In my opinion, something that is ethically wrong with this case is the fact that much of the pollution coming from biomass factories like Enviva are disproportionately affecting Black and Brown rural comminities. These communities experience health issues from the saw dust and can be seen cleaning sawdust off their outside belongings. It is important to see how much thes communities are impacted when looking at biomass corporations.
The complaints of Duplin County residents and the Environmental Justice Community Action Network about general permitting for hog farms in Eastern NC. These permits would give way to more ground and water pollution due to the relaxed regulations on corporate farms that hold multiple different numbers of livestock. Plans for the implementationa pipline called the "Grady Road project" interrupt the family and small scale farms in the ares. A quote from the Duplin County NAACP president Robert O. Moore says:
"The corporation has refused to implement any technology to clean up the water, citing the cost of doing so was too expensive. Yet the cost of this biogas project rivals the cost that would have been to implement cleaner and safer technology to ensure the safety of those living near these operations."
Many local groups in Eastern NC counties have previously tried to receive assistance to help with their agriculture waste managment systems, yet fall short due to many government officials only focusing on corporate farms.
Read more at the link: https://southerlymag.org/2022/03/24/biogas-could-do-more-harm-than-good…
I am particularly interested in comparative approaches on how different sites (and academics in those places or studying them) are thinking about COVID in their localities. How are people dealing with issues of trust and information in an era when entire archives are in danger (like the police archives in Guatemala which had been rescued in the past decade and are now in danger). This question expands beyond COVID but has become crucial in the context of Ecuador where reliable data is hard to come by. Another important aspect for us is how indigenous communities are fairing amid the pandemic (here a fabulous article on the terrible situation in Brazil—which is not so different to Ecuador's). This touches on issues of communication, infrastructure, language, systemic racism, and more. Finally, I am also interested in ways in which we might be a able to contribute to some of these issues from our academic spaces. Collaborators (which can take many forms) are certainly welcomed.
I'm a co-founder of Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography, a space for academic experimentations supported by two top ranked universities in Ecuador (University of Cuenca and FLACSO-Ecuador). We are located in Cuenca, where I am assistant professor of medical anthropology. Together with a team of researchers we have been tracking covid19 with a specific focus on Latin America through Spanish language podcasts, collective texts, webinars, and online forums.
My current ethnographic interest is on documenting data distrust networks from the neighborhood scale to the national level in Ecuador, and how these networks have produced distinctive approaches (and failures) to the current pandemic.
I was interested in learning about how air pollution has been talked/researched in the New Orleans area. Mainly, the need to highlight local specificities and historical analysis. A 1950s study on air pollution in New Orleans (Air Pollution and New Orleans Asthma), for instance, documented asthma incidence among black communities (sadly the article still uses the N word), and its relationship to underground fire burning in nearby dumps. The study is more comprehensive and did a census in part of the city as well as a number of medical tests on 84 individuals.
A second study, this one from 2007, documented asthma in children (Prevalence of Indoor Allergen Exposures among New Orleans Children with Asthma). It has a relevant focus of the differences between document indoor allergen exposure in different areas of the US and how subtropical weather in NOLA plays an important role in the kinds of allergies that children with asthma face. One of the main findings of the study can be summarized in the following quote “our data show that asthmatic children in New Orleans may be exposed to a greater number of allergens at moderate to high levels compared to asthmatic children living in other inner cities and to the general population.”
Finally, a third reference, the book Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast talks about something, others have already pointed out (@Omar Perez Figueroa for instance) regarding areas that undergo dramatic change and hardship after natural disasters like hurricane Katrina and Rita. This book, particularly chapter 5 (though I can’t access the full text) explains the highly toxic environment that resulted (and remains) in the New Orleans area due to little clean-up action following the disasters. Lack of funding, deference to poorly resourced local authorities, and policy-failure all affect New Orleans (and many of our sites of research) particularly the fate of vulnerable communities.
Some works that referenced or discussed the article include: “Test for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sports”, “Reimaging (Bio)Medicalization, Pharmaceuticals and Genetics: Old Critiques and New Engagements”, “Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress”, “Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences”, and “Posthumanism”. According to Google Scholar there are eighty-five other articles that reference “Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations”.
The author uses a wide variety of news and journal sources to make their point. Everything from the New York Times to East Asian Science. It also cites many volumes on disaster preparedness. For example, “The Chernobyl Accident: a Case Study in International Law Regulation State Responsibility for Transboundary”. The sources tell me that the article was developed around the news at the time and works that dealt with handling of disasters from the past. For me, this furthers the case that the author is making: that the way we have been doing things in the past is not working.
1) “Repeatedly, I have been surprised by the impact that even lightly sketched case histories can have on readers.”
2) “But even the manifesto conceded that less formal expertise would remain important in the areas of practice that had not been subject to high-level testing. THAT confession covers much of the territory.”
1) Factors affecting disease (HIV/AIDS) outcome in different biosocial settings are radically different despite similar, established “risk-factors” in lifestyles/behaviors for individuals. This is because biosocial factors play an important role that is far often overlooked by current medical systems and policies.
2) mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV, antiretroviral therapy (ART) and infant formula (preventing pediatric aids transmission through mother). MTCT of HIV is driven through universal breastfeeding being mainly pushed by the existing medical structures of the local and international healthcare policy makers. They claimed that the difficulty giving access to infant formula in rural areas and stigma around signing up for an HIV project doomed it to failure; however the projects in Rwanda and Haiti proved otherwise, when the structural “violence” was addressed. This was done mainly by giving both distal and proximal support and care as well as addressing the other social-economic barriers to good medical care in these communities.
3) When locals, who are much more aware of the areas biosocial setting, implications and problems, are utilized in the medical system, the results are multifold. Proximal care provided by an accompagnateur not only reduces barriers to care such as traveling to a hospital for basic medicine, but also creates jobs that contribute to raising the quality of life which is another major factor when examining structural “violence”.