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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! 

The article notes the U.N.'s role in the cholera epidemic that killed thousands of Haitians and government and societal factors that lead to Haiti's lack of major improvement after the earthquake. Another public health issue that was mentioned was, "the only part of the Haitian government that receives direct funding from the U.S. government, the Health Ministry, has racked up impressive post-earthquake gains in childhood vaccination rates and access to lifesaving HIV treatment". 

The report addresses how strained public health infrastructures can get in the face of large scale epidemics like in the ebola outbreak. It analyzes the responses of local government, health care workers, and MSF in the ebola outbreak, discussing what could have been done to prevent the spread and severity of the disease.

Research came from newspaper articles, surviving letters, and other texts were used to produce the argument in the report regarding disaster investigation.

The article describes the situation in post-Katrina New Orleans as one where trauma is constantly happening and more work is going into emergency response than recovery. Instead of construction workers, social workers and the like, the military was sent by the government for aid after Katrina. 

The main findings in this article is the phenomenon of "biological citizenship" that occurred in the Ukraine after the Chernobyl disaster, how "scientific cooperation and political management" developed, and how sociopolitical factors affect the course of health and disease in a country. 

The parts of the film that I found most persuasive and compelling were Atul Gawande's personal experience. As both a surgeon and son, he has the unique viewpoint of being the one to be the bearer of bad news and be the one to accept his father's mortality as his cancer progressed. Gawande gives rational and emotional parts of end-of-life care, and is able to learn new ways of handling mortality as a healthcare provider and a human. 

The main arguments in the article are that globalization has created new threats to the public health and security on a global scale, with biological threats the foremost concern. "Biosecurity" is the goal, which looks at public health preparedness at all levels (local, national, international, global) with four domains: "emerging infectious disease; bioterrorism; the cutting-edge life sciences; and food safety." Despite increasing defenses and plans for current threats, the article notes that we need to become better at predicting new threats and identifying risks to biosecurity while adapting to changing political, environmental and infrastructure factors that create difficult ethical decisions.