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Ecuador Acidification

This PECE essay details the quotidian anthropocene in Ecuador utilizing the Questioning Quotidian Anthropocenes analytic developed for the Open Seminar River School.

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michael.lee
  • "Until the early 1990s, illness was used as grounds for seeking a residence permit in only exceptional cases. Ten years later, the health criterion had become one of the primary grounds for legalization, and one that was increasing most rapidly."
  • “The compassion protocol is thus a procedure of the last resort that derives from a form of sympathy evoked in the face of suffering. It demands the right to keep alive individuals who have nothing except their mere existence."
  • “Sometimes the foreigner, too, is no more than his body, but this body is no longer the same: useless to the political economy, it now finds its place in a new moral economy that values suffering over labor and compassion more than rights.”

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michael.lee
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Natural disasters are the first type of disaster that comes to mind when assessing FEMA's response efforts, but the organization is also concerned with response to acts of terrorism, acts of war by a foreign nation, and other manmade disasters. That being said, FEMA was heavily criticized for its response during and after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. 

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michael.lee

"These initiatives build on a growing perception among diverse actors — life scientists and public health officials, policymakers and security analysts — that new biological threats challenge existing ways of understanding and managing collective health and security. From the vantage point of such actors, the global scale of these threats crosses and confounds the boundaries of existing regulatory jurisdictions. Moreover, their pathogenicity and mutability pushes the limits of current technical capacities to detect and treat disease."

"However, the ideal of dual use faces many difficulties, in part because public health professionals often do not agree with security experts about which problems deserve attention, and how interventions should be implemented. Such disagreements point to broader tensions provoked by the current intersection of public health and national security. Public health officials and national security experts promoting preparedness strategies have very different ways of evaluating threats and responses. As a result, programs that depend on coordination between these groups may often founder."

"The report defines emerging disease as one among a number of new threats to security that 'do not stem from the actions of clearly defined individual states but from diffuse issues that transcend sovereign borders and bear directly on the effects of increasing globalization that challenge extant frameworks for thinking about national and international security.' Proposed responses to this new 'global threat' have come from various kinds of organizations, with diverse agendas."

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michael.lee

OSHA is a part of the United States Department of Labor and is overseen by the Secretary of Labor. The chief administrator of OSHA is the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, who is supported by a Chief of Staff and several Senior Advisors. The Assistant Secretary oversees two Deputy Assistant Secretaries who supervises various directors and administrators. The full organization chart can be found on the OSHA website.