Search

Main argument

Anonymous (not verified)
In response to
Lee argues that EJ practice has long stagnated over an inability to properly define the concept of disproportionate (environmental and public health) impacts, but that national conversations on system racism and the development of EJ mapping tools have improved his outlook on the potential for better application of the concept of disproportionate impact. Lee identifies mapping tools (e.g. CalEnviroScreen) as a pathway for empirically based and analytically rigorous articulation and analysis of disproportionate impacts that are linked to systemic racism. In describing the scope and nature of application of mapping tools, Baker highlights the concept of cumulative impacts (the concentration of multiple environmental, public health, and social stressors), the importance of public participation (e.g. Hoffman’s community science model), the role of redlining in creating disproportionate vulnerabilities, and the importance of integrating research into decision making processes. Baker ultimately argues that mapping tools offer a promising opportunity for integrating research into policy decision making as part of a second generation of EJ practice. Key areas that Lee identifies as important to the continued development of more effective EJ practice include: identifying good models for quantitative studies and analysis, assembling a spectrum of different integrative approaches (to fit different contexts), connecting EJ research to policy implications, and being attentive to historical contexts and processes that produce/reproduce structural inequities.

Tanya Matthan: environmental justice and epistemic violence

tanyamatthan
Annotation of
In response to

In their introduction, Vermeylen's argument for a particularist and decolonial approach to justice through a recognition of plural ontologies and epistemologies that decenters Western liberal discourse and its theory of justice. How does bringing the lens of coloniality into environmental justice literature alter our visions of energy futures? Can we make appeals to environmental justice without recourse to liberal theories of individual rights and property ownership? More specifically, I am wondering how our team can study and address this dynamic plurality of ways of understanding and experiencing in/justice in this site, and how can we engage this plurality in productive ways? What axes of difference and inequality should we be looking for/at (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, citizenship, housing status, etc)? If the Anthropocene is coloniality by another name, how can we foreground this in our approach?

Tanya Matthan: BRT and envt justice

tanyamatthan
Annotation of
In response to

The authors productively place three bodies of theory in conversation, abolitionist theories, urban political ecology, and decolonial theory, to rewrite the intellectual trajectories of EJ as extending the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition. What are our intellectual and political genealogies as students and researchers of the quotidian anthropocene? What genealogies are we pushing against? Drawing from their examples of spaces and historical moments of interracial solidarity, what kinds of coalitions do we see ourselves partnering with and contributing to as (largely?) newcomers to the activism in Austin?

Tanya Matthan: envtl politics of reproduction

tanyamatthan
Annotation of
In response to

In this fascinating review, the authors show how environmental justice is reproductive justice (following the water protectors at Standing Rock) and how this intersection reshapes understandings of the environment, embodiment, and exposure. I was particularly interested in the concepts of social and cultural re/production, and how we might think about this in light of Austin's rapid gentrification. They discuss an intersectional approach as a multi-scalar approach, from climate change to chemical exposure in the home - and I think this could be extended to a inter/multi-generational approach to justice (esp given our focus on renewables). The authors show how the RJ framework rethinks the individualism of reproductive choice as the right to conceive and bear children in conditions of social justice and human flourishing - then how does the current energy system (and future energy transitions) negate or create these conditions, and for whom? If we think about biological/cultural reproduction, how do we also incorporate the concept of reproductive labor into our analysis? Finally, I think they make an important point about the harms of documentation, and it would be great to hear everyone's thoughts (Esp those who have participated in earlier field campuses) on what the goal and ethics of our knowledge production are?

Tanya Matthan: Walsh and Austin's environmental history

tanyamatthan
Annotation of
In response to

Walsh's piece gives us a concise history and geography of environmental racism in Austin, by drawing our attention to how ineequality is written into city law and urban planning. The ongoing legacies of segregation have shaped social life from access to public services to access to recreational spaces. Given the foundations of environmental racism in zoning laws and land use regulations, so succinctly highlighted by Walsh, how does/must the process of energy transition address these issues? Can there be zoning for justice, and what would that look like? In what way can our work at the field campus contribute to the existing work being done by orgs like El Pueblo and PODER?

Elena Sobrino: anti-carceral anthropocenics

elena
Annotation of
In response to

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.

Elena Sobrino: toxic capitalism

elena
Annotation of
In response to

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 referenced media source is missing and needs to be re-embedded.

pece_annotation_1476141101

Anonymous (not verified)
Annotation of
In response to
" Then, after the scale of the disaster had sunk in and victims began to realize they were barred by the local and federal authorities from returning home, another kind of trauma set in. Families had to find a place to live, a way to replace lost income, a place for their children to go to school, a way to obtain their prescription medications and telephones, a way to pay mounting unpaid bills for homes they no longer inhabited. Without their personal documents, they had to try to track insurance policies, if they had them, bank accounts, and health records, to begin the slow process of accessing government or insurance funds to help pay for their displacement and their hoped-for recovery. The reality of how much had been destroyed, not just in personal physical property but in whole communities, whole ways of life, had just begun to be felt" "The ongoing conditions of displacement have prompted some to report that, despite the length of time since the actual disaster, New Orleans is still in a state of “responding” rather than “recovery.”4 This ongoing predicament is key to understanding that what we are calling “chronic disaster syndrome” is different from posttraumatic stress disorder, in which traumatic events are isolated in time and symptoms are related to events in the past. In the case of Katrina displacement, conditions that are traumatic continue; they are ongoing. " " “Cleaning up the mess” in this case included a deliberate effort to get rid of the poorest sectors of the population, who were seen as a drain on public resources— those who lived in public housing. The notion that subverting support for public-sector recovery and using disaster to enrich private contractors by evicting and “erasing” the poor were part of a deliberate plan was affirmed for residents when they heard one of their state lawmakers say, in regard to the loss of public housing from the storms and flooding, that “God did what we could not do.""