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I am currently in the process of transitioning my M.A. level course on Science, Technology, and Development with 11 students to virtual instruction. One of my interests in engaging with COVID-19 is to examine how it (should) informs development ideologies and practices. How should students of development studies retool -- conceptually, methodologically, practically -- in wake of the pandemic?

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?

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?

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?

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?

As a participant in the NOLA Anthropocene Campus, I have gained insights on how communities, stewards, and managers of ecosystems in New Orleans have rolled out forms of interspecies care vis-à-vis ongoing environmental changes, coastal erosion, climate catastrophes and their deeply present and current effects (i.e., the 2010 BP oil disaster). Whilst much analytical lens has been given to geospatial changes in the study of the Anthropocene, here, I focus on how relations to non-human beings, also threatened by the changing tides of NOLA’s waterscapes, can enrich our understanding of such global transformations.

After disasters like Katrina, urban floodwaters harbored many hidden perils in the form of microbes that cause disease. Pathogenic bacterial exposure occurred when wastewater treatment plants and underground sewage got flooded, thus affecting the microbial landscape of New Orleans and increasing the potential of public health risks throughout Southern Louisiana. But one need not wait for a disaster event like Katrina to face these perils. Quotidian activities like decades of human waste and sewage pollution have contaminated public beaches now filled with lurking microbes. Even street puddle waters, such as those found on Bourbon Street, contain unsanitary bacteria level from years of close human exploitation of horses and inadequate drainage in 100-year old thoroughfares. More recently, microbial ecologies have also changed in the Gulf of Mexico due to the harnessing of energy resources like petroleum. Lush habitats for countless species are more and more in danger sounding the bells of extinction for the imperiled southern wild.

Human-alteration has severely damaged the wetland marshes and swamps that would have protected New Orleans from drowning in the water surge that Hurricane Katrina brought from the Gulf of Mexico. The latter is something that lifelong residents (i.e., indigenous coastal groups) of the Mississippi River Mouth have been pointing to for a  long time. Over the past century, the river delta’s “natural” infrastructure has been altered by the leveeing of the Mississippi River. Consequently, much of the silt and sediments that would generally run south and deposit in the river mouth to refeed the delta get siphoned off earlier upstream by various irrigation systems.

While some actors see it as a futile effort, there have been many proposals to restore the Mississippi River Delta. For instance, the aerial planting of mangrove seeds has even been recommended to help protect the struggling marshes and Louisiana’s coastal region. Tierra Resources, a wetland’s restoration company, proposed that bombing Lousiana’s coast with mangrove seeds could save it. Mangrove root systems are especially useful in providing structures to trap sediments and provide habitats for countless species. Additionally, mangroves have been touted as highly efficient species in carbon sequestration, thus taking carbon dioxide out of the biosphere.

Species diffusion into new environments has been of great concern for the different lifeways these soggy localities sustain, whether human or non-human. Many so-called “invasive species” have been identified throughout the river delta by researchers at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research hosted by Tulane and Xavier University. Such species have disrupted local ecological relations and practices and have had profound economic effects. Some plants have even entirely blocked waterways in the swamps and estuaries where salt and freshwater mix. 

Louisiana’s humid subtropical climate, and the diverse ecosystems therein, also warrant attention in that they can incubate some of the world’s deadliest parasites and other microbes. Of particular concern would be some of today's Neglected Tropical Diseases (i.e., Chagas, Cysticercosis, Dengue fever, Leishmaniasis, Schistosomiasis, Trachoma, Toxocariasis, and West Nile virus) often perceived as only affecting tropical regions of Latin America and revealing the enduring legacies of colonial health disparities.

How and when are seemingly quotidian events and upsets understood as not isolated but rather as produced in conjunction with other anthropocenics worldwide? What roles will interspecies relations and forms of care play as we cope with further anthropocenic agitation?

NOLA’s oldest tree, McDonogh Oak in City Park, 800 years old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK9YoGpng_c&t=0s

Other trees in New Orleans: https://www.atlasobscura.com/things-to-do/new-orleans-louisiana/trees