Analyze

In response to multiple concerns about water quality expressed by residents, EJCAN launched a water quality testing initiative with university-based collaborators from UNC Chapel Hill and Appalachian State University. Threats to water include but are not limited to industrialized agriculture. Industrialized hog feces contain pathogens, heavy metals, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria that growers store in large, open pit lagoons (Grant 1999; Wing et al. 2008; Blanchette 2019; Christenson et al. 2022). When operators spray the waste onto nearby fields, they also release air and waterborne contaminants. Scholars have linked airborne emissions from industrial hog operations to respiratory dysfunction, mood disorders, compromised immune function, anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, and low birth weight (Wing et al. 2000; Kravchenko et al. 2018; Guidry et al. 2018). Moreover, the odor is noxious, causing nausea, embarrassment, disorientation, and social loss in cultural continuity as people cease culturally meaningful practices like gardening, going for walks, or gathering outside to share food (Herring 2014; Blanchette 2019). The impacts to water include contamination, harmful algal blooms, fish kills, and eutrophication in rivers and estuaries, especially when hurricanes flood the inner coastal plains with industrialized animal waste (Wing et al. 2000; Wing et al. 2008; NCCN 2021; Emanuel 2018; Christenson et al. 2022). Access to water infrastructure in Sampson County is highly uneven, and residents have been advocating for improved access for more than a decade. 

In response to concerns expressed by community members, EJCAN launched a water quality testing initiative with university-based collaborators to increase knoweldge about the impacts of multiple hazards on water. Industrialized hog feces contain pathogens, heavy metals, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria that growers store in large, open pit lagoons (Grant 1999; Wing et al. 2008; Blanchette 2019; Christenson et al. 2022). When operators spray the waste onto nearby fields, they also release air and waterborne contaminants. Scholars have linked airborne emissions from industrial hog operations to respiratory dysfunction, mood disorders, compromised immune function, anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, and low birth weight (Wing et al. 2000; Kravchenko et al. 2018; Guidry et al. 2018). Moreover, the odor is noxious, causing nausea, embarrassment, disorientation, and social loss in cultural continuity as people cease culturally meaningful practices like gardening, going for walks, or gathering outside to share food (Herring 2014; Blanchette 2019). The impacts to water include contamination, harmful algal blooms, fish kills, and eutrophication in rivers and estuaries, especially when hurricanes flood the inner coastal plains with industrialized animal waste (Wing et al. 2000; Wing et al. 2008; NCCN 2021; Emanuel 2018; Christenson et al. 2022).Through Sampson County there is uneven access to water quality infrastructure, and residents have been advocating for improved access for water quality for more than a decade.   

As a researcher, I’m interested in the political, ecological, and cultural debates around mosquito-borne diseases and the solutions proposed to mitigate them.

When we received the task, my first impulse was to investigate about the contemporary effects of anthropogenic climate change in mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans. But I was afraid to make the same mistake that I did in my PhD research. I wrote my PhD proposal while based in the US, more specifically in New England, during the Zika epidemic, and proposed to understand how scientists were studying ecological climate change and mosquitoes in Brazil. However, once I arrived in the country the political climate was a much more pressing issue, with the dismantling of health and scientific institutions.

Thus, after our meeting yesterday, and Jason Ludwig’s reminder that the theme of our Field Campus is the plantation, I decided to focus on how it related to mosquitoes in New Orleans.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the yellow fever virus it can transmit are imbricated in the violent histories of settler-colonialism and slavery that define the plantation economy. The mosquito and the virus arrived in the Americas in the same ships that brought enslaved peoples from Africa. The city of New Orleans had its first yellow fever epidemic in 1796, with frequent epidemics happening between 1817 and 1905. What caused New Orleans to be the “City of the Dead,” as Kristin Gupta has indicated, was yellow fever. However, as historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby points out, the slave trade cannot explain alone the spread and persistance of the disease in the region: "Alterations to the landscape, combined with demographic changes resulting from the rise of sugar production, slavery, and urban growth all contributed to the region’s development as a yellow fever zone." For example, sugar cultivation created ideal conditions for mosquito proliferation because of the extensive landscape alteration and ecological instabilities, including heavy deforestation and the construction of drainage ditches and canals.

Historian Kathryn Olivarius examines how for whites "acclimatization" to the disease played a role in hierarchies with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people and how for black enslaved people "who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery."

As I continue to think through these topics, I wonder how both the historical materialities of the plantation and the contemporary anthropogenic changes might be influencing mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans nowadays? And more, how the regions’ histories of race and class might still be shaping the effects of these diseases and how debates about them are framed?