Analyze

In the years following Gov. Buddy Roemer and Paul Templet’s leadership of the DEQ, “Louisiana has not seen a governor make environmental protection a priority” (Russell 2019). Templet was replaced with Kai Midboe, an attorney who had formerly represented the gas and oil industry. The environmental scorecard program ended. In 2008, Bobby Jindal became governor and cut 300 positions from the department. 

Between 2008 and 2018, Louisiana reduced environmental protection program funding by 35% and reduced its staffing by 30% (Environmental Integrity Project 2019). A 2021 legislative audit of LDEQ found that “DEQ faces challenges related to low staffing levels, high workloads, frequent turnover of staff, and ineffective data systems that make it more difficult to perform its regulatory work. For example, DEQ’s positions dedicated to air quality regulation decreased 14.6%, from 247 in fiscal year 2010 to 211 in 2019.” (Louisiana Legislative Auditor 2021).

Today, LDEQ explicitly avoids use of the term “Cancer Alley,” according to the department spokesperson Greg Langley: “ ‘That term implies that there is a large geographic area that has higher cancer incidence than the state average. We have not seen higher cancer incidence over large areas of the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.’ ”—this, despite the data from the EPA showing that almost every census tract in the area is ranked in the top 5% nationally for cancer risk as a result of toxic air pollution (LaRose 2024).  

 “The Thin Green Line.” Environmental Integrity Project. December 5, 2019.

Russel, Gordon. 2019. “How an Environmental Regulator Became Known for Protecting Industry.” ProPublica. December 19, 2019. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-an-environmental-regulator-became-known-for-protecting-industry.

Kaare Johnson Talks. 2023. “Dr. Paul Templet, Former Head of La DEQ Joins Kaare To Discuss Lack of Enforcement And More!” Streamed on Sep 11, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-8jJtKRI2w. 

Templet, Paul H. 2001. “Defending the Public Domain: Pollution, Subsidies and Poverty.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.333280.

LaRose, Greg, Louisiana Illuminator February 1, and 2024. 2024. “DEQ Remains in Denial over ‘Cancer Alley’ Industry Correlations.” Louisiana Illuminator (blog). February 1, 2024. https://lailluminator.com/2024/02/01/cancer-alley-3/. 

Louisiana Legislative Auditor. 2021. “Monitoring and Enforcement of Air Quality. Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.” https://app2.lla.state.la.us/publicreports.nsf/0/bbc259a7e7a73cfa8625713b002c8e7b/$file/00001572.pdf?openelement&.7773098. 

Several political and discursive currents, including The Environmental Justice Movement, Climate Change, Political and Policy Shifts, and Community Mobilization, influence the EHC. Actors within the organization are attuned to these currents and work to navigate them to promote environmental justice and healthy communities.

Changes in government policies and regulations can impact the organization's ability to achieve its goals, requiring innovative and creative solutions to continue developing new opportunities for organizing and advocacy. Shifting public opinion and media coverage can also affect how the public and policymakers perceive the organization.

1. APEN works at the intersection of environmental and economic justice, immigrant rights, and advocating for policies prioritizing the needs of low-income Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Many of the issues in AAPI communities are rooted in a legacy of colonization and imperialism within the United States. APEN prioritizes these concerns by directly supporting the voices and leadership at the frontlines of their community's work. 

1. Climate Justice – CBE efforts are focused on the intersection of environmental issues, emphasizing the significance of the disproportionate impacts on low-income communities of color.

2. Racial Justice – The CBE is committed to amplifying the voices of Black and Brown communities in their work. Their work can be considered an effort to dismantle systems of oppression and inequality.

3. Corporate Power – CBE can be seen as a counterbalance to corporate interests and is proactive in holding polluters accountable by promoting policies that prioritize public health and environmental protection over corporate profits.

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.

In the text, the 2015 White paper of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports Science and Technology (MEXT) is quoted as: "When it comes to the creation of innovation that changes society, ‘citizen science’ (shimin kagaku), which embrace ideas from daily life, is important, because the possibility that innovation is created, increases as new venues where experts and citizens collaborate, are developed. Moreover, the knowledge, skills and desires that citizens possess, sometimes surpass that of the expert. If we can bring this knowledge to an efficient use as ‘the wisdom of crowds’ under the banner of open science, then around the year 2030 we can increase the amount and the quality of innovation activities in technology and science, including research activities, even if the number of scholars in our country will decrease.”

The authors state that this notion were to introduces “citizen science” within the globally expanding science and policy fields of open science and open innovation and further that by this MEXT was targeting an increased contribution of citizens to benefit formally institutional science rather than being concerned with the question of how science can contribute to society. I tend to agree with the latter, but am left with the question how the underlying narratives are constructed when talking about creation of innovation, increasing new venues, and bringing knowledge to an efficient use under the banner of open science? These terms seem to be very much informed by neoliberal thought, but social relations do not seem to be an analytical framework the authors are working with.

The article is great at highlighting the multple efforts and projects lurking behind the label "citizen science" in Japan. Paying attention to the various terms and histories, especially their implications for citizenship and activism are really important. I guess the focus on language, reports and self-definitons of different actvists left me wanting to hear more about what all the different practices look and feel like. I assume this gets more attention in the ethnographic write-ups of the project. 

(1) I am mostly frustrated by Spivak's, and even the collective's exclusion of Dalit thought and literature. I think that the argument of: “There simply are no subaltern testimonials, memoirs, diaries, or official histories”: is both incorrect and dangerous. Both Spivak and the Subaltern Studies overdetermine the influence of bourgeois nationalism and of figures like Gandhi, who were mainstream but not necessarily radical or even the most popular. In the Spivak reader, for example, there is no mention of Ambedkar's work, who as a Buddhist Dalit scholar and the architect of the constitution of the Indian nation-state, is a subaltern figure who spoke and wrote fiercely against both colonialism and the caste system. There is now the field of Dalit Studies which writes against the grain of this exclusion. The book Decolonizing Anarchism offers an anti-authoritarian narrative of decolonization, offering accounts of social movements and anti-colonial thought that advocated for complete liberation from the British empire, a goal later appropriated by mainstream liberal politics. 

(2) I wonder how to perform a comparison of recuperative scholarship like that of the Subaltern Studies collective with that of Black Radical Tradition? Is it possible to read Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism in conjunction with Ranajit Guha's Peasant Insurgency? What differences exist between articulating a shared subalternity and global Blackness? 

(3) What kinds of pedagogy does Spivak point us to? 

While I found the article illuminating (I did not read the book), I am frustrated by, what I found, to be the hegemonic visions of political theory and climate change. Is there no space for feminist epistemological stances when imagining future forms of governance? Even their presentation of Climate X--what seemed to me like a quest for a unifying theory of opposition that is neither realistic nor reflects the how resistence movements however stuttering they may be are also a source of possibility and hope.