Analyze

What I find really noteworthy in this text is how Julia Watts Belser takes the poem by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and includes it into a scientific text. In this way, she not only allows an affected person to have her say, the poem also leaves the reader with a very striking image of the connection between the river and the body, in multiple ways, as well as the connection between enviromental harm and disability.

The text was published in 2020 (Vol. 40, No. 4) by The Ohio State University Libraries in their Journal Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ). It is, as you can read on their Homepage "a multidisciplinary and international journal of interest to social scientists, scholars in the humanities and arts, disability rights advocates, and others concerned with the issues of people with disabilities. It represents the full range of methods, epistemologies, perspectives, and content that the field of disability studies embraces. DSQ is committed to developing theoretical and practical knowledge about disability and to promoting the full and equal participation of persons with disabilities in society."

The author connects disability theories and activism with environmental justice, this approach allows her to show how disability is related to and through environmental harm, she shows how diagnoses are used politically in these cases, and looks critically at how these processes determine how, when and in what favor human and environmental harm is taken into account. The writing is shaped by the consequences of the Anthropocene like environmental harm linked to health isusses, especially affected are communities of color and poor communities in the United States, here pre-existing patters of structural inequality, already known from climate change come into play,  this communities are the most affected and the least responsible.

The text left me with a question that I actually often find frustrating in the process of research. On page 6, the authors take up the criticism of a Fukushima resident who says: “[W]hat you call research does not give benefits to local people” (Miyamoto and Ankei, 2008, cited in Ankei, 2013, p.24). The authors here suggest adopting or borrowing terms from the field that are used by citizens to create a more “socially robust science” (Bonhoure et al. 2019, Nowotny, 2003). From the authors' point of view, this can be achieved above all by paying closer and careful attention to the language of citizen organizations and the contexts these groups work in. After further elaboration, the authors call for citizen science terms and concepts developed by, for and with citizens to better reflect the values, priorities, and stakes of its main agents and of all concerned parties. But I am not sure that this approach alone would be sufficient to adequately address such expressed criticism. Perhaps one should ask about the expectations of people one is researching with/about in order to enter into a conversation and to be able to understand this criticism. Perhaps the authors will address this point again in further publications. I think to ask oneself how to deal with this criticism methodically and ethically could also be very fruitful for empirical research in general.

Anthropocene psychologies (or psychopathologies) have some similarities to the decadence and denialism of late socialism in central and eastern Europe that is one of my research interests. As ecological disasters, particularly in the coal regions of northern Bohemia; the most polluted area of europe at the time) gave the lie to the Party line of progress and prosperity, a comforting veil of ideology allowed leaders and many citizens to go about their business "as if" there were no looming crisis. In his New Year's address after becoming the first post Communist president of Czechoslovakia, dissident playwright Vaclav Havel made this connection clear, describing the destroyed environment as an undeniable symptom of modern humanity's disconnection from the natural world and a "contaminated moral environment." As outlined in the work of historian Miroslav Vanek (see our article "Ecological Roots of a democracy movement") , the ecological crisis was deeply entwined with a political crisis that eventually led to the collapse of the Communist state in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Havel's critique was not just of Communist ideologies, but of ideologies of technologival civilization and modernity in general:

"What we call the consumer and industrial (or postindustrial) society, and Ortega y Gasset once understood as "the revolt of the masses," as well as the intellectual, moral, political, and social misery in the world today: all of this is perhaps merely an aspect of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along by the automatism of global technological civilization, finds itself. The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect-a particularly drastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its real origins-of this general inability of modern humanity to be the master of its own situation. The automatism of the posttotalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization. The human failure that it mirrors is only one variant of Ihe general failure of modern humanity. This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in the world is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the only difference being the social and political forms it takes- Heidegger refers expressly to a crisis of democracy. ... It may even be said Ihat the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it. It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-cousumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the posttotalitarian societies. But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy, and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity's rediscovery of itself." (Power of the Powerless, 1978)

Thinking about the theme of this campus and after reviewing the material on the Whitney plantation, I was pondering the connections between the history of slavery in Louisiana and the industrial/technical implications and affects of the Anthropocene. I remembered a book by Andrew Nikiforuk called “The Energy of Slaves” (shout out to L Cohen fans)) which draws clear historical and technical parallels between the energy regimes of slavery and the petrochemical industry. Thought it might be interesting/relevant.

From the Greystonebooks publisher’s description:

“A radical analysis of our master-and-slave relationship to energy and a call for change.

Ancient civilizations routinely relied on shackled human muscle. It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities. In the early nineteenth century, the slave trade became one of the most profitable enterprises on the planet, and slaveholders viewed religious critics as hostilely as oil companies now regard environmentalists. Yet when the abolition movement finally triumphed in the 1850s, it had an invisible ally: coal and oil. As the world's most portable and versatile workers, fossil fuels dramatically replenished slavery's ranks with combustion engines and other labour-saving tools. Since then, oil has transformed politics, economics, science, agriculture, gender, and even our concept of happiness. But as Andrew Nikiforuk argues in this provocative new book, we still behave like slaveholders in the way we use energy, and that urgently needs to change.

Many North Americans and Europeans today enjoy lifestyles as extravagant as those of Caribbean plantation owners. Like slaveholders, we feel entitled to surplus energy and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. But endless growth is an illusion, and now that half of the world's oil has been burned, our energy slaves are becoming more expensive by the day. What we need, Nikiforuk argues, is a radical new emancipation movement.”

Also book review @: https://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-the-energy-of-slaves-oil-and-the-new-servitude/

If the Anthropocene epoch is characterized by a decadent, mutually destructive dance of human and physical geographies, then New Orleans is the perfect host city. Founded on the exploitation of both human and natural resources, built on the shifting sands of the delta, stripped of natural defenses, sitting below sea level with only earthen levees and ancient pumps keeping out the toxic waters of the Mississippi, Lake and Gulf, the city is a model of social and environmental injustice and unsustainability. The drunk staggering home past the trash and vomit on Bourbon street singing Jock-a-mo while the rats scurry, the levees seep and storm clouds gather in the Gulf is a good metaphor for the state of the planet and human civilization in the current epoch.

Yet, despite the intractable problems of decaying infrastructure, inequality, corruption and the constant threat of disaster, a stubborn spirit of grit, resilience, and even joy somehow endures. I first visited New Orleans in 2007. While the CBD and tourist quarters were open for business, heaps of steaming, mouldering debris still littered the lower 9th ward and outlying districts and half the population remained displaced, the majority-minority of whom labelled “refugees” in their own country. The hurricane had blown the sequins off the Big Easy’s carefree façade, stripping away the ideological veneer and laying bare its stark inequities, yet its soul was somehow intact*.

The criminal incompetence and indifference of the emergency response to Katrina (I remember tractor trailers full of supplies idling for days in Gloucester, MA waiting for instructions from FEMA) illustrated how there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster in the Anthropocene. “Acts of God” are increasingly triggered and mismanaged by acts of man.

As a political scientist and cultural historian, I am interested in how issues of power, control, resources, and justice are framed; how such narratives are deployed and contested; and (as an geographer at heart if not by training) how these cultural systems codependently interact with the environmental systems that underwrite them. The theme of “land, life and labor” exploitation of the New Orleans campus seems to me particularly salient for my interdisciplinary instincts and social science perspective. I look forward to meeting, working, and learning with you all.

*PS: The soul of New Orleans, which restored my faith in America during the dark years of the W administration (remember when we thought it couldn’t get worse?), is also what led my daughter to adopt the city as her own for the past five years, and inevitably led her parents to keep a wary weather eye on the Gulf and cancer alley. Actually both my daughters (like all sons and daughters of their generation) are on the front lines of the Anthropocene, as my youngest is a budding environmental scientist. So, my desire to understand the systems and scale of these issues is personal as well as political.

Yes, filing complaints in one way might help reduce pollution but it won't completely eliminate it. I think by filing complaints, it does give the issue precendence in coming to the top so people become more aware by it, but along wiht complaining people need to take action and come up with plans to resolve the complaints.

The kind of technology and/or infrastructure that they rely on are one big road map. Having an eye on each area as a whole not only helps the organization aide in seeing where the problem relys, but also has the commuities be able to keep an eye out to pinpoint the exacy areas that have the problems. This also helps by not only the organizations but also the communities being able to come up with better and quicker solutions.

The numbers and totals on the damage done by the hurricane were given out by total occupied after the storm had hit. Most importantly then the numbers, the pictures of the storm before/after is what occupied the whole research. More then words the pictures spoke on how big this really was, and then the numbers of the damage were also given which made it complete on how big of a damge this had really caused.

Although reducing air pollution is very hard nowadays, however people can take precaution especailly in the way in which they use means of transportation in their daily lives. Eliminating air pollution is not possible but their are many ways in which we can reduce it. First off by choosing a better transportation method everyday, instead taking public transport, or driving your car when not needed. Suppose you want to make a quick food run to a place nearby, why not walk there or maybe even ride your bike, saving fuel and the emissions that would be emitted from them when you use those transportations. It is small steps that each person can take in their daily lives that would help reduce pollution overtime. Also getting out there and supporting causes that push for cleaner air, if each person played their part in their own communities instead of leaving it up to others, we would definitley elimiante a lot of waster.