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Assessing the PM2.5 impact of biomass combustion in megacity Dhaka, Bangladesh - PubMed (nih.gov)

This article is about crop burning in Dhaka, Bangladesh and attempts to figure out if there is more or less harmful PM2.5 particulate air pollution caused by either fossil fuels or biomass, and during which season is one or the other higher in the air pollution it produces. During monsoon season, fossil fuels lead in the most PM2.5 releases at 44.3%. When it is not monsoon season and is the winter season, the percentages are way higher for PM2.5 air particulate releases at 41.4% for the remainder of the year. Across the globe, there are now people stepping up to uncover the true and real environmental and health impacts this harmful particulate byproduct causes in different parts of the world and with differring weather conditions than what we see in North Carolina. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351209404_PM25_Emissions_from_…;

This study is set in South/Southeast Asia and uncovering that, when trying to count the percentages of PM2.5 put off during biomass, the true amount of emissions were being gravely undercalculated. Specifically rice straw burning becuase the amount burned varied so much because of different harvest and burning practices that it just wasn't taken into consideration. What this study does is go bottom up using these strategies: "subnational spatial database of rice-harvested area, region-specific fuel-loading factors, region, and burning-practice-specific emission and combustion factors, including literature-derived estimates of straw and stubble burned"(Lasko et al. 2021, 1). 

In this essay the authors have highlighted some of the stakeholders in the fight against industrial biomass operations as members of the surrounding community who live with these operations as close as their own backyards, and experience the environmental pollution directly everyday. They highlighted Belinda Joyner, a resident of Northhampton County, and an environmental activist who rose to defend her community and their lands and livelihoods due to expanding hazardous infrastructures such as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Enviva power plant. Other stakeholders besides activists and organziers such as Belinda include the people of Northampton County who attend hearings with government officials and take a stance agaisnt pollution, as well as organizations such as the Dogwood Alliance. The county is predominantly Black and working class, one of several in North Carolina that bear the brunt of exploittion and pollution by powerful biomass manufacturers such as Drax and Enviva.

This timeline essay provides more examples from recent years of community responses and collective action for environmental justice.

The development of both pipelines and CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) in eastern NC have prompted action from justice organizations such as the North Carolina Environmnetal Justice Network (NCEJN). To address the ongoing problem of CAFOs, NCEJN has provided a number of resources on their site, as well as ways to take action by signing a petition to stop the use of hog waste as fertilizer. Prior to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) being canceled in 2020, NCEJN played a role in organizing protests and taking legal actions- in conjunction with many other community member and activist groups- against Dominion and Duke Energy, the companies responsible for the ACP's construction. 

“Under a 1986 federal law titled the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals are required to treat people who come to the ED presenting with an emergency medical condition, defined as a condition that, without treatment, will likely lead to serious impairment or death. … EMTALA is one of the largest federal mandates to provide services to have gone unfunded (Friedman 2011); costs instead fall on states and local health care systems.” 481

“In bringing ethnographic attention to hot spotting as a technique of governance, we find that it provides lifesaving humanitarian interventions while operating within the racialized structures of violence that produce continual life crises. The institutional rationality of hotspotting and the encounters of care that it produces illustrate the often-contradictory role of medicine in the lives of poor people: both caring and coercive, it intertwines care and violence.” 475; “we conclude by suggesting that economic investment and return are becoming a reigning logic in the governance of poverty, generating hot spots as sites of interest for both policing and health care and decentering normative assessments of deviance, illness, and social problems” 476; “Neoliberal social assistance, as it is practiced in the health care safety net, is conceptualized as an “investment “in the population, as a strategic and targeted deployment of basic resources, one that promises to generate a return on investment for the state or health system in the form of cost savings.“ 485

 The authors examine the practice of “hot spotting,” a form of surveillance and intervention through which health care systems in the US intensively direct health and social services towards high-cost patients.  Health care hot spotting is seen as a way to improve population health while also reducing financial expenditures on healthcare for impoverished people. The authors argue that argue that ultimately hot spotting targets zones of racialized urban poverty—the same neighborhoods and individuals that have long been targeted by the police. These practices produce “a convergence of caring and punitive strategies of governance” (474). The boundaries between the spaces of healthcare and policing have shifted as a “financialized logic of governance has come to dominate both health and criminal justice” (474).

From Roberto: I took the liberty of reaching out to the disaster research and practitioner community via the RADIX listserv to see what their thoughts are on the inclusion of war and terrorist attacks within the category of disasters. In my query, I specified that my interest was in the ways academics, and particularly anthropologists, thought about this issue in theoretical/analytical terms. I was hoping to make a clear distinction between the inclusion of war and attacks in policy, as that may follow more a vital systems security type of governmental justification, but it is interesting that, in their responses, the respondents moved back and forth between academic and governmental definitions of disasters. One comment was particularly insightful, bringing up alternative concepts other than disaster that may be more inclusive. People like Katiana Lementec, for example, has used the term "upheavals" to bring disaster scholarship and development induced disaster/displacement like the building of the Three Gorges Dam. One respondent brought up "complex emergencies," and we could also include "crisis" as one of the more inclusive terms, but these terms also bring with them the baggage of ignoring the historical political ecology or longue durée of catastrophes and reducing our focus to the immediate emergency. I asked those who replied if I could share their thoughts with the Disaster STS group and they agreed, so I copied and pasted their responses in the word document that is attached.

• Disaster governance -- and legitimation of particular modes of governance -- has been different in different historical periods and settings. Historian Michele Landis Dauber (year?), for example, describes how New Dealers had to frame the Great Depression as a disaster -- “afflicting citizens through no fault of their own” - in order to secure and legitimate federal aid to those in need. Focusing on more recent developments, John Hannigan, describes how “a humanitarian aid model for dealing with disasters became widely accepted in international affairs during the 1970s and 1980s; faltered in the 1990s; and is currently being challenged by a new approach to disaster management wherein risk management and insurance logic replace humanitarian concern as guiding principles” (2013, 1)" (quoted in Fortun et al. 2016) 

• While organized to address immediate needs, disaster response often lays ground for enduring structures of different kinds. A literally concrete example is how temporary housing for disaster survivors often becomes permanent housing, though under-designed for this. A more general examples is given by MIchale Landis Dauber in her description of the way federal aid to people in need during the Great Depression in the United States laid ground for a truncated and compromised form of the welfare state that we still live in -- turning on “suspicion that those in need are reasonable for their own deprivation.”