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The Sampson County landfill can be smelled before seen. This olfactory indicator points toward the sensory scale of these pungent emissions but also toward the geographic scope: this landfill receives waste from as far away as Orange County (the state's most expensive property/tax base), among dozens of other distant counties, making this "hazardous site" a lesson in realizing impact beyond the immediate locale. So when we answer the question, "What is this hazard?" we must think not only about the landfill as a thing in itself but as a set of economic and political relations of capital and the transit of other peoples' trash, into this lower-income, rural, predominantly African-American neighborhood. In this way, 'thinking with a landfill' (like this one in Sampson County) enables us to analyze wider sets of relationships, NIMBY-ist policymaking, consumerism, waste management, and the racialized spatial politics that enable Sampson County to be the recipient of trash from all over the state. At the same time we think spatially and in transit, we can think historically to (a) inquire about the DEQ policies that enable this kind of waste management system; and (b) the emergent "solutions" in the green energy sector that propose to capture the landfill's methane in order to render the stench productive for the future -- that is, to enable more consumption, by turning garbage into gas. As such, the idea of "hazard" can expand beyond the site itself - impactful and affective as that site might be - to examine the uneven relations of exchange and capitalist-driven values of productivity that further entrench infrastructures such as these. [This offers a conceptual corrollary to thinking, as well, about the entrenchment of CAFOs for "green" biogas development, as we address elsewhere in the platform].

Danielle Koonce in an Opinion piece in the Fayetteville Observer, states...

"And it’s not just household garbage coming in — chemical waste and coal ash has also been disposed of in the Sampson County landfill."

"We listened to community members share how they can no longer garden or enjoy the outdoors due to the thick odor and fumes from the landfill."

"We learned that the landfill receives trash from around the state, from as far away as New York City, and even trash that comes in on ship-barges through Wilmington."

While Bryan Wuester, manager for the Sampson County Landfill states in the Sampson Independent...

"The Sampson landfill accepts waste from North Carolina only, about 5,450 tons from 16 different counties a day."

"The landfill accepts three kinds of waste: construction and demolition materials, solid waste and special waste, which are byproducts of industry. No coal ash comes into the Sampson facility..."

These are two different stories of the landfill coming from two different stakeholders, one in which needs the landfill to be in operation for a job and the other a concerned citizen worried about the disproportional impacts her community faces. While Danielle Koonce listens to the realities of the community members located around the landfill who express concern and worry, the landfill manager denies these realities and insists they are not true. This is not only invaliding to the community members who are fighting to get their voices heard but further embeds environmental injustice into the community.  

The article explains how a team of medical staff treated (and consequently killed) a number of patients following the flooding of a hospital in New Orleans. The staff in question overdosed the patients to put them out of their pain as they saved other patients who were more likely to survive. The article calls into question the process of triage and how we go about it. Who has the authority to make these decisions, and what lines do we draw between ethics and compassion. The article provides a play-by-play of the events leading up to the flooding, and relevant policies that existed and have been created related to this incident. 

“The smell of death was overpowering the moment a relief worker cracked open one of the hospital chapel’s wooden doors.”

“The physician, Anna Pou, defended herself on national television, saying her role was to “help” patients “through their pain,” a position she maintains today.”

From the links provided within the article, relevant information about Hurricane Katrina can be viewed with the commentary and archival articles that published in The New York Times that written by other authors.

Also the author has made in contact with Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans to focus on the investigation into the detail situations happened with the floodwaters. Afterwards, gained more information on the lethal injection issues.

[http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/hurricane-katrina?inline=nyt-class…]

[http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/hurricanes-and-tropical-storms-hur…]

The article has first emphasis the number of death and corpses during and after the Hurricane Katrina, then with further investigation and research, the issue related to the lethal injection to the patient has raised. From the physician’s perspective, the lethal injection in this case is a way to relief the patient’s pain, as it is a “for” for the lethal injection, which not seems to be violating the medical ethical. From the conclusion parts of the article, the author provided the evidence that “that more medical professionals were involved in the decision to inject patients — and far more patients were injected — than was previously understood.”     

The main focus group of the article is the physicians that involved in the injection decision to the patients. The discussion to the article questioned on the ethical issue towards overdose injection in order to “help” the patients to relief their pains that causes the death to the patients.  

"Anna Pou, defended herself on national television, saying her role was to “help” patients “through their pain,” a position she maintains today"

"The laws also encourage prosecutors to await the findings of a medical panel before deciding whether to prosecute medical professionals. Pou has also been advising state and national medical organizations on disaster preparedness and legal reform; she has lectured on medicine and ethics at national conferences and addressed military medical trainees"

The author conducted their research for the article through a personal interview with one of the doctors who worked at the Memorial Medical Center in Uptown New Orleans. 

The main point of this article is the idea that government regulations do not always comply with what is best for patient care and the situation at hand. In this particular case doctors and nurses decided to euthanize patients who were in critical condition and were going to be delayed or unable to be rescued.