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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! 

Emergency response is not directly addressed in this article, however there is likely some emergency response occuring in the countries that are needing the humanitarian aid. Hopefully the first responders there are well trained in responding to victims of sexual assault if that is something that they see more often, if it is something that people would call an ambulance for in those areas.

The main point is the lack of justice for Haiti in this rebuild process. They got huge amounts of dontions from all over the world in hopes of rebuilding the country to be better than it was. Insead, the vast majority of the money is not being spent in the right ways, and much of the spending is not being done in the most economical ways. The ways that the companies are going about rebuilding is much more wasteful than it has to be, thus using more of the money and preventing it from going as far as it could.  Additionally, the UN has created a cholera epidemic in Haiti and is not being held accountable for cleaning it up.

It doesn't cover many people that openly do have insurance, nor does it interview the healthcare providers outside of the ER, like the PCPs, the recovery facilities, etc.

" For decades, those who study the determinants of disease have known that social or structural forces account for most epidemic disease. But truisms such as “poverty is the root cause of tuberculosis” have not led us very far. While we do not yet have a curative prescription for poverty, we do know how to cure TB."

"The debate about whether to focus on proximal versus distal interventions, or similar debates about how best to use scarce resources, is as old as medicine itself. But there is little compelling evidence that we must make such either/or choices: distal and proximal interventions are complementary, not competing"

" By insisting that our services be delivered equitably, even physicians who work on the distal interventions characteristic of clinical medicine have much to contribute to reducing the toll of structural violence"