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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! 

1. “…large­-scale social forces—racism, gender inequality, poverty, political violence and war, and sometimes the very policies that address them—often determine who falls ill and who has access to care.”
2. "the holy grail of modern medicine remains the search for the molecular basis of disease."
3. "In some senses, the model is simple: clinical and community barriers to care are removed as diagnosis and treatment are declared a public good and made available free of charge to patients living in poverty."
4. "The poor are the natural constituents of public health, and physicians ... are the natural attourneys of the poor."

Almost all of the references cited in the bibliography were taken from Google Scholar, implying that the authors used this database to collaborate on the article through the internet. Many of the articles cited were from Paul Farmer's own works, so he also seems like the main contributor to the article.  

1. I first looked up travel to and from Liberia during the Ebola outbreak, since it had been seized. There was a ban, which has since been lifted after, but people coming to and from West Africa are still screened and recommended to visit physicians. As of mid-2015 there wa still a 21 day monitoring period needed. http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2015/05/cdc-downgrades-travel…'
2. I was interested if there had been any progress on treatment for Ebola, but found that the main form of treatment is supportive care. Doctors are informed to provide IV fluid and ensure that the patient's immune response and other bodily functions are functioning properly. A vaccine is being worked on but has not gone through a trial to prove safety and effectiveness. https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/treatment/index.html
3. I looked further into the vaccine being produced for Ebola. Currently, there is a combined phase 2 and phase 3 trial occurring in Sierra Leone called STRIVE (Sierra Leone Trial to Introduce a Vaccine against Ebola). The study is unblinded, so patients know whether or not they have received the vaccine. The vaccine is a rVSV-ZEBOV, or recombinant Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Zaire ebolavirus vaccine. This vaccine is also being used in phase 2 and phase 3 trials in Guinea and Liberia http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/strive/qa.html

Emergency response was addressed in IV. Global Health and Emergency Response. They discussed how organizations have different approaches to emergency response, either going for preparedness (WHO), immediate mitigation (humanitarian organizations), or management of global health threats (Gates Foundation). Short term solutions (emergency response) are much more common while preparedness-based solutions to prevent emergencies or minimize risks are often not funded and difficult to maintain due to the social/economic/ international issues that would need to be addressed.

The federal government funds OSHA.

The college offers undergraduate major and minor programs in emergency preparedness, homeland security, and cybersecurity. The major requires 39 credits and 12 in a concentration field while the minor requires 18 credits (6 classes) within the college. They also offer a graduate certificate in emergency preparedness, homeland security, and cybersecurity.

The convention in 1951 was a response to WW2 and the vast amounts of refugees that existed as a result. States involved in the convention and the UN could decide to apply it to refugees not necessarily from WW2, but in 1967, the limits were removed and made it so that it could apply to any refugees, not just those from WW2. It has since been used during major refugee crises in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. 

The study is in the Annual Review of Public Health. This is just one journal out of many Annual Reviews; the studies/ topics published are solely related to public health, such as epidemiology, biostatistics, and health services. Health professionals use the Annual Review to look at major articles in Public Health, for research, and for teaching.