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Data infrastructure supporting recognition of the anthropocenic air pollution in the context of the 6th Naphtha plants is the collection of health related and biological data, as it could be one possibility to sue. The data collected in scientific studies mentioned in the film were the concentration of a certain metabolite (produced when being exposed to VCM) in the bodies of children visiting the schools nearby and the incidence of cancer in the surrounding area. Doing medical and epidemiological research on these topics could help to set regulations. And - and that's maybe even more important to the people affected - if you can prove that you got a disease from being near the factory, you might be able to sue.

One ecosystem mentioned in the film was the one of oysters  -which actually is also man-made, as it is an oyster-farm - but I think it becomes very clear in the film that it became more difficult to the oyster-farmers to cultivate the oysters through the 6th Naphtha petrochemical complex. The farmers talk about  mud and other new circumstances that kill the larvae of the oysters. In this context, this is also affecting the socio-sphere, and the impact on the eco-sphere is not so much highlighted in the film, but I think it would be interesting to look further in this point.

The technical infrastructure that is supposed to monitor fixed pollution sources by law is not working properly in the case of the 6th Naphtha (- or it is made to work not properly). There should be CEMS “Continuous Emission Monitoring System” installed directly at some of the chimneys, and there was data produced by the systems, showing a lot of cases of excessive emission - but data was described to be invalid due to maintenance of the apparatus. The activists describe this as a loophole. It is interesting here, how standards and monitoring is not only a question of what is asked by law or regulated by law, but also what happens to avoid these regulations. So what civic data is needed here? It would be the measurements of the CEMS  or from other monitoring systems not only at the plant, but for example nearby the school. As one activist stresses in the documentary, there were for example infrared thermometers at one school, that recorded the heat of the accident mentioned in the film. This is an example for civic data.  It was also interesting here, how a person in the film said, that their own bodies monitor the pollution (“Our body is more sensitive”): they feel in their bodies, what the monitoring devices supposedly do not notice. 

One could say that there are several subjectivities produced in the context of the 6th Naphtha petrochemical complex: being someone who suffers from a disease or the smell, the risk to get health issues due to the exposure to the polluted air; being an activist who fights against formosa company, being a oyster farmer who has become politicised by the environmental pollution. In this context, for me it is the point of being at risk is very interesting, as it seems to lead people to different kinds of action: to produce knowledge about these risks, to relocate children from one school to another etc.

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?