Analyze

The Sunset Advisory Commission is tasked with evaluating the efficiency of over 130 Texas state agencies. A November 2022 news article points out that the group has not reviewed TCEQ's operations for over a decade (Douglas & Martinez 2022). The article also summarizes the Sunset Advisory's recommendations to improve regulation of polluting industries in Texas: 

• suspending a company's compliance history after major accidents (complicating approval of future permits)
• increasing of non-compliance penalties from $25,000 per day to $40,000 per day
• increasing the notice for public hearings and possbility to submit comments up to 36 hours after the hearing

Read more in the Sunset Advisory Commissions 2022–23 staff report.

"TCEQ regulates air, water and land pollution and had a $429 million budget in 2021; it oversees more than 250,000 permits ranging from small-scale landscape irrigation to major petrochemical plants." (Douglas & Martinez 2022).

"TCEQ Commissioner Jon Niermann said the agency’s permitting decisions could not be racist because the TCEQ does not choose the location of industrial facilities." (Douglas & Martinez 2022)

What I find really noteworthy in this text is how Julia Watts Belser takes the poem by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and includes it into a scientific text. In this way, she not only allows an affected person to have her say, the poem also leaves the reader with a very striking image of the connection between the river and the body, in multiple ways, as well as the connection between enviromental harm and disability.

The text was published in 2020 (Vol. 40, No. 4) by The Ohio State University Libraries in their Journal Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ). It is, as you can read on their Homepage "a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities and arts, disability rights advocates, and others concerned with the issues of people with disabilities. It represents the full range of methods, epistemologies, perspectives, and content that the field of disability studies embraces. DSQ is committed to developing theoretical and practical knowledge about disability and to promoting the full and equal participation of persons with disabilities in society."

The author connects disability theories and activism with environmental justice, this approach allows her to show how disability is related to and through environmental harm, she shows how diagnoses are used politically in these cases, and looks critically at how these processes determine how, when and in what favor human and environmental harm is taken into account. The writing is shaped by the consequences of the Anthropocene like environmental harm linked to health isusses, especially affected are communities of color and poor communities in the United States, here pre-existing patters of structural inequality, already known from climate change come into play,  this communities are the most affected and the least responsible.

I think what is very striking in this text, is the author puts her perspective of the disability studies and uses it to draw lines from the disability studies, more particular the queer black disability studies, to the environmental justice movement. From reading the text, I think one can see, that Julia Belser is very involved in disability studies and the field of critical medicine/ psychology. The way she describes that we should turn away from always seeking to get (back) the pure nature, the healthy environment, the "healthy" body, she reminded me of the general idea of overcoming pure categories (for example Latour etc.) - and dualisms. Additionally, I think one could locate her in the area of inequality studies and the field analyzing structural violence.