This map is a fascinating and important image as it does NOT show the many sites of (ongoing) nuclear radiation contamination in communities impacted by uranium extraction and processing. For example, the Navajo Nation has around 270 unreclaimed open pit tailings piles. This is not official "waste" but is quotidian waste that creates longstanding environmental harm.
This image hides many things, including:
1. the slow but steady dispossession of smallholder (often African-American) farms that have been overtaken/bought out by Smithfield Foods to enlarge the industrial footprint of CAFOs;
2. the hogs themselves, whose hooves never touch the ground as they stand on "hog slats" inside the hangers as they move through the Fordist stages of transformation from individual animals into packaged pork;
3. the human operators, themselves, who are rarely wealthy, and are contracted for decades (or life) to purchase all "inputs" (feed, semen, etc) from Smithfield; in 2010, I took my EJ class from UNC-Chapel Hill to visit one of these operators at his CAFO, outside Raleigh, NC, and he was battling Smithfield and Duke Energy to be allowed to erect and operate a small-scale, experimental wind turbine that ran on methane captured from his pigs; years later, individual efforts at small-scale biogas would be overtaken by entities like Align LNG which now, in Sampson County, proposes the "Grady Road Project" to scale-up factory-farmed methane gas capture from much larger operations;
4. the legacy of resistance to this form of agricultural production, led by community-based intellectuals like Gary Grant, who as early as the 1980s was speaking out, traveling to state and federal lawmakers, publishing, and organizing against the growing harms of CAFOs in his home territory of Halifax County, NC. [See the suggested readings by Gary Grant and Steve Wing, Naeema Muhammed and others, that tracks this organized resistance and the formation of several community-based EJ groups in response].
The Sampson County landfill can be smelled before seen. This olfactory indicator points toward the sensory scale of these pungent emissions but also toward the geographic scope: this landfill receives waste from as far away as Orange County (the state's most expensive property/tax base), among dozens of other distant counties, making this "hazardous site" a lesson in realizing impact beyond the immediate locale. So when we answer the question, "What is this hazard?" we must think not only about the landfill as a thing in itself but as a set of economic and political relations of capital and the transit of other peoples' trash, into this lower-income, rural, predominantly African-American neighborhood. In this way, 'thinking with a landfill' (like this one in Sampson County) enables us to analyze wider sets of relationships, NIMBY-ist policymaking, consumerism, waste management, and the racialized spatial politics that enable Sampson County to be the recipient of trash from all over the state. At the same time we think spatially and in transit, we can think historically to (a) inquire about the DEQ policies that enable this kind of waste management system; and (b) the emergent "solutions" in the green energy sector that propose to capture the landfill's methane in order to render the stench productive for the future -- that is, to enable more consumption, by turning garbage into gas. As such, the idea of "hazard" can expand beyond the site itself - impactful and affective as that site might be - to examine the uneven relations of exchange and capitalist-driven values of productivity that further entrench infrastructures such as these. [This offers a conceptual corrollary to thinking, as well, about the entrenchment of CAFOs for "green" biogas development, as we address elsewhere in the platform].
Thinking through this article and Vermeylen's, something we might consider in ATX is how we conceptualize community itself. It is so easy in EJ-contexts to make communities our object of study and analysis, which can erase identities and exclusions within them...
How is ecological harm and gentrification experienced by LGBTQ people in Austin? Women? Etcetera?
What is the energy sector's relationship to racial capitalism? How is its current configuration shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, state bureaucracy, and corporate investment?
Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.
For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city?
Providing a historical overview of EJ-related issues and organzing in Austin, Walsh's piece gestures to the need for deep engagement with those already doing what we might consider 'quotidian anthropocenic' work in our field campus locations. What are our ethical relationships and obligations to those we collaborate with during our time physically in the city? What should they be after? How can our analytical contributions help organizations like PODER and other local activists fighting gentrification and biased zoning laws?
It has become a common refrain to ask how the Anthropocene is experienced locally, but what about corporeally? A growing body of evidence (such as this report from the APA) demonstrates that climate change and its effects are linked to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, PTSD, and a host of emotions including anger, hopelessness, and despair. After Hurricane Katrina, it was estimated that 1 in 6 survivors experienced PTSD, and Harvard researchers found that suicidal ideation heavily spiked. While discussions of these forms of ecological grief (or "ecoanxiety" by psychologists) have largely focused on mental health, economic impacts, and big storms rather than less spectacular forms of ecological change (especially in New Orleans), I am particularly interested in finding how embodied apprehensions of human vulnerability are experienced within the city, and how these have affected approaches to mortality and practices around death and dying.
Aside from talking to more deathcare professionals in the area (something I hope to do once we arrive), I have found rather robust evidence that there is increased engagement with mortality in New Orleans. Death Cafes, which are community gatherings to discuss death and combat taboos that make it an inappropriate topic of conversation, have regularly met for the past two years. Furthermore, preliminary research on funeral homes in NOLA seems to indicate increased interest in green internment options, with multiple organizations framing green/natural burial as a gentle option that "returns the body to nature." While means of casket burial and cremation have historically worked to “correctly” order death and the dead through preservation or means of obliterating the body as quickly as possible (organizing principles that have that rendered death as an interruption rather than a natural process), these endeavors seem to accept to the pressing realities of individual and earthly mortality by framing death as an opportunity for renewal - a sort of "circle of life."
Although it is less related to my own area of expertise, one of most surprising discoveries I made was that New Orleans was home to the original "Before I Die" wall. In 2013, artist Connie Chung created a participatory chalkboard in an abandoned house with a fill-in-the-blank question of “Before I die, I want to ______.” (The next day, the wall was completely filled with responses.) Iterations of this project are now in over 75 countries. While Chung does not specifically cite anthropogenics as a source of interest or inspiration, its original placement on a building that stood as a sort of monument to ecological devastation makes me strongly think that there are broader connections to be made here about somatic attunements to climate change.
As a researcher interested in the growing relationship between ecological grief and rituals surrounding death and dying, New Orleans has always been a place of special curiosity. The city’s historic cemeteries are arguably some of the most beautiful and certainly some of the most visited graveyards in the world. Since New Orleans lies below sea level and generally has soil too water-saturated for earth burial, the dead have historically been buried above ground in “Cities of the Dead,” where rows upon rows of mausoleums are designed to protect casketed bodies from the defilement of water, microbes, and ‘vermin’ as a means of warding off decay. Gesturing towards anxieties about the ontological pollution of the human subject, these structures often seem to be constituted through desires to remain intelligible after death and act to inhibit the incorporation of the corpse into subterranean, more-than-human worlds.
However, as anthropogenic climate change threatens these kinds of normative deathways, the sustainability of such practices have begun to be called into question. It is estimated that on average, burials in the United States annually use 30,000,000 board feet of wood, 104,000 tons of steel, 1,600,000 tons of concrete, and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid. (I'm interested in finding out about more specifics about material usage in NOLA, but am still searching for that information.) This becomes even more important when considering that cemeteries within the city have repeatedly been disturbed by hurricanes and floods in recent years, an issue that remains even further inland from Lake Pontchartrain due to now regular flooding. When a storm hits, it can wreak havoc by destroying or displacing mausoleums, buildings, signs, and decorations. Even more disturbingly, vaults and caskets buried below ground can surge to the surface and float away. This has become a macabre pattern across the South in recent years: the waters brought by Hurricanes Katrina, Gustav, Ike, Irma, and Harvey all washed away caskets, in some cases breaking them apart and leaving local medical examiners and federal mortuary response teams with the rather grim task of identifying remains and parsing the environmental damage caused by potential leakages and run-off.
This new normal has brought wider attention to how the ways we “do death” affect built and natural environments, enmeshing funeral practices in broader questions of ecologically responsible citizenship and collaborative survival with nonhuman life. How has New Orleans responded to these crises, both materially and existentially? Is there growing recognition of individual and earthly mortality, and how is that reflected in mortuary practice? What options best attend to these forms of climatic upheaval?
The report addresses disaster and health in how it describes actors' emergency response to the initial disaster as adequate but states the aid supplied does not allow progress to occur. The victims of the disaster were given temporary shelter in tents, but many still live in tents at the time of this report being written. These conditions led to a cholera outbreak which the actors did not seem to care about or provide aid for.