Analyze

The North Carolina Environmental Injustice Network (NCEJN) is a grassroots coalition of community organizations that is predominantly organized and led by people of color. They work to expose and oppose institutionalized practices that create environmental injustice.

Their mission statement: "To promote health and environmental equality for all people of North Carolina through community action for clean industry, safe workplaces and fair access to all human and natural resources. We seek to accomplish these goals through organizing, advocacy, research, and education based on principles of economic equity and democracy for all people.”  

Ways to get involved are linked here: https://ncejn.org/get-involved/

In this essay the authors have highlighted some of the stakeholders in the fight against industrial biomass operations as members of the surrounding community who live with these operations as close as their own backyards, and experience the environmental pollution directly everyday. They highlighted Belinda Joyner, a resident of Northhampton County, and an environmental activist who rose to defend her community and their lands and livelihoods due to expanding hazardous infrastructures such as the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Enviva power plant. Other stakeholders besides activists and organziers such as Belinda include the people of Northampton County who attend hearings with government officials and take a stance agaisnt pollution, as well as organizations such as the Dogwood Alliance. The county is predominantly Black and working class, one of several in North Carolina that bear the brunt of exploittion and pollution by powerful biomass manufacturers such as Drax and Enviva.

This timeline essay provides more examples from recent years of community responses and collective action for environmental justice.

In an article written in August 2022 details the complaints of residents of Duplin County and the Environmental Justice Community Action Network in response to a general permit for hog farms in Eastern North Carolina that would pollute the ground and water by relaxing regulations on farms with varying numbers of livestock. A quote from Sheri White-Williamson, cofounder of the Community Action Network, says, 

“A general permit is a one-size fits all system, regardless of the number of animals you have,” she said. “That doesn’t seem to make good environmental sense. At the very minimum we would like to see the denitrification system that has shown to be better for taking care of the toxins that come out of this process. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.”

Local groups urge the DEQ to set regulations on a case by case basis depending on the size of biogas operations and should require cleaner systems and ways of getting rid of waste.

The article is linked here:https://coastalreview.org/2022/08/groups-challenge-ncs-biogas-general-p…

I've found myself returning to thinking about/around/within interstitial spaces of care, particularly within hospital settings, interested in how viral activity unsettles the ideas we have around space and boundaries, both biological and infrastructural. In COVID-19 pathology and response, the inbetween, the interstitial, become sites challenge and possibility. With COVID-19, we see an acknowledgment of once forgotten spaces quite obviously, with hospital atria and hallways being reconfigured into patient care spaces, makeshift morgues established in refrigerated trucks, and hospitals spilling out into neighboring streets and parks. More than ever, we see how hospitals are simultaneously bounded and unbounded--the most stable and unstable sites for care. Along this line of thought, what might thinking through hospitals as heterotopia of crisis and deviation afford?

Foucault outlines six principles for heterotopic spaces

The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.

I'm currently based in Troy, NY where I recently completed a PhD in Science and Technology Studies.  I'll soon be living in NYC to attend medical school. I can be reached at amorgan14[at]gmail[dot]com

I've long been interested in the disaster of routine medical care in the U.S. healthcare system. As far as COVID-19 is concerned, I'm particularly interested in how the long-term health impacts of intensive care are conceptualized and communicated (including Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS)) and the tensions between acute and chronic illness, broadly. 

How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?

This artifact contains information regarding the change in attitude towards environmental damage after hurricane Sandy. Newark is very vulnerable to flooding do to storms, and this was emphasized within the artifact.

The distribution of risk and damage for hurricane Irene was spread throughout the east coast of the US starting at Florida and working its way up to New York. Based on this, many people of all races and social classes were affected by the hurricane

Attorney General Rabner states that illegal dumping poses a serious threat to the public health of anyone in New Jersey. He does not state which groups are more vulnerable than others, and I believe that this information is hidden.