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I am an environmental engineer with a profound interest on providing urban sustainability through the use of biotechnology. I currently research about air pollution in public health and its environmental factors related. My interest is focused on how to adopt greenery as air pollution mitigation strategy in developing cities of south America.
While making this briefly research about NOLA, I observed how air pollution has been historically related to a environmental injustice issue. An example of this is a 1960s study documenting asthma incidence among black communities due its near location to dumps, where subterranean burning happened commonly. This depicts the “southern pattern” in New Orleans, where African American were forced to reside in undesired areas subjected to frequent flooding, unhealthy air and noise levels, as well as unsanitary water and sewerage conditions. Morse (2008) describes Katrina as a turn point, where America’s attention on the enduring legacy of racial segregation and poverty were refocused. Local government remarked the necessity of green restoration in flooding areas, where most of segregated population lived in. Communities and foundations are also working together to sustain the urban landscape mainly for flood control. Therefore, I got interest on know how urban reforestation in NOLA was adopted as a tool for climate change adaptation but also in knowing how it acts as a pathway to reach environmental justice.

As a researcher, I’m interested in the political, ecological, and cultural debates around mosquito-borne diseases and the solutions proposed to mitigate them.

When we received the task, my first impulse was to investigate about the contemporary effects of anthropogenic climate change in mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans. But I was afraid to make the same mistake that I did in my PhD research. I wrote my PhD proposal while based in the US, more specifically in New England, during the Zika epidemic, and proposed to understand how scientists were studying ecological climate change and mosquitoes in Brazil. However, once I arrived in the country the political climate was a much more pressing issue, with the dismantling of health and scientific institutions.

Thus, after our meeting yesterday, and Jason Ludwig’s reminder that the theme of our Field Campus is the plantation, I decided to focus on how it related to mosquitoes in New Orleans.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the yellow fever virus it can transmit are imbricated in the violent histories of settler-colonialism and slavery that define the plantation economy. The mosquito and the virus arrived in the Americas in the same ships that brought enslaved peoples from Africa. The city of New Orleans had its first yellow fever epidemic in 1796, with frequent epidemics happening between 1817 and 1905. What caused New Orleans to be the “City of the Dead,” as Kristin Gupta has indicated, was yellow fever. However, as historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby points out, the slave trade cannot explain alone the spread and persistance of the disease in the region: "Alterations to the landscape, combined with demographic changes resulting from the rise of sugar production, slavery, and urban growth all contributed to the region’s development as a yellow fever zone." For example, sugar cultivation created ideal conditions for mosquito proliferation because of the extensive landscape alteration and ecological instabilities, including heavy deforestation and the construction of drainage ditches and canals.

Historian Kathryn Olivarius examines how for whites "acclimatization" to the disease played a role in hierarchies with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people and how for black enslaved people "who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery."

As I continue to think through these topics, I wonder how both the historical materialities of the plantation and the contemporary anthropogenic changes might be influencing mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans nowadays? And more, how the regions’ histories of race and class might still be shaping the effects of these diseases and how debates about them are framed?