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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

Sonja D. Schmid is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech. Her area of expertise is in the history of technology, science and technology policy, and social studies of risk. Specifically, Schmid researches the history and the organization of nuclear industries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. With respect to emergency response, Schmid has studied how agencies and personel have responded to nuclear disasters.

A recent article Schmid has written: Schmid, Sonja D. "What If There's a next Time? Preparedness after Chernobyl and Fukushima - A European-American Response." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. N.p., 01 July 2016. Web. 05 Sept. 2016.

I looked further into governmental relief policies  after disasters, mental health policies in regard to emergencies, and New Orleans current state. 

This study was funded by Grants-in-aid for the Cancer Control Policy from the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan.

Miriam Ticktin received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Ticktin is now an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility. 

Paul Farmer is an American physician and anthropologist who is known for providing appropriate healthcare in under developed regions and developing countries. Farmer is situated in emergency response in that he is a physician providing care to those in need and works toward ensuring that people will have access to healthcare despite socioeconomic conditions. Bruce Nizeye works alongside Farmer and specializes in TB infection control in Rwanda. Sara Stulac is a physician who specializes in women’s and children’s healthcare. Her focus has included pediatric HIV prevention and treatment, malnutrition care, inpatient pediatrics and neonatology, and pediatric oncology and other non-communicable disease treatment. Salmaan Keshavjee is a physician who specializes in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and in providing access to healthcare in poverty stricken regions. 

In addition to this article I looked up more information about WHO, drug-resistant TB, and biological terrorism. 

"Clashes over authority among powerful institutions both public and private, competition among rival experts for influence, inquiry into a disaster elevated to the status of a memorial for the dead: these are the base elements of the World Trade Center investigation. And yet, even a brief historical review shows us that these elements are not unique.""Notions of public responsibility for private safety were highly evolved by this time, hence the fact that a coroner's inquest indicted Mayor Harrison and a full slate of city officials for complicity in the deaths of the Iroquois victims."

"The most bizarre, and perhaps most telling, moment in the hearing occurred when Rep Anthony D. Weiner of New York, addressing the panel of experts, asked for the person in charge of the investigation to raise his hand. When three hands went up..."