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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?

After Hurricane Sandy, John Schreiber, the CEO of NJPAC, announced that he along with the arts center was going to provide relief for victims of the hurricane. This agency is working hard to minimize the damage of the victims of the hurricane

Brian Conover, the man convicted of abandoning the waste, had left vials of blood along with needles that still had blood on them. The law requires that he properly dispose of these materials, but he had left the objects in his home when he moved out.

The EPA has been working to raise funds to launch this ambitious cleanup project. The EPA has also began looking for solutions to cleanup the polluted waterways in the Hudson River.

The Department of Criminal Justice played a large part in indicting a contractor for illegally abandoning medical waste. If not for their investigation, this issue would not have been resolved.

There was no precatuions taken regarding the waste in the Passaic River. Many of the locals knew it for its murky waters after years of industrial toxin buildup.

For hurricane Irene, city and state governments had shelters built and prepared for the event, but the best solution was for complete evacuation, as the storm was predicted to be too strong. The precautions did not work fully because there were some casualties and injuries

In this case, the source of resillience would be the federal authorities as they were the ones that launched the investigation to acquire the knowledge to discover and pass judgement on the guilty party.