Search

In 1993 near my city, Cuenca - Ecuador, it ocurred maybe the biggest disaster that we have expirienced, we called it "La Josefina". A mountain collapsed, due to legal and illegal mining, and it completely blocked a river. Quickly the water of the river started to flood the surrondings, there was the fear of the big city of the region, Cuenca, being also flooded, a lot of homes, forests and bridges were lost, and it caused a huge impact in many families that lost everything, 150 lives were lost. But one particular story always came to my mind when I hear about this disaster: a man, called Walter Sánchez, saved his house because he carefully looked up his construction and he felt that he could make his house float, he was not an engineer, or architect, he didn't have college education, but he, with help of his friends and familiy, gathered tens of empty barrils, attached to the bottom of the house -his house was mainly wood and was screwed to the floor- , and at the end, when the water came and flooded the terrain his house floated and was saved. Here is a post of BBC in spanish about this event.

This came to my mind because sometimes we think that the fight against Climate Change is expensive and as the most part of the world is poor, and those are the ones who suffer more the consequences, the fight is lost. But all over the world there is people that in order to safe their lives and personal belongings have witty and ingenious ideas low-cost. Elizabeth English had one of those ideas in 2007, she is an architect that was concerned about how to help people in New Orleans to survive and don't lose anything in future Hurricanes, she knew about the procedure in Netherlands for allowing houses to float but it was way to expensive to the population because it meant, actually rebuilt the house, and even if someone wanted to rebuilt his/hers home, it was way to expensive. She decided to create an alternative and founded the non-profit  Buoyant Foundation Project. You can read more about these "Anphibious Homes" here. 

The Guardian published in may this year an investigation about Reserve, best known as "Cancer Alley", a town 40 minutes in car away from New Orleans, it has gained this grim nickname because as Lousiana having the most toxic air from US (EPA's 2014 report) this town has the most toxic air from the State, so a person living in this town has 50 times more risk of developing cancer than in other towns of US. Even if this investigation is not about New Orleans, the town is really near, and as we know, pollution travels, being the River Mississipi an important contributor for movilizing the pollution through its way and also the air. Not only the town has been ignored by authorities and media coverage, also the inhabitants recount that this negligence is part of the history of the area, where their ancesters where enslaved by the rich and powerful, and in the present Denka factory is slowly killing them:

For many African Americans in Reserve, including Hampton, who trace their ancestry back to slavery in the area – the reminder of past atrocities is made even starker by knowing what the land has been used for since. “When you think about it, nothing has ever really changed,” she says. “First slavery, then sharecropping, now this. It’s just a new way of doing it.”

Cancer is not the only disease that haunts the residents of Reserve, others illness has been ocurring like  – gastroparesis – a rare intestinal disease linked to air pollution made principally by chloroprene. EPA has also failed the people, because as chloroprene is mainly produced in this part of the country, there is no intention to develop a legally enforceable standard for this toxin. As The Guardian points out, this decision leaves the residents completely disarmed, as they were not expecting anything anymore of State governement, they expected a lot of the Federal Governement that has alwasys helped African American communities when the local governement has failed. I believe this is a clear example of "enviromental racism" and we rely againg in an EPA-funded research that shows how poor towns are more likely to be more polluted and forgotten.

I found this summary (Sinking into the Anthropocene: New Orleans nature writing) of a visit to New Orleans made by a group of young writers, and what surprised me was their preocupation and insistence in linking the problems and even the nice or "typical" touristics things and landscapes of the city to the ongoing Anthropocene and Climate Change. Is just a piece of exercise of a collaborative writing and the approach to the topic is made by classical anglophone writers, Mary and Percy Shelley among others are quoted, but they talk about important issues like the Sinking, the Chemical Horizon andDaily Commutes. I leave an extract of the text to encourage its reading:

One sculpture that struck the class was an assemblage of tall slabs of glass towering from the grass: Mirror Labyrinth by Jeppe Hein. This is a tri-spiral maze of mirrors that reflect anything and everything the entering viewer sees. This piece conjured the feeling of a funhouse as we stumbled our way through, titillated by sudden sensations of disorientation. But thinking about this sculpture alongside the city’s ongoing gentrification and expansion, in tandem with denial of ecological realities and political resistance to enact real social justice, we could not help but think more along the lines of Cormac McCarthy’s use of the word “funhouse” in his novel The Road: “the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk.” What is new here, now, cannot help but intimate a post-apocalyptic ruin to come.

Based on what I have found thus far regarding narratives surrounding the socioeconomic state of New Orleans, there are two predominant ones I have come across: New Orleans as the “laggard,” the city of play but not work, of poor educational quality, and the other of New Orleans as a "comeback" city shaping to a knowledge-based economy following Hurricane Katrina. The former reminds me of racist stereotypes typically used to describe groups of people deemed not to fit within the white supremacist narrative of progress. The other, post-Hurricane Katrina narrative, is portrayed in the media as a phoenix rising from the ashes, one of the “most rapid and dramatic economic turnarounds in recent American history.” I felt an almost visceral reaction to the assertion of one article that “It would be wrong to say the hurricane destroyed New Orleans public schools, because there was so little worth saving even before the storm hit.” I cannot help but be reminded of “terra nullius,” the “empty land” narrative implemented by colonial powers to seize and control land, dismissing the people residing on the land as insignificant to their broader aim of economic and political dominance. In place of public schools, charter schools are perceived as an improvement—but what of the people who were displaced due to the storm and long to return, yet cannot afford to send their children to a charter school and would be forced to bus their kids across the city? Many people end up not returning to New Orleans as a result. I find it interesting to compare these pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina narratives of New Orleans with the information I find from sources such as this one: a shrinking African American population, fewer young people, less affordable housing, increased segregation, etcetera. What do these demographic changes in the city imply for the “ecosystem” deemed ideal for Innovation hubs? As this article asserts, “New Orleans is making a big name for itself among innovative industries and entrepreneurs and the city’s unique vibe plays a big role in that.” On the other hand, City Councilmember Kristen Palmer asserts that “People have been consistently pushed out…If we lose our people and our culture, we lose our city.” What implication does this “burst” in innovation in New Orleans have for both the Anthropocenics of the city as well as its culture, a culture that is stereotyped as one long “party” with intermittent “emptiness,” as opposed to the realities of the people who have resided in the city for generations, or even the people who moved away after the Hurricane and long to return but to no avail? I am curious to see how education, job training (or lack thereof), and issues of housing feed into the anthropocenics of the city. How do grassroots, social justice and environmentalist activists and organizations (such as this one) perceive the changes in the city following the Hurricane compared to innovation hub technicians and CEOs? How do the social and environmental outcomes of Hurricane Katrina fit within the history of "natural" disasters and climate change in New Orleans? I think it is important to keep articles such as this one central to our focus as we move forward with this project.

I’m interested in how universities, cities, and corporations develop the physical embodiment of the knowledge economy in U.S. city centers in an attempt to foster global connections, and the effect this tends to have on historically black and brown communities. What I find interesting about New Orleans is the manner in which following Hurricane Katrina (which some allege was a human-made disaster), gentrification of the city was spurred on, particularly as predominantly young, white people seeking to work in tech start-ups and corporations moved in to what is deemed yet another potential site for “Innovation.” This made room for corporations and richer residents to move in at the expense of working-class neighborhoods . As council member James Gray argued, “The area desperately needs activity and development…if the city of New Orleans is going to recover, if the Lower Ninth is going to recover- we need development. We cannot turn it away.” I came across an advertisement for an event hosted by INNO that will be held in New Orleans for a “global innovation conference” whereby innovators can “forge the connections that matter.” While I am in the preliminary stages of my research in Houston regarding the Innovation District being built in Midtown Houston, I see astonishing parallels with New Orleans and similar questions arise. Many of the employees at tech companies I have interviewed thus far speak of the notion of the “ecosystem”: the confluence of higher educational institutions, cities, corporations, and start-ups that provides the ideal environment for businesses to thrive and innovation to flourish. However, who is included in this ecosystem and who is left out? What implications (if any) does the use of such environmental terms (ecosystem) to describe innovation economies have for the anthropocene? What does innovation mean and who does it benefit? How do these innovation districts and corridors potentially exacerbate racial inequity in the city, even as they claim to be working for the benefit of all? How do infrastructural neglect and gentrification contribute to health, educational, economic, and environmental disparities, and will innovation in any way seek to address these issues, or merely perpetuate the status quo?

I'm also interested in the narratives that arise surrounding natural disasters, particularly the linear fashion in which events are described. There is a beginning, middle, and end supposedly: but what about before and after, and what about the reoccurence of these disasters? In what ways do these narratives leave out the stories of people who did not get to see the "silver lining" of a disaster? Who did not get to witness the rebuilding of the city? Many of those people moved to Houston and went through another hurricane, Hurricane Harvey. It would be interesting to trace the connections between these two cities. 

Finally, in relation to the topic of slavery, I am interested in the surge of conversations surrounding reparations, particularly in New Orleans and Houston in light of the uneven effects of hurricanes on certain populations. I am intrigued both by memorialization of slavery as well as attempts by elected officials such as Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston and celebrities such as Danny Glover to conduct research (bill H.R. 40) on how to compensate for the U.S.'s history and presence of slavery and racism.