Analyze

So the main 'slowdown' of the economy as well as the 'lockdown' of people appears to come to an end. It's been three exceptional months, as for instance emphasized by altered mobility patterns. (See https://www.covid-19-mobility.org/current-mobility/) However, what do we make out of this?

I would like to propose the following argument: The global health crisis of SARS-CoV-2 triggered a new public engagement with the polluted world produced and inhabited by humans. Media reports and preliminary scientific studies showed how pollution parameters decreased significantly and people visited public parks to a previously unknown extent. A debate on healthy clean air popped up, which was further strengthened by measures to contain the pandemic. Publicly discussed scientific studies suggest a correlation between COVID vulnerability and air pollution; and through hygiene measures, the mask has become popular as an object of protection, which in many societies was previously known primarily as protection against air pollution in public spaces. A few authors even claimed that air pollution should be indentified as a pandemic as well, a non-communicable pandemic with a significant toll.

We know perfectly well that air pollution is a slow disaster that is hard to account for. Threshold limits are not enough. The unequal consequences are not well appreciated, let alone translated into sufficient action. The pandemic experiences might help cherish clean air; it could help in producing clean and healthy air as a common good.

This is just a start, but I'm thinking about doing more research on that topic. One possible approach would be to discuss the "clean air experience" cross-culturally (like we do during the calls), while analysing and drawing on public (social media/media) discussions to enact clean air as a value. In turn, this could help bring pollution prevention and accountability to the forefront.

Science-study wise, it's interesting to see that based on sensing and modelling scientists find it challenging to carve out a "Corona effect". The weather is just very unique this year. However, a new assessment by the German Aerospace Center claims to have "proven" it. In the Italian Lombardai (the North), for example, the effect boils down to 45 percent. This is the main finding of this link (which has some nice gifs, but otherwise is written in German).

Is there any ethnographic science study of how global pollution data is made and processed? Jennifer Gabrys get's pretty close with her work, plus Paul Edward's research on climate data. But there might be more to it. Doing such a study now might produce interesting insights.

I also came across a compelling clip by the Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment, where they explain current Delhi data. They show an explicit interesting in a state of zero/low-pollution, which otherwise can never be observed, as well as its consequences. https://www.cseindia.org/covid-19-lockdown-60-drop-in-air-pollution-in-…

Just to begin the discussion for this particular question: here's the Harvard study that is being cited in various newspapers on the apparantly direct link between air pollution and Covid-19 vulnerability. van Donkelaar, A., R. V. Martin, C. Li, R. T. Burnett, Regional Estimates of Chemical Composition of Fine Particulate Matter using a Combined Geoscience-Statistical Method with Information from Satellites, Models, and Monitors, Environ. Sci. Technol., doi: 10.1021/acs.est.8b06392, 2019.
See e.g. how it is picked up by the NYT. I also find it interesting to link this data with more critical race-ish reports, such as this by Vice.

So, how to draw on this to develop what kinds of ethnographic studies?

Reading lists appear to play an important role in the distribution of knowledge. They might help follow discussions, but they also make things complicated, especially when one is facing non-curated long lists. For example, I am trying to follow the daily updates provided by the The Syllabus -- especially its Anthropocene and Economy parts. I intend to read the articles (and at times listen to the podcasts) that discuss the intersection of Corona and Climate. Or at least safe the important ones to Zotero. Yet, there is a lot to digest. Many repetitions.

Are these lists a data infrastructure 'for us'? What do they mean for 'others'? Might it be helpful to share the workload of reading the updates, and invest a bit of time in some sort of curation process?

I'm staying at home these days, that is, in Erfurt, set in Eastern Germany. My commute to the Ruhr University – roughly 400 km to the west – thus has been put to a hold. I have a background in waste studies, while also becoming increasingly interested in matters of energy production. I’d like to understand how pollution affects bodies, but also how the reactions to the pandemic are changing the way pollution is discussed and experienced. You can contact me via mail: stefan.laser@rub.de

I'm particularly interested in the following questions:

How is COVID-19 impacting and intersecting with air pollution?

What data infrastructure -- in different settings, at different scales -- supports efforts to understand and respond to COVID-19?

What COVID-19 data visualizations are in circulation and to what effect?

How does COVID-19 impact the civil rights of unsheltered populations and challenge ideas of what a healthy environment is?

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. 

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.

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.