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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! 

According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited in 52 publications, mostly pertaining to response to the Katrina disaster and the sociopolitical aftermath which is still affecting survivors to the present.

Emergency response is addressed in this article in two main ways. First, emergency response is referenced as one of the major demographics that would commonly suffer from mental disorders in the wake of a disaster. Second, emergency response and appropriate perperations are cited as being one of the best ways which can be employed to mitigate the risks of PTSD and MDD accross demographics.

I found the parts of the film regarding the initial investigation and the release fo marine corps documents on the internet to be most compelling, because this was the establishment of the proof that the corps knew fully about the potential health concerns at Camp Lejeune and actively covered it up and did nothing to improve the conditions until it was too late.

In this film, three groups of stakeholders are portrayed; doctors, patients, and mortality. The doctors depicted fight a loosing battle against aging, death, and terminal illness like cancer. They need to come to terms with the fact that they can't save everyone and they need to honor their patients wishes for how they want to conduct the end of their lives. The patients need to accept their impending death with the assistance of their doctors and advocate for how they want to conduct the end of their lives. And mortality is an object which is immaterial but ever present, and both doctors and patients need to learn how to grasp with it.

This policy was innitially well recieved and was quickly ratified by a number of countries with major nuclear capabilities. However after the Fukushima Disaster, this policy and other international policies were percieved by the public to be slow and inefficient in spreading vital information.

This article utilizes excerpts from interviews to illustrate the story narrative of an illness, showing how emotion and values are reflected in the creation of a "plot" of the narrative, and uses statistics and broader research to analize these stories from a broader, more societal perspective. 

The Red Cross opened a Red Cross R&D in 1961 to further existing research on blood component technology, blood safety, plasma-derived therapeutics, transfusion medicine, and biomedical science. Red Cross R&D has made accievements in the following areas, listed on their website:

• Developed a technique to freeze red blood cells, preserving their viability for up to 3 years, helping to ensure a steady supply of red cells for patients needing rare blood types. (1971)
• Contributed to the development of bar-coding for blood products. (1977)
• Developed procedures for large-scale purification of therapeutic blood proteins like gamma globulin and factor VIII. (1978)
• Collaborated with scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to define the window period—the length of time between infection with the virus and the earliest stage in infection that can be detected by a test—for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) following implementation of universal HIV testing of donor blood. (1994)
• Investigated the prevalence of blood-transmitted diseases like human T-lymphotropic virus-1 (HTLV-1) and Chagas disease, providing key data that led to implementation of testing for these diseases. (HTLV-1 in 1987, Chagas disease in 2008)
• Continue to facilitate improvements in bacterial testing of blood products.
• Investigated the role of antibodies in female-source plasma in causing transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI), leading to reduction in the incidence of TRALI by providing male-predominant plasma for transfusion. (2009)
• Modified height and weight restrictions for donors younger than 19, which has significantly reduced adverse reactions among young donors. (2009)