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Why is the rate of incarceration in Louisiana so high? How do we critique the way prisons are part of infrastructural solutions to anthropocenic instabilities? As Angela Davis writes, “prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.” One way of imagining and building a vision of an anti-carceral future is practiced in the Solitary Gardens project here in New Orleans: 

The Solitary Gardens are constructed from the byproducts of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco and indigo- the largest chattel slave crops- which we grow on-site, exposing the illusion that slavery was abolished in the United States. The Solitary Gardens utilize the tools of prison abolition, permaculture, contemplative practices, and transformative justice to facilitate exchanges between persons subjected to solitary confinement and volunteer proxies on the “outside.” The beds are “gardened” by prisoners, known as Solitary Gardeners, through written exchanges, growing calendars and design templates. As the garden beds mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet.

"Nature" here is constructed in a very particularistic way: as a redemptive force to harness in opposition to the wider oppressive system the architecture of a solitary confinement cell is a part of. It takes a lot of intellectual and political work to construct a counter-hegemonic nature, in other words. Gardeners in this setting strive toward a cultivation of relations antithetical to the isolationist, anti-collective sociality prisons (and in general, a society in which prisons are a permanent feature of crisis resolution) foster.

My interest in NOLA anthropocenics pivots on water, and particularly the ways in which capitalist regimes of value and waste specify, appropriate, and/or externalize forms of water. My research is concerned with water crises more generally, and geographically situated in Flint, Michigan. I thought I could best illustrate these interests with a sampling of photographs from a summer visit to NOLA back in 2017. At the time, four major confederate monuments around the city had just been taken down. For supplemental reading, I'm including an essay from political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. (who grew up in NOLA) that meditates on the long anti-racist struggle that led to this possibility, and flags the wider set of interventions that are urgently required to abolish the landscape of white supremacy. 

Flooded street after heavy rains due to failures of city pumping infrastructure.

A headline from the same week in the local press.

Some statues are gone but other monuments remain (this one is annotated).

A Starbucks in Lakeview remembering Katrina--the line signifies the height of the water at the time.

Reading:

Adolph Reed Jr., “Monumental Rubbish” https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/06/25/monumental-rubbish-statues-torn-down-what-next-new-orleans

P.S. In case the photos don't show up in the post I'm attaching them in a PDF document as well! 

Emergency responders are not portrayed in this film. This film focuses on long term care and the ethics of dealing with death, hospice, and gravely ill patients.

This policy would help provide first responders and technical professionals with specific information on a nuclear emergency from a forign source which they could be responding to. This information could allow them to more effectively mitigate the effects of such a disaster. 

1. "As a result, however, the stories were often quite ambiguous as to the nature of the illness, and it was often unclear whether the stories were "reports of experience" or were largely governed by a typical cultural form or narrative structure"
2. "Stories, perhaps better than other forms, provide a glimpse of the grand ideas that often seem to elude life and defy rational description. Illness stories often seem to provide an especially fine mesh for catching such ideas."
3. "much of what we know about illness we know through stories - stories told by the sick about their experiences, by family members, doctors, healers, and others in the society. This is a simple fact. "An illness" has a narrative structure, although it is not a closed text, and it is composed as a corpus of stories."

Funding for the American Red Cross comes primarily from individual and corporate donations. They are funded by the people to serve the people.

They confess that ‘survivors of sexual violence have generally been neglected in standard models of humanitarian aid delivery’.

To return to the story: with humanitarians effectively governing in crisis zones, it is not surprising that gender-based violence should become an issue; having been categorised as a human rights violation, one which garnered significant attention, it could not be easily ignored or brushed aside as a ‘private’ matter.

In this sense, gender-based violence makes it clear that the suffering body – while purportedly universal – requires certain political, historical and cultural attributes to render it visible and worthy of care.

I looked up

1. International response to the Ebola epidemic

- from http://ebolaresponse.un.org/liberia

   I learned about how the UN coordinated various organizations, including UNICEF, the World Food Programme, and the WHO in their individual persuits to end the transmission of ebola in Liberia, including providing food, hygene kits, medical supplies and care, and how within 3 months of international joint operations the transmission rate of ebola was deacreased to zero.

2. Health Care in Liberia

Source http://www.aho.afro.who.int/profiles_information/index.php/Liberia:Index

While physical access to primary health care has improved dramatically across Liberia, from one health facility serving an average of 8000 population in 2006 to one health facility per 5500 population in 2009, it is still not nearly enough, and the existing resources of medications, supplies, and facilities can and do become overwhelmed when faced with new challenges. 

3. Liberain public health response to the ebola crisis.

- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/world/africa/ebola-response-in-liberi…

As international support came into the country at the outbreak of ebola, Liberian public health structures and political institutions were unable to cope with the new strains and were rendered ineffective. Meetings between liberian health officials and international organizations that were lauded to the public as being "effective" were consistantly bogged down in politics, resulting in the inefficient implimentation of programs and the poor distribution of despritely needed resources.

This policy addresses matters of public health by allowing first responders to carry concealed weapons on EMS/Fire to protect themselves in a location where law enforcement response times can be prohibitively lengthy, causing unacceptable delays in patient care or scene managment.