Analyze

1. Long-term threats, legacy of mining
- Unstable old salt mines below Stassfurt that have to be monitored and water flows have to be management to prevent ground movement
- so far, more than 800 buildings, including an 500-year old church had to be demolished. Currently, ground movement is under control
- 27 waste heaps and contaminted sites within the city that contain many very hazadous chemical compunds. They were never properly cleaned up

2. Long-term threats, ongoing causes
- by-products of salt mining and refining are collected in large landfills that leak salt into sorrounding areas. There are no plans how these landfills can be remediated, they have to be mananged indenfinitely
- soil erosion of arable land around the city by high intensity farming of crops for livestock production and bioenergy
- toxic waste produced by waste incarceration plant is pumped into former salt mining caves where it solidifies and becomes impossible to recover

3. Short term threats
- explosion in bionenergy plant in 2020
- leakage of ammonia at public street in 2014
- pollution of river bode with ammonia and chloride by CHIECH Soda, massive fish kills every summer
- air pollution, cause unknown, probably mostly by metalworks industry

Staßfurt is a small city in the East German Bundesland Saxony-Anhalt with about 24 thousand inhabitants. Like many cities and villages in the area, it faces huge demographic problems: The population is shrinking rapidly, consists mostly of older people, unemployment is high, percentage of highly educated people is low. The city has a long history of salt mining that goes back to the 13th century. Many inhabitants proudly refer to Staßfurt as the "Cradle of potash-mining" ("Wiege des Kalibergbaus"). Unfilled salt mining shafts that were flooded by groundwater had to be abandoned and started to cave in. Over 800 buildings in the city center had to be demolished because of instabilities, among them a 500-year old church. Nevertheless, salt mining and a metallic industry that developed alongside it is still the largest economic sector in Staßfurt. The city is still permeated by an old mining culture that becomes visible in traditional festivals, clubs (Bergmannsverein e.V. Staßfurt) and the playing of traditional miner's song on offical occasions (Steigerlied).

The text builds on the concepts "biopower" and "capital" and introduces the concept "energopolitics" to exisiting anthropolitical minima. In the text's introduction, Boyer disucsses the limitations of these concepts when universalized, because they are multiplicities that have been bundled into more nominal forms as part of analytic projects, and then expands on these concepts in order to situate them within anthropolitical and technopolitical domains in Mexico. For example, biopower, which can be defined as a practice of governance that denotes vast networks of enablement with many infrastructures and actors in order to optimize human life, and in Mexico the government put forth discourse around renewable energy development that discusses it as a means of guaranteeing or imporiving the health and welfare of human enviornments, economies, communities, and individuals. 

"Anthropological knowledge is perpetually incomplete, disrupted, uncertain, somehow less than the sum of its parts. It is the right kind of knowledge for grappling with what Anna Tsing and her collaborators have termed “a damaged planet.”"

"This is, then, a call for political theory to not so much “take ethnography seriously” as to accept ethnography’s invitation to unmake and remake itself through the process of fieldwork.  If we wish to appreciate difference within the Anthropocene, fieldwork is a much-needed supplement to any theory of power"

"Instead of an ideal dialectical process of self-realization through productive activity, “capital” signaled how the division of labor allowed labor power to congeal in such a way that it could be alienated from its source, circulate beyond the self, be appropriated and commanded by others, and thus be transformed into new social and material forms"

"The resistance to infrastructural transformation thus has less to do with the fear of blackouts or “energy poverty”—although societal paralysis and devolution continue to be conjured to delegtimate renewable energy transition—but rather because of a more basic but also invisible codependence between our contemporary infrastructures of political power and our infrastructures of energy."

"Getting wind power has less to do with land rents, let alone clean energy, than with getting running water for the village, making electricity more constant and reliable, and developing better transport linkages since the villagers had few vehicles of their own."

"So he founded the Yansa Group with the ambition to export the Danish model of “community wind” production to rural communities in developing countries in order to help democratize access to renewable energy expertise and technology and to serve as a powerful tool for community integration and development."

"Yansa-Ixtepec gives us a glimpse of how new energopolitical potentialities are struggling to come into being in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (and not only there).Yansa-Ixtepec follows the charge of Scheerian thinking, seeking to harness renewable energy sources to transform and improve the social and political conditions of humanity, to bring justice and empowerment to long-marginalized indigenous communities in the postcolonial world. But instead of finding the Ixtepec high-voltage infrastructure of national enablement, Yansa-Ixtepec’s vision has been kept off grid in more ways than one."

"Elsewhere, we hear a few truly chilling stories, like the one about an intrafamily dispute over a hectare of land for which a rental contract is being sought. A man is said to have organized the rape of his cousin in order to get her to back away from her land claim"

"

"But in the zone where aeolian politics and anthropolitics intersect, we have seen how wind development has been avidly embraced by some as a means of concentrating wealth and power in the constant game of positional advantage in the city."

"For others, meanwhile, we have seen how wind parks are excoriated as worst kind of megaproyecto development, the sinister collaboration of local caciques and transnational capitalists to complete a centuries-long project of capturing and expropriating the wealth of the isthmus."

Might movement, both forced and voluntary, be a defining characteristic of the anthropocene? If not, where might this quality find a home within the analytic questions? 

In preparation for the field school I am reading Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. Chapter 1, 'Feet', tells the history of the forced migration of slaves from northern coastal plantation colonies to the south. Men and Women, chained together by iron were forced to walk in coffles to South Carolina or Georgia. As Baptist writes 

Men of the chain couldn’t act as individuals; nor could they act as a collective, except by moving forward in one direction. Even this took some learning. Stumble, and one dragged someone else lurching down by the padlock dangling from his throat. Many bruised legs and bruised tempers later, they would become one long file moving at the same speed, the same rhythm, no longer swinging linked hands in the wrong direction (25).

One of the arguments presented in this book is that American capitalism, as we know it today, would be impossible without the the foundations put in place by slave labor. The early chapters also make clear that forced migration, the movement and redistribution of enslaved persons, allowed for the southern states to expand agricultural production and increase white wealth. This eventual transformation of land and capital was predicated on the movement of peoples from one place to another, and as the passage above suggests, this movement had a rhythm, a timbre, a musical modality. 

I contrast this with Zenia Kish's article "My FEMA People": Hip-hop as disaster recovery in Katrina Diaspora where she argues that the music that emerged following Katrina was the first time American hip-hop engaged with "the thematic of contemporary black migration as a mass phenomenon in any significant way" (674). This article also draws attention to the rhythms of post Katrina life; the call and response of Bounce, the vibrations of trauma. Although lyrical expression proved the most potent way for artists to narrate the impact of environmental change and political neglect, the music itself was borne out of the experience of moving through and with disaster. 

Both writings point to the importance of further exploring the rhythms of mobilities as they relate to environmental transformations. I'm struggling to see where this point of inquiry maps to the analytic questions and may be worth some further exploration. 

Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books. New York. (2014)

Kish, Zenia. “"My FEMA People ": Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora.” American Quarterly. 61, no. 3 (2009): 671–92.

I am currently at the Ecological Society of America annual conference, so I am a bit limited on time to dig into New Orleans. I want to share the link below to the NoLA Urban Water plan. Even the nomenclature of 'urban water' allows us to think a bit deeper about how natural resources take on new characteristics, transformations, and meanings based on the spaces they inhabit. For instance, what does it mean for water to be Urban and how might that designation change how it is governed or interpreted?  

Furthermore, in thinking through the Field School's call to investigate Slavery and Labor, what might be the work of creating specifically urban waters? What forms of scientific knowledge and technological devices make urban water legible?

In asking these questions I'm thinking through a recent presentation I saw by Billy Hall who called attention to the wedding of environment and race in Baltimore City as a mechanism to encourage policies of segregation. I'm inclined, as we move into New Orleans, to think further on this provocation to examine how powerful social perceptions are wedded to techniques of governance to achieve publicly oriented outcomes. 

https://livingwithwater.com/blog/urban_water_plan/about/