simply a temporary model for problem solving but tries to account for ecological forces and material conditions" (my emphasis).

They close the article with three provocations:

1) All Media on Deck: the current moment of combo disaster (COVID and climate crisis) requires the production of more public and open access materials (of various kinds), but also boosting of media literacy. The auhtors acknowledge the conundrum of producing more media, while being confronted with sustainability issues and the call for "no-carbon" media.

2) Relief and media Production: a critical look at the kinds of assumptions that governments/NGOs/industry bring to COVID-19 relief efforts (videos, websites, maps, algorithms...) -- what counts as relief and for whom? 

3) Focus on Social and Environmental Justice: "In moving forward, it will be crucial to approach disaster media as a domain in which structural reform agendas that interweave social and environmental justice can flourish."

In the article, the authors address visualizations of COVID cases, including related satellite mages of air pollution in Southern California and China (generated by NASA/ESA) as well as of mass graves in Iran.

First, they provide basic framing of how to critically read air pollution satellite imagery. Connections between COVID-19 measures and improvements in air pollution are not identifiable in a straightforward way.

"Figure 1a, for instance, uses bright magenta to indicate greater concentrations of nitrogen dioxide and light blue to signify cleaner air. However, such color choices can be misleading: there is no material correlation between nitrogen dioxide and the color magenta; and reduced traces of this chemical do not turn the sky a paler shade of blue. [...] color-coding selections imply, satellite images are not just scientific; they are cultural as well."

Second, they point out the paradox role of satellite imagery to account for the inequitable impact of COVID-19

"satellite image, from a US satellite operator, locates pandemic “excesses” in an Iranian “elsewhere.” But this is an increasingly deceptive proposition, given that the United States has one of the highest COVID-19 per capita transmission and fatality rates in the world."

Third, they draw comparisons between the "hockey stick" visualization of global Climate Change and the various "curves" used to display COVID-19 developments:

From a disaster media perspective, the film’s global warming graph depicts a dramatic climate shift, projects imminent catastrophe, and issues a world warning. Its circulation in global media culture for the past fifteen years potentially informs the ways people are engaging now with similar-looking charts of coronavirus death and illness. Historically, news media have relied on sensationalistic photos of human suffering to convey a sense of disaster, but in the age of big data and the current pandemic, numbers speak, and graphs and curves tend to dominate the mediascape. In both cases, scientific experts and publics must grapple with how these graphs make meaning, what datasets they rely upon, and how these media come to stand in for highly complex conditions.

Finally, they remark that COVID-19 visualizations are always incomplete - because of lack of testing and withholding of data - but also because stories of e.g. workers are missing. They reference the cover of the New York Times (May 24, 2020) that displayed the names of 100,000 people who had died from COVID.

The article points out the simulation Crimson Contagion that was run by the Department of Health in 2019.

"Despite all of the pressing unknowns of the disease, one cannot call its emergence unpredictable. A simulation by the US Department of Health and Human Services, code-named Crimson Contagion, ran from January through August 2019. The aim was to prepare for the effects of an influenza pandemic. The findings reportedly “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed” (Sanger et al. 2020)"

They also note the rise in Internet usage, pointing to environmental and energy implications:

"[C]oronavirus capitalism is interwoven with digital capitalism (Schiller 1999; Terranova 2004; Fuchs 2019). The pandemic has prompted a massive rush to online spaces of work and leisure activities. It is estimated that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased total internet use by 70 percent (Beech 2020)."

"Yet with this surge in online activities and virtual gatherings, the COVID-19 crisis has both exacerbated and laid bare the internet’s rising energy dependency, its growing carbon footprint, and issues of energy justice. The challenge is to be able to address crises of various kinds while reducing fossil fuel use especially, and developing sustainable and equitably managed energy sources. There is a burgeoning scholarly literature about the ill effects of the nuclear, petroleum, coal, and hydroelectric energy sources that power the grid and about the environmental devastation their industrial incursions wreak. In the meantime, the impacts of extraction and production of the various energy forms that keep the grid and the internet operating are often toxic and inequitable." 

Finally, they point to the connection between media and health, including civic archiving of HIV activists.

[F]ilm and media scholarship on public health [...] not only serves as crucial context for the COVID-19 pandemic but also extends the conceptual contours of disaster media to include disease and illness, outbreaks and pandemics, and the ways government agencies address or fail to address health-related crises. Alexandra Juhasz’s book AIDS TV (1995) explores community educational initiatives and activist videos that became vital means of conveying information about and perspectives on HIV transmission during the 1980s and '90s and continuing public health crises. Addressing media portrayals of other outbreaks, Kirsten Ostherr’s Cinematic Prophylaxis (2005) critically examines Hollywood films “that represent the spread of contagious disease across national borders.” In it Ostherr argues, “Audiovisual materials play a crucial role in the articulation of world health, not only as vehicles of educational and ideological dissemination, but also as metaphors for the spread of disease within the processes of globalization” (2). Her study sheds light on the current COVID-19 crisis by demonstrating how outbreaks become disaster media.