Analyze

“...Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty (Bullard et al., 2007) revealed that communities of colour and poor communities were still being used as dumping grounds for all kinds of toxic contaminants. The authors discovered evidence that the clustering of environmental hazards, in addition to single sources of pollution, presented significant threats to communities of colour. Furthermore, the research showed that polluting industries frequently singled out communities of colour in siting decisions, countering the “minority move-in hypothesis”: the claim that people of colour voluntarily move into contaminated communities rather than being targeted in situ by dirty industries.” (122)

“Bullard (1990) has highlighted the problem of “Black Love Canals” throughout the United States, where issues of environmental injustice are deeply connected with environ- mental racism. For example, Bullard highlights the case of toxic DDT water contamination in the African American community of Triana, Alabama. In 1978, in the midst of the national media attention focused on Love Canal, residents in Triana raised complaints over ill-health effects and contaminated fish and waterfowl. Lawsuits in Triana against the Olin Corporation continued throughout the 1980s. Although the case is noted within environ- mental justice histories (see Taylor, 2014), it is not widely recognized or commemorated.” (126)

“Underpinning the slow, structural violence (see Galtung, 1969; Davies, 2019) of unequal and unjust toxic exposures is the problem of “expendability” … Pellow (2018) proposes that indispensability is a key pillar of critical environmental justice studies (alongside intersectionality, scale, and state power). This idea builds on the work of critical race and ethnic studies scholar John Marquez (2014) on “racial expendability” to argue that, within a white-dominated society, people of colour are typically viewed as expendable.” (127)

“National and international media headlines followed the Flint water crisis story as it unfolded, but, after the initial shock, Flint faded from media attention. It shifted from being a spectacular disaster to a case of slow violence. This paral- lels the dynamics of public memory surrounding many toxic disasters, struggles, and legacies.” (128)

The author’s main argument is two-fold. Acute environmental disasters (e.g., Chernobyl, BP Horizon Spill, Hurricane Katrina) that garnered public attention leave behind legacies of increased support for environmental action and legislation, although the public attention span is often too short for lasting change. At the same time, these disasters have received a disproportionate amount of public attention compared to the many more slow-moving toxicity disasters that affect people in more systematic but often less visible ways. Examples of this disparity include the contrast between the 1984 Bhopal disaster coverage, and the persistent toxicity in the area in the time since then in the form of industrial waste and infrastructure that is not maintained. It is additionally important to note that the cases that don’t receive much attention often affect marginalized groups (by race, socioeconomics) disproportionately.

Because of my work on the Bhopal disaster, I follow worst case scenario potential in many places -- and the corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge has long been on my radar.  Worst case scenarios involve the catastrophic release of dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere and create "vulnerability zones" -- what many people call kill zones -- around an industrial facility.  A 2014 report  from  the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance documents how these zones are hotspots of environmental injustice in the United States. 

See this 2001 Greenpeace map. When Greenpeace made this map, there was a push (by organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute) to pull worst case scenario information off the Internet because of its potential use by terrorists.  Greenpeace pushed back in campaigns for "chemical security," arguing that the best way to reduce risk is to reduce the production, handling and use of dangerous chemicals -- laying ground for today's movement for a "just transition."  See just transition work in Lousiana by the another gulf is possible campaign . 

Worst case scenarios came back into US national attention after the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas in 2014, prompting the Center for Effective Government's report, Kids in Danger Zones (showing that Houston and Port Arthus in Texas and Baton Rouge in Louisiana are the most high-risk metro areas in the United States).  See the Louisana Fact Sheet from the report (listing the highest risk facility in New Orleans as a wastewater treatment plant.). Note that the maps in the Center for Effective Government's report are no longer interactive -- pointing to a challenge the QA project is addressing: what we've termed "archiving for the anthropocene."  We need to figure out what archiving for the anthropocene should look like, how to build and sustain it, and how to put it to good use. 

Worst case scenarios have come back into controversy recently with Trump's EPA's saying that focus on worst case climate scenarios are unrealistic. Louisiana looks pretty bad....  see Propublica’s “Losing Ground.” 

The extreme weather that comes with climate change of course exacerbates worst case scenario risks.  See this on floods and chemical plant safety across the United States.  See this on the 2016 "thousand year" flood in Louisiana.  See this moderate recognition of the problem. 

As a participant in the NOLA Anthropocene Campus, I have gained insights on how communities, stewards, and managers of ecosystems in New Orleans have rolled out forms of interspecies care vis-à-vis ongoing environmental changes, coastal erosion, climate catastrophes and their deeply present and current effects (i.e., the 2010 BP oil disaster). Whilst much analytical lens has been given to geospatial changes in the study of the Anthropocene, here, I focus on how relations to non-human beings, also threatened by the changing tides of NOLA’s waterscapes, can enrich our understanding of such global transformations.

After disasters like Katrina, urban floodwaters harbored many hidden perils in the form of microbes that cause disease. Pathogenic bacterial exposure occurred when wastewater treatment plants and underground sewage got flooded, thus affecting the microbial landscape of New Orleans and increasing the potential of public health risks throughout Southern Louisiana. But one need not wait for a disaster event like Katrina to face these perils. Quotidian activities like decades of human waste and sewage pollution have contaminated public beaches now filled with lurking microbes. Even street puddle waters, such as those found on Bourbon Street, contain unsanitary bacteria level from years of close human exploitation of horses and inadequate drainage in 100-year old thoroughfares. More recently, microbial ecologies have also changed in the Gulf of Mexico due to the harnessing of energy resources like petroleum. Lush habitats for countless species are more and more in danger sounding the bells of extinction for the imperiled southern wild.

Human-alteration has severely damaged the wetland marshes and swamps that would have protected New Orleans from drowning in the water surge that Hurricane Katrina brought from the Gulf of Mexico. The latter is something that lifelong residents (i.e., indigenous coastal groups) of the Mississippi River Mouth have been pointing to for a  long time. Over the past century, the river delta’s “natural” infrastructure has been altered by the leveeing of the Mississippi River. Consequently, much of the silt and sediments that would generally run south and deposit in the river mouth to refeed the delta get siphoned off earlier upstream by various irrigation systems.

While some actors see it as a futile effort, there have been many proposals to restore the Mississippi River Delta. For instance, the aerial planting of mangrove seeds has even been recommended to help protect the struggling marshes and Louisiana’s coastal region. Tierra Resources, a wetland’s restoration company, proposed that bombing Lousiana’s coast with mangrove seeds could save it. Mangrove root systems are especially useful in providing structures to trap sediments and provide habitats for countless species. Additionally, mangroves have been touted as highly efficient species in carbon sequestration, thus taking carbon dioxide out of the biosphere.

Species diffusion into new environments has been of great concern for the different lifeways these soggy localities sustain, whether human or non-human. Many so-called “invasive species” have been identified throughout the river delta by researchers at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research hosted by Tulane and Xavier University. Such species have disrupted local ecological relations and practices and have had profound economic effects. Some plants have even entirely blocked waterways in the swamps and estuaries where salt and freshwater mix. 

Louisiana’s humid subtropical climate, and the diverse ecosystems therein, also warrant attention in that they can incubate some of the world’s deadliest parasites and other microbes. Of particular concern would be some of today's Neglected Tropical Diseases (i.e., Chagas, Cysticercosis, Dengue fever, Leishmaniasis, Schistosomiasis, Trachoma, Toxocariasis, and West Nile virus) often perceived as only affecting tropical regions of Latin America and revealing the enduring legacies of colonial health disparities.

How and when are seemingly quotidian events and upsets understood as not isolated but rather as produced in conjunction with other anthropocenics worldwide? What roles will interspecies relations and forms of care play as we cope with further anthropocenic agitation?

NOLA’s oldest tree, McDonogh Oak in City Park, 800 years old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK9YoGpng_c&t=0s

Other trees in New Orleans: https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/new-orleans-louisiana/trees

My interests center around soil--its preservation, regeneration, and remediation. Living farther up North on the Mississippi in Saint Louis has changed my thinking around the relationships between soil, water, and contamination. Saint Louis and New Orleans are linked not just through their shared river and its attendant water management issues, but through patterns of extraction and contamination. New Orleans may also provide some clues (and potential solutions) to my community's changing relationship with water as we confront climate change. My work as an artist explores our relationship with landscape through tours of contaminated sites and remediative interventions in the landscape, so I approach New Orleans with questions about contaminated environments and water management through landscape design, gardening, and education. 

I situate my research at the crossroads of history, philosophy, sociology and anthropology of science. In the past, I have focused on epigenetics, environmental research, empirical bioethics and environmental justice, within and outside the academia, as you can read here, or here. Now I am focusing on antibiotic resistance, and I use it as a lens to interpret the contradictions of the last century derived by industrial production, environmental degradation and biomedical cultures.

What interests me is the (at that time) new epistemic discourse that since the Forties has been produced to explain morphological changes of organisms produce when they experience new environmental conditions or perturbations. Through an important experiment at the base of the so-called concept of genetic assimilation, Conrad H. Waddington showed that a thermic shock can produce changes in wings’ veins of fruit flies, changes that can eventually be inherited across generations, without the environmental trigger that caused them.

This focus on production and (genetic) storage of biological differences elicited by the environment is nowadays coupled with the knowledge produced through microbiome research that explains the phenotypic patterns that recur across generations.

In a thought-provoking twist, with microbiome research, the focus shifts from production and inheritance of biological differences to production and inheritance of biological similarities. Microbiome research shows that some phenotypic patterns are allowed by ecological communities of microorganisms composing all animals. Bacteria allow the development and functioning of our bodies within an epistemic framework that is now key to understand biology. The network of vessels composing mammals’ stomach is formed through cellular differentiation and expression of genes coordinated by bacteria. The same is true for our immune system that is coordinated by gut bacteria. Food, which is an important aspect of our lives also impacts on this microecology and mediates between our biological functions and functioning of means of production whose parts dedicated to food production have immense importance for our biology and our internal and external ecologies. Antibiotic resistance is one of the crossroads where culture, biology, history and the Anthropocene meet. Indeed, Antibiotic resistance shows that means of production of our societies have an even more widespread, deep and allegedly unexpected impact on the biology of animals and plants. The microorganism can indeed adapt to resist the selective toxicity of antibiotics. Moreover, bacteria can transfer their genetic code horizontally, by touch, so that we can acquire antibiotic resistance by eating food that functions as a vector, by hosting lice on our heads and many other contacts. Bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics that have been used as growth factors in animal husbandry and to prevent diseases in livestock and aquaculture, spread in natural ecosystems and can be found in wild species. Rivers and estuarine waters are places hosting antibiotic resistance.

Searching on PubMed (the search engine for biomedical literature) titles of articles containing the terms ‘antimicrobial’ and ‘Louisiana’ I retrieved just one twelve-years-old article. No results with terms such as 'Mississippi' or 'New Orleans'. The authors collected and analysed Oysters from both waters of Louisiana Gulf and in restaurants and food retailers in Baton Rouge. In most of the samples gathered, scientists recognised the presence of bacteria (Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio vulnificus) resistant to specific antimicrobials. Food production is indeed the first factor in terms of the quantity of antibiotics used. This use and related antibiotic resistance impact all the living beings present in a specific area, and can easily travel around the globe through many channels. As Littman & Viens have highlighted, a sustainable future is a future without antibiotics as “there may be no truly sustainable way of using antibiotics in the long-run, as microorganisms have shown to be almost infinitely adaptable since the first introduction of antibiotics” (Littman & Viens 2015). But in the meanwhile, we need to use them and antibiotic resistance is a phenomenon that can be better studied through environmental research, by analysing wild species and emissions nearby livestock, for instance.

The study that I retrieved focuses on Oysters. But what about antibiotic resistance conveyed through food that is consumed by the most?

What about exposures of communities that are living in highly polluted areas?

And what is the additive value on antibiotic resistance for individuals who experience the presence of industrial pollutants and that live in areas where cancer epidemics are registered?

In this respect, there is a strategy to cope with the issue of antibiotic resistance promoted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The document doesn’t mention any action to monitor and regulate the production and usage of antibiotics in livestock. Nevertheless, the CDC wants to scrutinise, through genome sequencing, “Listeria, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and E. coli and uploads sequence data into PulseNet for nationwide monitoring of outbreaks and trends.” Moreover, the document reports that “In Fiscal Year 2019, Louisiana will begin simultaneously monitoring these isolates for resistance genes. When outbreaks are detected, local CDC-supported epidemiologists investigate the cases to stop spread.”

The questions that I would like to ask (to local ppl, activists, researchers, practitioners..) are:

What could be the epidemiologic characteristics (socioeconomic status, gender, residence..) of the populations more vulnerable to antibiotic resistance?

What is the additive role of antibiotic resistance for people living in highly polluted areas?

What is the impact of antibiotic resistance for people and patients living in areas where cancer incidence is high?

And on the long run I am interested in imagining possible strategies to not only living with the problem but also to tackle the problem itself, which means to develop strategies to answer the questions:

Why antibiotic resistance, which is known since a century, it’s a problem on the rise?

What is the role and interest of capitalism, in terms of profit-making of corporations, knowledge production and environmental degradation, in not being able to resolve antibiotic resistance?

What can be strategies of local communities to tackle the problem and to promote environmental justice in terms of alliances with ecologists, doctors, epidemiologists and other activists?