Project: Formosa Plastics Global Archive
The Formosa Plastics Global Archive supports a transnational network of people concerned about the operations of the Formosa Plastics Corporation, one of the world's largest petrochemical
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Austin Rhetoric Field Team
This essay will serve as the workspace for the Austin Anthropocene Campus Rhetoric Field Team.
Rhetoric Team Description
Ian Ferris describes the methods and focus of the Rhetoric Field Team of the Austin Anthropocene Field Campus.
What have you learned about anthropocenics in this place?
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In response to
My interests center around soil--its preservation, regeneration, and remediation. Living farther up North on the Mississippi in Saint Louis has changed my thinking around the relationships between soil, water, and contamination. Saint Louis and New Orleans are linked not just through their shared river and its attendant water management issues, but through patterns of extraction and contamination. New Orleans may also provide some clues (and potential solutions) to my community's changing relationship with water as we confront climate change. My work as an artist explores our relationship with landscape through tours of contaminated sites and remediative interventions in the landscape, so I approach New Orleans with questions about contaminated environments and water management through landscape design, gardening, and education.
West Lake Landfill
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Most of the citizen-produced data is discounted by officials. There is little authorized data, though data has been collected and can be found with some effort. Dissemination of information is on a grassroots level. PRPs have been engaged in misinformation campaigns as well, creating organizations with misleading names who advertise on the radio and distribute flyers.
West Lake Landfill
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Monitoring. Decisions from the EPA about 'safe' levels of radiation exposure.
West Lake Landfill
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Cancer cluster. Not racialized in this particular area so much as class-based. Bridgeton is a working-class, mostly white suburb. The neighborhood closest to the landfill is a mobile home park.
West Lake Landfill
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Dualistic attitude of humanity as separate from nature led us to believe that we can dump nuclear waste in a floodplain and it will not affect us. Refusal to trust in ecological processes, hubris of engineering, and faith that we are not subject to natural laws because we are above nature led us to use the land in this way. Ecosystems compromised are innumberable because of the nature of the site--its proximity to water and the porous nature of the karst beneath it. This is still not recognized as a fundamental issue as evidenced by the fact that our solutions to these problems are always based on engineering, attempting to outsmart geography, geology, and physics...never a long-term solution or re-thinking land use practices.
A report by environemntal advocate Xavier Sun that documents water pollution at outfalls around the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Complex through the collection of plastic pellets ("nurdles").