Search

I published this news article about a hunger strike against Formosa Plastics that occurred in Texas this fall. Despite the extremity of a 30-day hunger strike, the protesting tactic has not gained attention from national media outlets. At the time I published this article, two small environmental organizations had announced the beginning of the strike, but none continued to cover the event in the unfolding weeks. While activists are driven to take on dangerous protest tactics, little communication of these tactics has carried across mass media.

The article itself introduces Formosa Plastics through its reputation as a "serial offender" of environmental and workplace safety regulations. I list several statistics on legal fines that Formosa Plastics has accumulated overtime, using these quantities to demonstrate the scale of their harm to environmental and human health. An important limitation of this storytelling strategy, however, is that many of Formosa Plastics' actions go undocumented, and even when documented, do not lead to legal consequences. Furthermore, we should still strive to acknowledge the harms committed by Formosa Plastics that are technically within legal limits.

Elizabeth Hoover is an anthropologist and associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at Berkley, who long claimed to be native (receiving grants and research access under this assumption) but has recently admitted otherwise. She has a PhD in anthropology from Brown University  with a focus on Environmental and critical Medical Anthropology. 

Katsi Cook, Mother’s Milk Project, collecting samples of breast milk: “Katsi has described this work as “barefoot epidemiology,” with Indigenous women developing their own research projects based on community concerns and then collecting their own data.” (90) - 61? – used a private lab to analyze samples because women did not trust the New York State Health Department

“Barefoot epidemiology” is a concept borrowed from China’s “barefoot doctors”—community-level health workers who brought basic care to China’s countryside in the mid-twentieth century. Hipgrave, “Communicable Disease Control.” According to a “workers’ manual” published by the International Labour Organization, barefoot research is often qualitative, and qualitative research is not the standard approach for conducting health studies, which tend to be based on laboratory experiments and clinical findings. See Keith et al., Barefoot Research” (294)

Civic Dislocation: “In many instances Mohawks experienced what Sheila Jasanoff calls “civic dislocation,” which she defines as a mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public, and what they did in reality. In the dislocated state, trust in government vanished and people looked to other institutions . . . for information and advice to restore their security. It was as if the gears of democracy had spun loose, causing citizens, at least temporarily, to disengage from the state” (118) 

“Dennis Wiedman describes these negative sociocultural changes and structures of disempowerment as “chronicities of modernity,” which produce everyday behaviors that limit physical activities while promoting high caloric intake and psychosocial stress” (235)

Third space of sovereignty: “This tension that arises when community members challenge political bodies while simultaneously demanding that they address the issues of the community has been theorized by political scientist Kevin Bruyneel, who describes how for centuries Indigenous political actors have demanded rights and resources from the American settler state while also challenging the imposition of colonial rule on their lives. He calls this resistance a “third space of sovereignty” that resides neither inside nor outside the American political system, but exists on the very boundaries of that system.” (259)

“Akwesasne residents’ main criticism of the Mount Sinai study was that at its conclusion, the researchers packed up and left, and community members felt they had not received any useful information.” (76) 

“As scholars of tribal health risk evaluation Stuart Harris and Barbara Harper explain, among most tribal people, individual and collective well-being comes from being part of a healthy community with access to heritage resources and ancestral lands, which allow community members to satisfy the personal responsibilities of participating in traditional activities and providing for their families.” (96)

“By placing “race/ethnicity” on a list of diabetes causes without qualifying why it is there, the CDC neglects the underlying root cause—that race/ethnicity is often associated also with class, education, levels of stress, and access to health care and fresh foods.” (231)

“Chaufan argues that to counter the focus on the medicalized aspects of diabetes, which has led to the individualization and depoliticization of the issue, a political ecology framework needs to be applied to the disease, one that is concerned with the social, economic, and political institutions of the human environments where diabetes is emerging.39 Such a framework would highlight how diabetes rates among Mohawk people are influenced more by changes in the natural environment and home environments than by genetic makeup.” (231 - 232)

“Understanding community conceptions of this intertwined “social and biological history” is important because, as Juliet McMullin notes, examining the intersections of health, identity, family, and the environment helps to “denaturalize biomedical definitions of health and moves us toward including knowledge that is based on a shared history of sovereignty, capitalist encounters, resistance, and integrated innovation.”61 The inclusion of this knowledge can lead to the crafting of interventions that community members see as addressing the root causes of their health conditions and promoting better health.” (249)

Hoover’s book is an analysis of the material and psychosocial effects of industrial pollution along the St. Lawrence River, which runs through the Mohawk community of Akwesasne. Hoover focuses on resistance to private and state efforts at land enclosures and economic rearrangements.  Hoover shows how legacy of industrialization and pollution (GM and Alocoa, primarily) ruptured Mohawk relationships with the river, and incurred on tribal sovereignty by disturbing the ability to safely farm, garden, raise livestock, gather, and recreate in ways fostered important connections between and amongst people and the land (“ecocultural relationships”). Hoover describes how confusion about risk and exposure is culturally produced and develops the "Three Bodies" analytic framework to show how individual, social and political bodies are entangled in the process of social and biophysical suffering. 

Hoover also highlights how in response to pollution, Mohawk projects of resistance emerged - a newspaper, documentary films, and  community-based health impacts research. Hoover conducts a comparative history of two research projects tracking the effects on industrial-chemical contamination on Akwesasne people and wildlife: the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s epidemiological study in the 1980s, which failed to engage Akwesasne people in the production of knowledge or share results meaningfully, and the SUNY-Albany School of Public Health Superfund Basic Research Program study (in the 1990s and 200s), which ultimately began incorporating key theoretical and methodological principles of CBPR.

xx

St. Louis: Award winning (US Society of Environmental Journalists)  2001 journalism on health hazards in Weldon Springs.

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/the-right-to-answers/Content?oi…

I'm interested in better understanding the ongoing geological processes that shape St. Louis and the Mississippi Valley region. So far, I've been looking into the history of seismicity in the region, focusing on the fascinating but little known history of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 -- the most devastating earthquakes to have hit the US east of the Rockies. I've also been exploring how St. Louis and surrounding areas are dealing with the possibility of another earthquake occurring in the future. According to one article I read, one of the biggest uncertainties is what would happen to the heavily engineered Mississippi River in the case of another major tremblor. The shaking could break the levees, flooding wide areas along the river and creating cascading effects. The flow of the river might also reverse completely, as occurred during the New Madrid earthquakes.

On these possibilities and the lack of scientific consensus surrounding intraplate seismicity in this zone, see this article in The Atlantic.

On current efforts to create earthquake hazard maps in St. Louis, see this overview on the US Geological Survey site.

For a deeper dive into the history of the New Madrid earthquakes, see this book by historian of science Conevery Bolton Valencius. 

A brief essay about St. Louis' notorious eminent domain history--

--along with 2 recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles about "urban renewal" projects that are scheduled to reoccupy the Mill Flats area, which hosted the most notorious episode of displacement of African-American communities: the Chouteau Greenway project (will it serve or displace low-income St. Louisans?); and SLU's Mill Creek Flats high-rise project, which certainly will, and whose name seems to me an especially tone-deaf if gutsy move...

https://humanities.wustl.edu/features/Margaret-Garb-St-Louis-Eminent-Domain

https://www.stltoday.com/business/local/steelcote-developer-plans-more-apartments-brewery-space-in-million-midtown/article_811eaf96-76e1-5c20-a870-1e79abd3f06e.html

https://www.stltoday.com/business/local/chouteau-greenway-project-aims-to-knit-st-louis-neighborhoods-together/article_55fea4e6-6829-5c80-9168-313305b4e3bb.html

Contextual Articles
Landscapes with Purpose
One STL
Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District
EPA - Green Infrastructure
Green City Coalition

Green Stormwater Infrastructure
Prior to the 1970's, many US cities managed stormwater through piped conveyance systems. Flooding was once considered the most significant risk associated with rainfall. System builders built water infrastructure to accommodate volume. Most cities in the US have what is called a combined sewer system (CSS). This system pipes stormwater and municipal wastewater together. The water is then treated and then released into receiving bodies. St. Louis is one of the rare cities (Baltimore, where my research is based is another) that has a municipal separated stormwater system (MS4). In a separated system, a system of pipes keeps stormwater separate from other wastewaters. 

In the 1970's ecological research, some of which came from the EPA's National Urban Research Program, began to demonstrate that nutrients in runoff were responsible for environmental pollution. In turn, municipal engineers transitioned to thinking about tools and techniques for decreasing this nutrient load. In St. Louis, the separated system operates under a federal consent decree with the EPA where the city must reduce the overall percentage of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) carried through runoff. The most recent strategy for managing this problem is Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI). Although the problems associated with GSI are of local relevance, they are managed through state and federal governance strategies.

While GSI is difficult to define, many times installations feature landscaped elements that aim to mimic the pre-development hydrological processes of a given site. In urban areas, these projects often utilize vacant lands or reduce existing impervious surface cover. Many planners and community groups also suggest that GSI provides additional social benefits through an increase in community green space, reduction in urban heat island, and improved property values. 

This image from Missouri Coalition for the environment brings together the many suggested benefits of implementing these technologies. The diagram also provokes some questions that may interest us in our project; Does GSI represent a paradigmatic shift in techniques of stormwater management? Does natural or environmental mimicry in engineering projects act as a corrective to the anthropocene, or are these technologies merely a response? How are the social, economic, and technical benefits of GSI calculated and have attendent burdens been considered as well?