Analyze

The history of racialized exclusion to both social power and land tenure and homeownership has shaped how bodies are differentially impacted by land use in NOLA. This entire history could (and probably already is) a topic for a dissertation, but one case I found particularly interesting involved the Army Corps of Engineers' 2007 creation of an online database in which residents can find the "flood potential" faced by their homes (http://nolarisk.usace.army.mil/ --unfortunately no longer up).  While this database was hailed as a landmark achievement in providing NOLA residents with their "right to know" about the risks in their neighborhoods, only a few remarked on what the data actually showed: that in the two years following the flood predominantly white neighborhoods had experienced 4-6 feet of flood reduction, black neighborhoods had experienced little to no flood reduction whatsoever. 

This reminds me of a more general entanglement of racialized disparities, historical disinvestment and inequitable distribution of risk in America, which as Anna Clark so summarily puts it (in respect lead": "lead is one toxic legacy in America's cities. Another is segregation, redlining, and rebranding: this is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes."  

One interesting example of land use education that I found is the Whitney Plantation Museum in Wallace, LA--about an hour north of New Orleans proper and right on the banks of the Mississippi River. The museum is, according to its website, "the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on the lives of enslaved people." The 2,000 acre property was once a sugarcane plantation that operated from 1752 until well into the 19th century, with over 350 enslaved persons working on it during this period. 

The museum was founded in 2014 by John Cummings, who has spent more than $8 million of his own fortune on this long-term project, and worked on it for nearly 15 years.[ The director of research is Ibrahima Seck, a Senegalese scholar who has done much work on the history of slavery. These two seem to be the primary organizers of education in the musuem which focuses on how land in the Lower Mississippi was organized towards the cultivation of Sugar. 

Right off the bat, it is interesting that this museum is completely financed by a private citizen. I've looked up other plantation museums in the region and for the most part they see to all be privately run. Also, contrast the focus on slavery at Whitney to the Oak Alley plantation museum's celebration of a family legacy of sugar planters: "Hold fast to that which is good...."

The question of data relates to Denise Brock’s key role in the passage of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). Brock independently collected thousands of documents related to the health of  workers in nuclear facilities like Weldon Spring in her efforts to show that they had been exposed to pathological levels of radiation. In many cases, their employers were fully aware of the dangers these workers faced, but kept this information to themselves or hidden away in the private documents that Denise uncovered decades later. Prior to Denise's work this information was not publically available, and if workers who had become ill wanted to receive compensation for worksite expose, they would have to undergo exposure reconstruction assessments, which--due to the lack of accurate and available data--were imperfect evaluations of the actual levels of radiation workers had been exposed to. Due to Denise's advocacy, which led to the passage of the EEOICPA, workers at nuclear facilities are exempted from the exposure reconstruction assessments and are eligible for compensation payments up to a maximum amount of $250,000, plus medical expenses for accepted conditions.

Denise's experience raises a few questions and reflections on data in the Anthropocene:

•  Issues like worksite and environmental exposure are often plagued by invisibilities and what STS scholars have referred to as "agnotologies"--where can activists/scholars/any interested party gain access to relevant data in relation to these issues (in a similar fashion to Denise's work)?
• For historians in particular: do the thousands of documents Denise complied consitute an archive? How can these and similar archival practices be Anthropocenic strategies? 

Project managers at the Army Corps of Engineers are not concerned with the Anthropocene. Their job at SLAPS and other FUSRAP sites revolves around a different contestable term: remediation. What exactly does Anthropocenic remediation look like in St. Louis? As the ACoE project managers informed us, remediation consists of removing contimated soil and shipping it to approved waste management sites in Michigan, Kentucky and Ohio. It would be interesting to further investigate how ACoE practices of remediation have historically been shaped.

There were several forms of resilience int eh article. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were preparing several emergency personnel are preparing all along the coast. In addition to this, there were several shelters open, one specfically at the John F. Kennedy Recreation Center. Many of the shelters had also teamed up with Red Cross to help during the storm.

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The author of the article took several quotes from government officials to depict the severity of the situation: mainly taking quotes from governors and even the president to illustrate how the hurricane affected the surrounding communities and mentalities of those living in such towns. In addition, the author added statistics of the support relief and the number of deceased due to the storm. The author also discussed the background of many of the public transportation work shifts, such as airlfight and train systems: they were down becuase of the storm.

The largest risk at hand would be how the nautral disaster, Hurricane Sandy, affected the beaches of New Jersey, causing some the beaches to lose a significant amount of sand; this becomes a risk because the beaches weren't available to use. The beaches of New Jersey make most of the profit in tourism: the shore gaining $35.5 billion for tourism locations. This became a risk becuase there was money lost during and after the storm, as groups tried to repair the shores. In addition, the cost to repair the shores were extremely costly. Another group that received risks and hazards were the communities near the shores: they had to change their entire lifestyle when the beaches were destroyed after the storm. Those communities had to learn how to live without the beaches' resources and had to get accustomed to not going down to the shores while the beaches were being restored.

After the storms, many towns affected came up with ways to increase protection in infrastructure. Town officials working alongside exerpts have been working to upgrade their plans on making their communities more resilient to natural disasters. There have also many several funds and donations for the towns affected by Sandy; there have also been ways on how to help prevent flooding in such areas. In the article, it discusses how "the DEP has worked with local officials to design a proposed $230 million federally-funded system of flood walls along the Hudson River for Hoboken and parts of Weehawken and Jersey City."

The Disaster Management Act of 2005 constitutes the responsibilites of the NIDM to be human resource development, capacity building, training, research, documentation and policy advocacy in the field of disaster management. The organization aims to promote disaster management as a high priority in the national goverment. They also aspire to create "a culture of prevention" pertaining to disasters that involves all stakeholders.