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EH annotation 1 Cancer Alley Azusa Internship 2023

E.Hernandez11

This gas leak took place in Bhopal, India and I think that the location has an important impact on the aftermath of the situation. After the gas leaked people protested to be compensated for their lost ones but many died before they were able to be justified. I feel that if this happened in America, circumstances would have been different, there would have been more media coverage, and action would be taken more swiftly. The location of this occurrence had an impact with how it was handled after and if it had occurred some place else then it would have been different. 

EH annotation 1 Cancer Alley Azusa Internship 2023

E.Hernandez11

This film focuses on the environmental and social problem of having large gas (lethal) plants near cities or other populated areas where people can be harmed. Environmentally these gasses are no good because they are emitted into the air and are very soluble in the water which leads to ocean acidification. Ocean acidification makes it so that the ocean has a lower pH level, this can harm marine wildlife. Socially, the gas is toxic to people and as seen in the Bhopal tragedy, it can kill people or severely alter their lives. This could be seen through the immediate deaths of civilians, deformities of children born after the incident, and the families affected even years after hoping for justice.

EH annotation 1 Cancer Alley Azusa Internship 2023

E.Hernandez11

From watching the video, I feel affected emotionally because it was definitely hard to watch so many people die, especially the innocent children. It is a hard pill to swallow to watch the lives of so many people taken away from them so unexpectedly in their own homes. I feel affected by seeing the photo of the unknown child because it was hauntingly touching as it was for so many people that advocated for justice after this tragedy. It was also really daunting seeing so many people being buried and burned in mass because they were not granted the ability to be respectfully honored for their death which I think is something very valuable. Intellectually I think that this film made me think about how this tragedy could have been possibly prevented if the plant had been maintained and checked up on regularly or if the plant wasn’t so close to a whole city in the first place. And I also feel gratitude to those who are still advocating for justice for the victims and trying to get people with government power to make that change.

Citizen science as a contested culturally specific term

lclplanche

This text argues that the umbrella term citizen science has come to describe a variety of organizations and structures that function in a very different way. Not only does the notion of citizen science cover a wide variety of situations, but the term itself makes references to different types of organizations and is not neutral. Japan had forms of "citizen science" which pre-existed the introduction of the English term, as heirs to the development of more engaged scientific practices by politically inclined scientists in the 1970s.

The tensions within the use of the term citizen science and its diverse embodiments take the form of the following: basically, the concept of citizen science in Japan is mostly used in the context of top-down participatory approaches. The organizations that emerged after the Fukushima disaster are much more varied than this and exist within a framework that had been previously developed in Japan. This framework included visions of participatory and democratic science making by citizens, for citizens, and of citizens. They are mostly local organizations that are sometimes but not always affiliated to a network. Some of them cooperate with more formal institutions, while others steer clear of any collaboration with formal science or governments, partly because there is a lot of distrust towards these institutions in Japan, especially since the Fukushima accident.

One of the pitfalls of the reputation that citizen science projects have in Japan is that they are associated with the anti-nuclear movement and are therefore associated with the far left. This causes a need for distantiation from any political association, which some of the organizations studied use.

A complex set of data to understand and use.

lclplanche

One of the reasons for the specific nature of data and knowledge management in this context is the economic necessity and attractiveness of stable, high paying employment. In terms of the beginning of the accumulation of local knowledge regarding the risks to which the workers and the neighbors were being exposed to, this clearly played a role. For fear of losing their good paying jobs, and due to the military nature of their occupation, workers never told anything about their jobs to their families, or didn't ask questions that could have led to uncomfortable answers. This dynamic continued later, as we can see by the testimony of the worker who worked on the clean-up of the Weldon Springs site. The Priest also notes that in the neighborhood, people were wary of information leaking, as it might depreciate their property values.

Something else which we can observe is that, on top of the economic necessity for preserving one's job, there is also a sentiment of pride in doing one's work properly. A worker recalls that the relationship that the workers had to having to wear blue (and reduce your actions because you were contaminated) was that it was just part the job, and that they had a job to do. After the Weldon springs plant closed, there was a liberation of voices, and it was easier to report health concerns. The sentiment of pride in doing ones work properly is completed by a sentiment of patriotism. The same worker, Mr Schneider, said: "We have to believe what our government tells us, what the heck, uh. Best country in the world, I still think it is." Another example of the relationship between the job and the risk is the testimony of the clean-up worker who said that they shut of their Geiger counters, because they were "just going nuts". Here we can see that when the risk is too high, it becomes less visible, less understandable, because it is inescapable. Another reason for the difficulty of accumulating and sharing information, at least until the 1990s, is the priority of beating the communists. The discourse of emergency and national priority is not conducive to asking questions (as we can observe today in different ways).

The closing of the Weldon Springs plant coincided with the rise of environmental concerns in the USA and the change in environmental perspective had an impact on the categorization of places such as the Weldon Springs one, which became a Superfund site. This required a change in management at the department of energy because they started needing to have conversations and interactions with the public. This did not solve all the knowledge management problems however, because the measures put in place to deal with the injustices were insufficient compared to the nature of the events that had unfolded.

This is for multiple reasons. The first the nature of the risk means that the production of knowledge and regulations was complicated by a lack of understanding of the different medical pathways, conditions, and interactions which lead to the development of health problems. The number of people affected is also quite small, so the statistics may not appear to be significant. The second is the complexity of the accumulation of data in order to gain reparation and recognition, something which led to a movement to make the process more collective, in order to support the data finding and management process and make the knowledge of the administrative procedures consolidated. Finally, there were instances where the records of employee exposure were falsified, which meant that the access to this information was impossible.