I hope to build relationships within and beyond the lab, making connections with people who are directly invovled the environmental justice community. I also hope to continue expanding my knowledge about the different frameworks and methodologies the lab uses as well as gain more experience with community-engaged research and apply that to my future career.
Might movement, both forced and voluntary, be a defining characteristic of the anthropocene? If not, where might this quality find a home within the analytic questions?
In preparation for the field school I am reading Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. Chapter 1, 'Feet', tells the history of the forced migration of slaves from northern coastal plantation colonies to the south. Men and Women, chained together by iron were forced to walk in coffles to South Carolina or Georgia. As Baptist writes
Men of the chain couldn’t act as individuals; nor could they act as a collective, except by moving forward in one direction. Even this took some learning. Stumble, and one dragged someone else lurching down by the padlock dangling from his throat. Many bruised legs and bruised tempers later, they would become one long file moving at the same speed, the same rhythm, no longer swinging linked hands in the wrong direction (25).
One of the arguments presented in this book is that American capitalism, as we know it today, would be impossible without the the foundations put in place by slave labor. The early chapters also make clear that forced migration, the movement and redistribution of enslaved persons, allowed for the southern states to expand agricultural production and increase white wealth. This eventual transformation of land and capital was predicated on the movement of peoples from one place to another, and as the passage above suggests, this movement had a rhythm, a timbre, a musical modality.
I contrast this with Zenia Kish's article "My FEMA People": Hip-hop as disaster recovery in Katrina Diaspora where she argues that the music that emerged following Katrina was the first time American hip-hop engaged with "the thematic of contemporary black migration as a mass phenomenon in any significant way" (674). This article also draws attention to the rhythms of post Katrina life; the call and response of Bounce, the vibrations of trauma. Although lyrical expression proved the most potent way for artists to narrate the impact of environmental change and political neglect, the music itself was borne out of the experience of moving through and with disaster.
Both writings point to the importance of further exploring the rhythms of mobilities as they relate to environmental transformations. I'm struggling to see where this point of inquiry maps to the analytic questions and may be worth some further exploration.
Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books. New York. (2014)
Kish, Zenia. “"My FEMA People ": Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora.” American Quarterly. 61, no. 3 (2009): 671–92.
I am currently at the Ecological Society of America annual conference, so I am a bit limited on time to dig into New Orleans. I want to share the link below to the NoLA Urban Water plan. Even the nomenclature of 'urban water' allows us to think a bit deeper about how natural resources take on new characteristics, transformations, and meanings based on the spaces they inhabit. For instance, what does it mean for water to be Urban and how might that designation change how it is governed or interpreted?
Furthermore, in thinking through the Field School's call to investigate Slavery and Labor, what might be the work of creating specifically urban waters? What forms of scientific knowledge and technological devices make urban water legible?
In asking these questions I'm thinking through a recent presentation I saw by Billy Hall who called attention to the wedding of environment and race in Baltimore City as a mechanism to encourage policies of segregation. I'm inclined, as we move into New Orleans, to think further on this provocation to examine how powerful social perceptions are wedded to techniques of governance to achieve publicly oriented outcomes.
Looking at a map of the New Orleans area I am struck by how many Wildlife Management Areas there are. I wonder if some of these areas are a result of dealing with spaces that cannot be readily developed due to their geo/eco features rather than explicit pushes for wildlife conservation/creation of green space. In some places it seems that green spaces can be created through spaces being unfit for building (e.g. in Orange County, CA).
Although I'm unable to dig into these spaces at this moment, many questions arise:
How accessible are these spaces to visitors? Are they designed for visitors/for environmental education or are they primarily spaces left alone for wildlife habitat? If they are visited, who uses them and how? (e.g. subsistence fishing and hunting? birding?) When were they officially created/designated? What differences in management exist between the national wildlife areas and state-managed areas? What perceptions exist among New Orleaneans about how these spaces are managed and about state vs. federal management? Has the management of federally-managed spaces changed since the beginning of the Trump administration/with the tumultuous activity within the Department of Interior? What challenges do these spaces face (e.g. ecosystem health/wildlife well-being, human use, land management) with changing eco/atmo conditions?
I found an article announcing the release of an environmental mapping tool meant to improve the process of planning "green infrastructure projects." The tool was developed by the Trust for Public Land (which has also played a role in the rebuilding/repairing of parks/other public green spaces in New Orleans following Katrina) as part of its Climate Smart Cities Initative. The mapping tool draws from numerous sources to put multiple kinds of information in one place (e.g. flood prone areas, head islands).
In April 2016 (the date of this article) the mapping tool was only available to city officials and organizers from the Trust for Public Land. I looked on the Trust for Public Land website to see if it was now accessible to anyone but was unable to find it (the description on the website still says the tool is being developed, though that may be a feature of the webpage not being recently updated). What would it take for such a tool to become something anyone could look at and use?
In 2016 with the debut of this tool, the Gentilly area of New Orleans was stated to be the model space for starting to use this tool, which according to Wikipedia is a predominantly middle-class and racially-diverse neighborhood. The area is right on Lake Pontchartrain. I wonder what the decision-making process was for deciding where to test/develop this tool was and what factors were considered went into making that decision (eco/geo features? socioeconomic conditions? etc.). Has the tool now been expanded to be used in other areas of New Orleans?
I found a document produced by FEMA that details the history of "building" elevation in New Orleans (can be found here). Raising structures above ground was a necessary response to the eco/atmo/geo conditions of the space--it has been a site of major flooding during the past coulpe centuries of European, then Euro-American, inhabitance. Through the 19th century, a lack of adequate drainage is reflected in descriptions of the city that include details of cesspools and trash-filled gutters, with residents collecting drinking water off their roofs. In the early 20th century, these conditions were responded to in the requirements that became part of building code, laying out specifications for how high above ground buildings needed to be built and so on. While elevating buildings was primarily the responsibility of the owner throughout the past 150 years, this document describes how in recent decades federal funding through FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program has been used to elevate homes beyond just the New Orleanean elite.
As I learn more about the history of this place, I imagine that I may gain a better sense of how this document's narrative is shaped by its source (FEMA), but I found this document interesting to think with regarding the impacts of the anthropocene. Flooding and its effects on structures and infrastructure is simultaneously an old/ongoing feature of this low-lying coastal space and a new feature as patterns of storms/flooding shift and sea level rises. With this long history of building in response to these conditions, what features of New Orleans structures/infrastructure are a model for adapting to the anthropocene? How will changing anthropocenics limit the effectiveness of or make vulnerable some of these systems?