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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

The web platform was made for socail scientists and ebola control workers, so that they had a way to communicate, share stories, and review information from other cases. They also serve as an advisor in this way, for the responders as well as volunteer organizations going abroad to help.

Scott Gabriel Knowles is an associate professor of history at Drexel Univeristy, as well as the director at the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry in the Pennoni Honors College. These postitions show his knowledge in areas of history and investigavion, as he discusses in this article

Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and sociologist. He was a doctor trained in internal medicine and public health, and has taken to working on humanitarian projects. He writes this article from this combination perspective - with a medical background as well as anthropology and sociology experience. He focuses more on his position and knowledge of the latter, as he writes with with politics and humanitiarianism in mind

This study has been cited in several other articles and studies that look at disaster and intimate partner violence. Some focus on specific areas such as costal regions, others bring in other factors such as depression.

This article was primarily supported by it's cited work. It combined and summarized many research reports and other articles. They broke it down into sections that flowed in a reasonable manner and supported each statement with a reference number.

"Among inhabitants of Kyiv and other urban centers, there is a growing consensus that the invalids are "parasites of the state, dam aging the economy, not paying taxes." Many youths who had been evacuated from the zone do not want to be associated with groups of sufferers as this association makes it more difficult for them to find employment.

"Another administrator who authenticated com pensation claims told me illnesses had become a form of currency. "There are a lot of people out of work," he said. "People don't have enough money to eat. The state doesn't give medicines for free anymore. Drug stores are commercialized." He likened his work to that of a bank. "The diagnosis we write is money.""

"Symon Lavrov, was well-regarded internationally for having developed computerized fallout models and calculating population-wide doses in the post-Soviet period. He told me, how ever, that "when a crying mother comes to my laboratory and asks me, Professor Lavrov, 'tell me what's wrong with my child?' I assign her a dose and say nothing more. I double it, as much as I can." The offer of a higher dose increased the likelihood that the mother would be able to secure social protection on account of her potentially sick child.""