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.

The organization called Resilience Action Plan (RAP) team is a newly formed organization so they did not get a chance to do something yet from looking in the article. 

Air pollution causes many eye and skin irritation in addition with lung problems resulting in asthma and even cancer. These risks would affect people who live in communities that have high pollution, severely. 

The common nessesaties that arent given to children in the essex county ultimately handicap the community around them. All the issues directly influence the parents, and the state; because with all of these issues are things the government has a level of control over. By not trying to findd solutions so child poverty the state continues to have to fun child care, enrichment programs that are costly which we current cant afford. The quality of these programs slowly does down until they become another vulnerability themselves

According to the article, officials were trying to evacuate the areas that they predict to have the most damage, move people to higher ground, tell people to stay indoors, and close all public transportation systems. 

The aim of this organization is to work as a collaborative team to address efforts in reducing greenhouse gases, adapt to changes that are already underway, and foster social inclusion and cohesion. 

In terms of precaution regarding air pollution, the article talks about making good choices of transportation which means to walk or bike or take public transportation whenever feasible; choosing cars that have better mileage per gallon or electric cars; buying food locally grown rather than food from other places in order to reduce air pollution.