Dr. Cheney is attempting to answer the following question: What can we learn from the residents about their experience in living with asthma, and can this help us understand the disease?
There are very few hospitals in the area around the Salton Sea--only two in Imperial County and three in the Coachella Valley.
The "Disparities in Environmental Exposures and Health Impacts" project has four goals:
New and Alamo Rivers - transboundary movement
Because of my work on the Bhopal disaster, I follow worst case scenario potential in many places -- and the corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge has long been on my radar. Worst case scenarios involve the catastrophic release of dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere and create "vulnerability zones" -- what many people call kill zones -- around an industrial facility. A 2014 report from the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance documents how these zones are hotspots of environmental injustice in the United States.
See this 2001 Greenpeace map. When Greenpeace made this map, there was a push (by organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute) to pull worst case scenario information off the Internet because of its potential use by terrorists. Greenpeace pushed back in campaigns for "chemical security," arguing that the best way to reduce risk is to reduce the production, handling and use of dangerous chemicals -- laying ground for today's movement for a "just transition." See just transition work in Lousiana by the another gulf is possible campaign .
Worst case scenarios came back into US national attention after the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas in 2014, prompting the Center for Effective Government's report, Kids in Danger Zones (showing that Houston and Port Arthus in Texas and Baton Rouge in Louisiana are the most high-risk metro areas in the United States). See the Louisana Fact Sheet from the report (listing the highest risk facility in New Orleans as a wastewater treatment plant.). Note that the maps in the Center for Effective Government's report are no longer interactive -- pointing to a challenge the QA project is addressing: what we've termed "archiving for the anthropocene." We need to figure out what archiving for the anthropocene should look like, how to build and sustain it, and how to put it to good use.
Worst case scenarios have come back into controversy recently with Trump's EPA's saying that focus on worst case climate scenarios are unrealistic. Louisiana looks pretty bad.... see Propublica’s “Losing Ground.”
The extreme weather that comes with climate change of course exacerbates worst case scenario risks. See this on floods and chemical plant safety across the United States. See this on the 2016 "thousand year" flood in Louisiana. See this moderate recognition of the problem.
As a participant in the NOLA Anthropocene Campus, I have gained insights on how communities, stewards, and managers of ecosystems in New Orleans have rolled out forms of interspecies care vis-à-vis ongoing environmental changes, coastal erosion, climate catastrophes and their deeply present and current effects (i.e., the 2010 BP oil disaster). Whilst much analytical lens has been given to geospatial changes in the study of the Anthropocene, here, I focus on how relations to non-human beings, also threatened by the changing tides of NOLA’s waterscapes, can enrich our understanding of such global transformations.
After disasters like Katrina, urban floodwaters harbored many hidden perils in the form of microbes that cause disease. Pathogenic bacterial exposure occurred when wastewater treatment plants and underground sewage got flooded, thus affecting the microbial landscape of New Orleans and increasing the potential of public health risks throughout Southern Louisiana. But one need not wait for a disaster event like Katrina to face these perils. Quotidian activities like decades of human waste and sewage pollution have contaminated public beaches now filled with lurking microbes. Even street puddle waters, such as those found on Bourbon Street, contain unsanitary bacteria level from years of close human exploitation of horses and inadequate drainage in 100-year old thoroughfares. More recently, microbial ecologies have also changed in the Gulf of Mexico due to the harnessing of energy resources like petroleum. Lush habitats for countless species are more and more in danger sounding the bells of extinction for the imperiled southern wild.
Human-alteration has severely damaged the wetland marshes and swamps that would have protected New Orleans from drowning in the water surge that Hurricane Katrina brought from the Gulf of Mexico. The latter is something that lifelong residents (i.e., indigenous coastal groups) of the Mississippi River Mouth have been pointing to for a long time. Over the past century, the river delta’s “natural” infrastructure has been altered by the leveeing of the Mississippi River. Consequently, much of the silt and sediments that would generally run south and deposit in the river mouth to refeed the delta get siphoned off earlier upstream by various irrigation systems.