Analyze

In New Orleans, African American communities were not only hit hard by Katrina's floods, but also by violent policing during the catastrophe and a disaster "recovery" effort that was fundamentally Anti-Black (closing of publich housing and the privatization of schools and health care). Recovery efforts were not organized along ideals of racial justice that would have addressed gaps in educational and health care resources. Instead, they were imagined along neoliberal principles that systematically excluded the city's Black population. I am interested in looking into how the Anti-Blackness of Katrina "recovery" set the stage for the virulent way COVID 19 is affecting New Orleans' African American communities.

In the US Virgin Islands, Hurricanes Maria and Irma decimated what were already decrepit public school and public health systems. Public schools and hospitals had not been property repaired and remained under-supported as of early March 2020. In places like the Island of St. Croix, residents reported the hospital having only one physicial on staff, and indicated fear of misdiagnosis and prolonged waiting times kept them from seeking health care there. The clientelle of the public health system is predominantly Afro and Hispanic Caribbean. Meanwhile, US "mainlanders" (who are predominantly white) are reported to seek their healthcare off island, something only those with ample financial resources can do. Infection rates and fatality rates for the USVI seem rather low from official reports, but it is important to find out if this is because testing itself is not readily avialable in the territory.

Media coverage from hard-hit cities suggests there is a disproportionate number of arrests and citations related to enforcement of social distancing among racial minorities.

Also, police response seems to have followed very different patterns in the case of "re-open" protests and anti-police brutality protests.

In 1993 near my city, Cuenca - Ecuador, it ocurred maybe the biggest disaster that we have expirienced, we called it "La Josefina". A mountain collapsed, due to legal and illegal mining, and it completely blocked a river. Quickly the water of the river started to flood the surrondings, there was the fear of the big city of the region, Cuenca, being also flooded, a lot of homes, forests and bridges were lost, and it caused a huge impact in many families that lost everything, 150 lives were lost. But one particular story always came to my mind when I hear about this disaster: a man, called Walter Sánchez, saved his house because he carefully looked up his construction and he felt that he could make his house float, he was not an engineer, or architect, he didn't have college education, but he, with help of his friends and familiy, gathered tens of empty barrils, attached to the bottom of the house -his house was mainly wood and was screwed to the floor- , and at the end, when the water came and flooded the terrain his house floated and was saved. Here is a post of BBC in spanish about this event.

This came to my mind because sometimes we think that the fight against Climate Change is expensive and as the most part of the world is poor, and those are the ones who suffer more the consequences, the fight is lost. But all over the world there is people that in order to safe their lives and personal belongings have witty and ingenious ideas low-cost. Elizabeth English had one of those ideas in 2007, she is an architect that was concerned about how to help people in New Orleans to survive and don't lose anything in future Hurricanes, she knew about the procedure in Netherlands for allowing houses to float but it was way to expensive to the population because it meant, actually rebuilt the house, and even if someone wanted to rebuilt his/hers home, it was way to expensive. She decided to create an alternative and founded the non-profit  Buoyant Foundation Project. You can read more about these "Anphibious Homes" here. 

The Guardian published in may this year an investigation about Reserve, best known as "Cancer Alley", a town 40 minutes in car away from New Orleans, it has gained this grim nickname because as Lousiana having the most toxic air from US (EPA's 2014 report) this town has the most toxic air from the State, so a person living in this town has 50 times more risk of developing cancer than in other towns of US. Even if this investigation is not about New Orleans, the town is really near, and as we know, pollution travels, being the River Mississipi an important contributor for movilizing the pollution through its way and also the air. Not only the town has been ignored by authorities and media coverage, also the inhabitants recount that this negligence is part of the history of the area, where their ancesters where enslaved by the rich and powerful, and in the present Denka factory is slowly killing them:

For many African Americans in Reserve, including Hampton, who trace their ancestry back to slavery in the area – the reminder of past atrocities is made even starker by knowing what the land has been used for since. “When you think about it, nothing has ever really changed,” she says. “First slavery, then sharecropping, now this. It’s just a new way of doing it.”

Cancer is not the only disease that haunts the residents of Reserve, others illness has been ocurring like  – gastroparesis – a rare intestinal disease linked to air pollution made principally by chloroprene. EPA has also failed the people, because as chloroprene is mainly produced in this part of the country, there is no intention to develop a legally enforceable standard for this toxin. As The Guardian points out, this decision leaves the residents completely disarmed, as they were not expecting anything anymore of State governement, they expected a lot of the Federal Governement that has alwasys helped African American communities when the local governement has failed. I believe this is a clear example of "enviromental racism" and we rely againg in an EPA-funded research that shows how poor towns are more likely to be more polluted and forgotten.

I found this summary (Sinking into the Anthropocene: New Orleans nature writing) of a visit to New Orleans made by a group of young writers, and what surprised me was their preocupation and insistence in linking the problems and even the nice or "typical" touristics things and landscapes of the city to the ongoing Anthropocene and Climate Change. Is just a piece of exercise of a collaborative writing and the approach to the topic is made by classical anglophone writers, Mary and Percy Shelley among others are quoted, but they talk about important issues like the Sinking, the Chemical Horizon andDaily Commutes. I leave an extract of the text to encourage its reading:

One sculpture that struck the class was an assemblage of tall slabs of glass towering from the grass: Mirror Labyrinth by Jeppe Hein. This is a tri-spiral maze of mirrors that reflect anything and everything the entering viewer sees. This piece conjured the feeling of a funhouse as we stumbled our way through, titillated by sudden sensations of disorientation. But thinking about this sculpture alongside the city’s ongoing gentrification and expansion, in tandem with denial of ecological realities and political resistance to enact real social justice, we could not help but think more along the lines of Cormac McCarthy’s use of the word “funhouse” in his novel The Road: “the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk.” What is new here, now, cannot help but intimate a post-apocalyptic ruin to come.

I am an environmental engineer with a profound interest on providing urban sustainability through the use of biotechnology. I currently research about air pollution in public health and its environmental factors related. My interest is focused on how to adopt greenery as air pollution mitigation strategy in developing cities of south America.
While making this briefly research about NOLA, I observed how air pollution has been historically related to a environmental injustice issue. An example of this is a 1960s study documenting asthma incidence among black communities due its near location to dumps, where subterranean burning happened commonly. This depicts the “southern pattern” in New Orleans, where African American were forced to reside in undesired areas subjected to frequent flooding, unhealthy air and noise levels, as well as unsanitary water and sewerage conditions. Morse (2008) describes Katrina as a turn point, where America’s attention on the enduring legacy of racial segregation and poverty were refocused. Local government remarked the necessity of green restoration in flooding areas, where most of segregated population lived in. Communities and foundations are also working together to sustain the urban landscape mainly for flood control. Therefore, I got interest on know how urban reforestation in NOLA was adopted as a tool for climate change adaptation but also in knowing how it acts as a pathway to reach environmental justice.

My reaserch interest is focused in queer population and how its interseccionality lives together with the different challenges that each culture presents to a not heteronormative body. In my research about New Orleans I found that the city praises itself of being GLBTQ friendly being pioneering in U.S. with events like Fat Monday Luncheon, 1949, and civil movements like the Steamboat Club in1953; and remarking that the city has always being supportive of GLBTQ rights (non-discrimination ordinance, 1991; Gender Identity Law, 1998).

But when it comes to disaster situations, the more difficult and discriminatory existence of the GLBTQ community came to light, like in the aftermath of Katrina, because, like several testimois imply, during the tragedy all civilians where equal, but when it came to asking for aid and accesing to health services the failures and lack of resources and information to attend this diverse community was evident. Forcing them to negotiate their existence in heteronormative ways just to access to the basic needs for survival, e.g. transwomen being registered like men, transmen not being able to take showers, lesbian couples being registerd like sisters, among other sobering examples.

Charlotte D'Ooge describes that "While the traditionally gay male neighborhoods of New Orleans such as the French Quarter, the Marigny, and the Bywater were part of the 20 percent of the city that did not flood badly, the areas with a traditionally high proportion of lesbians and queer people of color, notably MidCity, were hit hard." The people that used to live in these prior queer friendly spaces were forced to leave the city, and in many cases hasn't been able to come back, being relocated across U.S., and the city itself hasn't recognized the existence of these neighborhoods as "gay friendly" focusing its regeneration and tourist appeal just in the traditionally white, male and gay spaces, a common reduction of all the GLBTQ community that leads to the concealment of all the gender and sexual diversities, here linked also to their socio-economic background.

The failing public system led queer people to look up for health and aid into the queer community developing support networks independently led by bar owners our event managers that were famous before the disaster, showing that in the disaster context the GLBTQ community couldn't trust neither the services from the State nor international support like the Red Cross. W. L. Leap does an important theoretical remark in this subject pointing out that "For purposes of theoretical neatness, perhaps, anthropologists may not want to assume the identity of the subject before it is actually named. But as the panelists made clear, FEMA made such assumptions repeatedly as matters of policy and practice -- and queer-identified subjects were inconvenienced, sometimes significantly so because of it" making a call to researchers that study this population in disaster situations.

A final anotation, that I wasn't able to fully develop, was my surprise to find out that several religious and fundamentalist groups blamed the gay community and its debauchery for causing the anger of God and consequentely the hurricane Katrina, the linking of climate disasters with religious beliefs in the XXI century strikes me as hidden the actual origins of the tragedy.

Cited articles and web pages:

D’Ooge, Charlotte. 2008. “Queer Katrina: Gender and Sexual Orientation Matters in the Aftermath of the Disaster.” In Beth Willinger (ed.) Katrina and the Women of New Orleans, pp. 22–4. New Orleans, LA: Tulane University.

Leap, W. L., Lewin, E., & Wilson, N. (2007). Queering the Disaster: A Presidential Session. North American Dialogue, 10(2), 11–14.doi:10.1525/nad.2007.10.2.11 

RICHARDS, G. (2010). Queering Katrina: Gay Discourses of the Disaster in New Orleans. Journal of American Studies, 44(03), 519–534.doi:10.1017/s0021875810001210

https://www.neworleans.com/things-to-do/lgbt/history/