A coalition of churches, synagogues, mosques, and cultural organizations located in the Inland Empire. Unfortunately, without any up-to-date number of members in this coalition.
For the org. there is a spiritual connection linking the desert landscapes and religious beliefs. Their primary focus is congregating more groups around environmental hazards in desert lands.
The organization is looking for a “new dimension and depth” in the discussion about the environmental crisis. Engaging in different fields:
Desert Stewardship Project is an interfaith coalition dedicated to protecting the deserts of California.
The previous annotation opened with Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez’s remarks about being forgotten by the U.S. federal government, and the failure of federal actors to recognize their responsibility and respond to the needs of Indigenous nations of the United States. What President Nez said authorizes a common discourse circulating among Indigenous nations around the world about “being forgotten,” and the general ignorance of the nations within which sovereign nations are nested (see IITC Webinar Series). The Indigenous impact of COVID-19 has made the experience of being forgotten painfully apparent. In the previous annotation, I described how recent reportage has displaced this noticeable discursive gap in the absence of the federal government. This annotation amplifies the irony that such structures and processes of forgetting are becoming increasingly visible.
In what follows, I will examine how ignorance and forgetting were enacted by the federal government through a new strategy of the politics of time, as witnessed in the untimely response to the crisis that is rapidly unfolding in the Navajo Nation (Dinétah). To be sure, the delay in federal emergency relief funds incapacitated public health responses across all levels of government—“tribal” and “non-tribal”—but in varying degrees; the impact was acute among tribal government. At a broad scale, what we have witnessed is an inversion of the “capacity building” that was once in vogue in international development discourse in the domains of government and business, and the effective reduction in the U.S. government’s capacity to respond to natural and anthropogenic disasters. I will not speculate on how such extensive incapacitation of government produced a neoliberal lapse that opened up a new space for privatizing ‘essential’ public health services and technologies. Instead I will focus on perceptions of “the lapse” itself, which marks a double meaning as both the passage of time and cognitive failure in memory.
President Nez underscored the urgency of the matter: “Navajo residents are panicking as these numbers rise... We need a lot of help fast from the federal government.” Nez continued by describing the partial access to limited emergency relief funds: “We’re barely getting bits and pieces. You have counties, municipalities, already taking advantage of these funds, and tribes are over here writing our applications and turning it in and waiting weeks to get what we need.” A New York Times report identifies the “delays in receiving federal emergency funds” and the compounding effect of “the requirement that tribal nations, unlike cities and counties, must apply for grants to receive money from federal stimulus legislation.” The report concludes, “the Navajo Nation—among other tribal nations — has faced crippling delays in receiving emergency funding” (NYT). An Arizona Congressman, Greg Stanton, echoed Nez’s concern using a similar vocabulary of timing: “Well, I’m very frustrated. I’m angry we’re waiting. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. The tragedy on the Navajo Nation is happening right now, in real-time. This is not the time for delay.”
This is not the time for delay. It bears repeating. The prevailing discourse of urgency and delay calls out the federal government’s strategic negotiation of the politics of time. The anthropologist Stuart Kirsch introduces the concept of the “politics of time” to understand how corporations strategically delay recognition of the environmental impacts of industry (2014:145-148, 155). I am advancing the concept here to account for how the Trump administration has scaled up the widespread corporate strategy of delaying recognition and deferring critique through a new form of government incapacity building—literally and actually building incapacity into every level of government. The lapse in the federal response is a new strategy of the politics of time that forces us to think critically about novel responses to incapacitating delays during the pandemic. Kirsch also accounts for the new politics of time leveraged by the critics of corporations: the novel strategy of critical intervention early in the production cycle made possible by accelerating the local learning curve and sharing information. In the new (covid) politics of time, both early intervention and information sharing were stifled by the once most trusted authority of information, the Executive Office of the President.
The incapacitating effects of the new politics of time are exacerbated by attempts to control information and, in this case, produce a dazzling array of misinformation at the discursive level of national public health. During an interview on Democracy Now!, Dean Seneca, former senior health scientist in the Partnership Support Unit of the Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offers a diagnosis for why the Indigenous impact of COVID-19 has been so severe: “Well, as you can tell, you know, right from the very beginning, I mean, [Trump] didn’t make this pandemic a priority. He did a lot of mixed messaging in the very, very beginning when he started to talk about this. And you see that he’s trying to now — in his recent reports, trying to justify that, ‘No, we were on top of this right from the beginning.’ And that’s far from the case. You know, his mixed messaging is what was really critical. At times, he would say, ‘Well, hey, this virus is just going to go away. And we’ll wake up one day, and it won’t be here.’ You know, people listen to this information, and that is the wrong thing to send. He made a major mistake in eliminating his council on international health and global pandemics. That was huge right from the beginning. He should never have done that.” These early interventions of the current administration had broad incapacitating impacts.
In the article, the authors used data from the 2011-2015 American Community 5-Year Estimates by the U.S. Census, 2010 U.S Census, and George C. Galster, “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications.”. They looked at data follwing children under 18, and followed poverty trends such as census tracts for concentrated areas of high poverty. They used the number of children in Essex County Cities and compared it to the the amount of children in poverty in those cities, for the years of 2000 and 2015. Henceforth, they created an arguement stating that Child Poverty rates have risen within those 15 years, and even by 50% in some areas. The only issue I have with some of this data is that in some cities, we see a decrease in child population - and while there is an increase in child poverty in those areas, I feel like the reduced number of children in that area plays a big part in the so called "Increased Child Poverty Rates".
The main argument in this artical is children poverty in newark has increased by 19 percent in the last 15 years. In newark over 40% of chlidren live in poverty.
Vulnerability and resilience in this artifact are defined by the high concentration of child poverty in Essex County. They are measured using the Census from 2000 and 2015 which show how there is a trend in the percentage of children who expereince poverty within the county. Majority of the children living in poverty are currently living in heavilyu concentrated poverty neighborhoods like Newark, Irvington, and the Oranges. Although the affluent town of Milburn is nearby, it is unclear how these children continue to live below the poverty line in Newark even though the towns are only 6 miles apart.
As a sesearch from the Rotgers University, the students or researchers support:
- The child poverty in becoming more concentrated. With the numbers next to us, we can say that a 52.5% of the poorest childs live in census were the concentration is above a 40%
- Inner-ring suburbs of Orange, East Orange, and Irvington have seen the largest increases in child poverty.
- Essex County’s smallest municipalities have very low child poverty, although many have seen their child poverty rates increase by more than 50 percent since 2000