Analyze

What do you think is the biggest difference between the ocean perspective and the land perspective?

CIEL's report is the first I have encountered to attempt to give a comprehensive analysis of Formosa Plastics and its impact on communities. The report breaks down the corporation's story into several sections: its origins and convoluted corporate structure, its primary products and common health risks of production, documented legal violations, and environmental justice threats. Together, the 100-page document covers significant ground, yet is readable in under an hour. It includes key statistics that are understandable without extensive background. I believe this report, as a mode of communication, finds an outstanding balance between accessible language, analysis, brevity, and detail. Activists and researchers alike should strive for the same qualities in their knowledge-sharing strategies.

Given the vastness of Formosa Plastics' influence, there are many ways to tell its story to the world. As environmental justice activists and researchers, how do we describe a company and its negative impact when there is so much to say? Limited by time, word count, and the audience's attention span, we must decide what goes unsaid. As a result, we could write countless answers to the same question, "What is Formosa Plastics?"

In this published academic case study, I introduce Formosa Plastics through a local lens--specifically, through the eyes of a grandmother-turned-activist in the small town of Welcome, Louisiana. Her family's history with social justice activism, as well as the area's connection to centuries of slavery, make the environmental racism of Formosa Plastics' Sunshine Project especially salient. Although Formosa Plastics is a global force, telling its story on the microscale is an equally important perspective. After all, in Sharon Lavigne's eyes, her small town is her world. How many of these little worlds have Formosa Plastics destroyed as they wreak havoc across international borders?

I published this news article about a hunger strike against Formosa Plastics that occurred in Texas this fall. Despite the extremity of a 30-day hunger strike, the protesting tactic has not gained attention from national media outlets. At the time I published this article, two small environmental organizations had announced the beginning of the strike, but none continued to cover the event in the unfolding weeks. While activists are driven to take on dangerous protest tactics, little communication of these tactics has carried across mass media.

The article itself introduces Formosa Plastics through its reputation as a "serial offender" of environmental and workplace safety regulations. I list several statistics on legal fines that Formosa Plastics has accumulated overtime, using these quantities to demonstrate the scale of their harm to environmental and human health. An important limitation of this storytelling strategy, however, is that many of Formosa Plastics' actions go undocumented, and even when documented, do not lead to legal consequences. Furthermore, we should still strive to acknowledge the harms committed by Formosa Plastics that are technically within legal limits.

From discussions of how to best document virtual strikers, organizers concluded participants should submit images of themselves holding signs of their commitment to fasting for a day with Diane Wilson. The series of images, showing many people from different countries, could create a sense of solidarity despite physical distance. In addition, images can serve as a tool against FPG demonstrating that many people disapprove of the corporation's actions, despite not being present at the in-person rally. Can images, however, form the same level of solidarity or connection that an in-person interaction otherwise would?

During my thesis project, Tim has served as a collaborator and mentor while he studied data use among activists opposing Formosa Plastics Group (FPG). In addition to connecting me with activists and interview candidates, he also introduced me to a small network of American and Taiwanese students in Taiwan and the United States studying FPG. This community can share resources and knowledge to further our individual studies. Could this academic network serve as a parallel to the transnational activist alliances I am studying? Are the strengths and barriers of research alliances reminiscent of the strengths and barriers of activist alliances?

Linking messages of community pride with political opposition to intrusion by petrochemical companies has interesting implications for collaborations across communities. Does this message enable partnerships in other regions and nations, and what is its relationship to the not-in-my-backyard/NIMBY mentality? How may it be interpreted in differing cultural and language contexts? 

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.