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As a participant in the NOLA Anthropocene Campus, I have gained insights on how communities, stewards, and managers of ecosystems in New Orleans have rolled out forms of interspecies care vis-à-vis ongoing environmental changes, coastal erosion, climate catastrophes and their deeply present and current effects (i.e., the 2010 BP oil disaster). Whilst much analytical lens has been given to geospatial changes in the study of the Anthropocene, here, I focus on how relations to non-human beings, also threatened by the changing tides of NOLA’s waterscapes, can enrich our understanding of such global transformations.

After disasters like Katrina, urban floodwaters harbored many hidden perils in the form of microbes that cause disease. Pathogenic bacterial exposure occurred when wastewater treatment plants and underground sewage got flooded, thus affecting the microbial landscape of New Orleans and increasing the potential of public health risks throughout Southern Louisiana. But one need not wait for a disaster event like Katrina to face these perils. Quotidian activities like decades of human waste and sewage pollution have contaminated public beaches now filled with lurking microbes. Even street puddle waters, such as those found on Bourbon Street, contain unsanitary bacteria level from years of close human exploitation of horses and inadequate drainage in 100-year old thoroughfares. More recently, microbial ecologies have also changed in the Gulf of Mexico due to the harnessing of energy resources like petroleum. Lush habitats for countless species are more and more in danger sounding the bells of extinction for the imperiled southern wild.

Human-alteration has severely damaged the wetland marshes and swamps that would have protected New Orleans from drowning in the water surge that Hurricane Katrina brought from the Gulf of Mexico. The latter is something that lifelong residents (i.e., indigenous coastal groups) of the Mississippi River Mouth have been pointing to for a  long time. Over the past century, the river delta’s “natural” infrastructure has been altered by the leveeing of the Mississippi River. Consequently, much of the silt and sediments that would generally run south and deposit in the river mouth to refeed the delta get siphoned off earlier upstream by various irrigation systems.

While some actors see it as a futile effort, there have been many proposals to restore the Mississippi River Delta. For instance, the aerial planting of mangrove seeds has even been recommended to help protect the struggling marshes and Louisiana’s coastal region. Tierra Resources, a wetland’s restoration company, proposed that bombing Lousiana’s coast with mangrove seeds could save it. Mangrove root systems are especially useful in providing structures to trap sediments and provide habitats for countless species. Additionally, mangroves have been touted as highly efficient species in carbon sequestration, thus taking carbon dioxide out of the biosphere.

Species diffusion into new environments has been of great concern for the different lifeways these soggy localities sustain, whether human or non-human. Many so-called “invasive species” have been identified throughout the river delta by researchers at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research hosted by Tulane and Xavier University. Such species have disrupted local ecological relations and practices and have had profound economic effects. Some plants have even entirely blocked waterways in the swamps and estuaries where salt and freshwater mix. 

Louisiana’s humid subtropical climate, and the diverse ecosystems therein, also warrant attention in that they can incubate some of the world’s deadliest parasites and other microbes. Of particular concern would be some of today's Neglected Tropical Diseases (i.e., Chagas, Cysticercosis, Dengue fever, Leishmaniasis, Schistosomiasis, Trachoma, Toxocariasis, and West Nile virus) often perceived as only affecting tropical regions of Latin America and revealing the enduring legacies of colonial health disparities.

How and when are seemingly quotidian events and upsets understood as not isolated but rather as produced in conjunction with other anthropocenics worldwide? What roles will interspecies relations and forms of care play as we cope with further anthropocenic agitation?

NOLA’s oldest tree, McDonogh Oak in City Park, 800 years old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK9YoGpng_c&t=0s

Other trees in New Orleans: https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/new-orleans-louisiana/trees

The argument is made using footage from the events occurring in Monrovia during the Ebola outbreak and subsequent months, which allows for the audience to truly understand the difficulties and horrors caused by disease. The film did not include much scientific data on the virus, only stating that 11,000 people had died and over twice that many had contracted the virus. Due to the public awareness of the Ebola epidemic, as it occurred so recently, and the graphic footage included, the film invokes feelings of horror and sadness for the many who couldn’t be helped.

• “Despite the urgency and impact of violence affecting health service delivery, there is an overall lack of research that is of health-specific, publically accessible and comparable, as well as a lack of gender-disaggregated data and data on perpetrator motives.”
• “Conclusions on violence in the healthcare setting are limited and it is difficult to examine whether or not certain sectors of aid work, such as health, are more dangerous than others. This has consequences for analyzing the drivers of violence. Within humanitarian communities and the media, and, to a lesser extent, within some sectors of academia, portrayals of violence directly affecting health service delivery in complex security environments often accentuate nebulous, macro-level factors such as the ‘shrinking humanitarian space,’”
• “increased collaboration in data collection and data sharing is essential, both between academics, human rights NGOs and organizations delivering health services and among representatives of the latter group. As part of this, aid organizations could do more to make their anonymized data public in order to support global responses on prevention and accountability”

Emergency response is not addressed in terms of the immediate response. The article focuses instead on the aftermath of the incident on Sept. 11th, dealing primarily with the cleanup efforts and investigation that followed in an effort to provide closure to the public and resume the regular business of the city, both important steps in recovering from a disaster.

The article has not been referenced extensively, as it is focused on a very specific topic. However the ideas presented in the article, and by extension the ideas presented in the book have been included in other papers including some of the author's later works.

The article focuses on the lasting effects of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent years of rebuilding that never fully repaired the communities and lives destroyed. The authors attribute a lasting sense of displacement to the treatment of survivors directly after the destruction of New Orleans, and the subsequent failures of the government to effectively support displaced survivors.

The organization does have extensive data collected from its members on the number of veterans, what kinds of injuries they are facing, and the level of success in rehabilitation among other topics.

The study aimed to discover new or more effective methods of studying long term effects of exposure to toxic agents. It describes the new insights including the effectiveness of simple studies, ensuring control groups, and methods to do research by using ecological aspects or involving the community in places where medical researchers are not entirely trusted.