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This gas leak took place in Bhopal, India and I think that the location has an important impact on the aftermath of the situation. After the gas leaked people protested to be compensated for their lost ones but many died before they were able to be justified. I feel that if this happened in America, circumstances would have been different, there would have been more media coverage, and action would be taken more swiftly. The location of this occurrence had an impact with how it was handled after and if it had occurred some place else then it would have been different. 

This film focuses on the environmental and social problem of having large gas (lethal) plants near cities or other populated areas where people can be harmed. Environmentally these gasses are no good because they are emitted into the air and are very soluble in the water which leads to ocean acidification. Ocean acidification makes it so that the ocean has a lower pH level, this can harm marine wildlife. Socially, the gas is toxic to people and as seen in the Bhopal tragedy, it can kill people or severely alter their lives. This could be seen through the immediate deaths of civilians, deformities of children born after the incident, and the families affected even years after hoping for justice.

From watching the video, I feel affected emotionally because it was definitely hard to watch so many people die, especially the innocent children. It is a hard pill to swallow to watch the lives of so many people taken away from them so unexpectedly in their own homes. I feel affected by seeing the photo of the unknown child because it was hauntingly touching as it was for so many people that advocated for justice after this tragedy. It was also really daunting seeing so many people being buried and burned in mass because they were not granted the ability to be respectfully honored for their death which I think is something very valuable. Intellectually I think that this film made me think about how this tragedy could have been possibly prevented if the plant had been maintained and checked up on regularly or if the plant wasn’t so close to a whole city in the first place. And I also feel gratitude to those who are still advocating for justice for the victims and trying to get people with government power to make that change.

Might movement, both forced and voluntary, be a defining characteristic of the anthropocene? If not, where might this quality find a home within the analytic questions? 

In preparation for the field school I am reading Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. Chapter 1, 'Feet', tells the history of the forced migration of slaves from northern coastal plantation colonies to the south. Men and Women, chained together by iron were forced to walk in coffles to South Carolina or Georgia. As Baptist writes 

Men of the chain couldn’t act as individuals; nor could they act as a collective, except by moving forward in one direction. Even this took some learning. Stumble, and one dragged someone else lurching down by the padlock dangling from his throat. Many bruised legs and bruised tempers later, they would become one long file moving at the same speed, the same rhythm, no longer swinging linked hands in the wrong direction (25).

One of the arguments presented in this book is that American capitalism, as we know it today, would be impossible without the the foundations put in place by slave labor. The early chapters also make clear that forced migration, the movement and redistribution of enslaved persons, allowed for the southern states to expand agricultural production and increase white wealth. This eventual transformation of land and capital was predicated on the movement of peoples from one place to another, and as the passage above suggests, this movement had a rhythm, a timbre, a musical modality. 

I contrast this with Zenia Kish's article "My FEMA People": Hip-hop as disaster recovery in Katrina Diaspora where she argues that the music that emerged following Katrina was the first time American hip-hop engaged with "the thematic of contemporary black migration as a mass phenomenon in any significant way" (674). This article also draws attention to the rhythms of post Katrina life; the call and response of Bounce, the vibrations of trauma. Although lyrical expression proved the most potent way for artists to narrate the impact of environmental change and political neglect, the music itself was borne out of the experience of moving through and with disaster. 

Both writings point to the importance of further exploring the rhythms of mobilities as they relate to environmental transformations. I'm struggling to see where this point of inquiry maps to the analytic questions and may be worth some further exploration. 

Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books. New York. (2014)

Kish, Zenia. “"My FEMA People ": Hip-Hop as Disaster Recovery in the Katrina Diaspora.” American Quarterly. 61, no. 3 (2009): 671–92.

META: Water seems to be one important medium through which NOLA envisions the “impacts” of the Anthropocene—scarcity, abundance, temporalities and spatial distributions, management of, and hazards that emerge in its context. Less is said about the causal or attributional aspects of the Anthropocene. How might water function as an entry point into the assemblages of local anthropocenics?

I found the NOLA Hazard Mitigation Plan for 2018, which frames the impacts of the Anthropocene as an intersection of weather extremes amid climate change and evolving vulnerabilities of its people. Four of seven items in the executive summary note water as central to local interventions: flood awareness, flood repair, flood mitigation, flood infrastructure. Too much water or water in the wrong places and the aftereffect of water on infrastructure and lives. One expression, then, is preparedness.

MACRO: Mitigation is an interesting analytic for the Anthropocene. In the US mitigation plans are shaped by the 1988 Stafford Act (which amended the 1974 Disaster Relief Act). Constraints on communities come through rules, regulations, policies, (dis)incentives, and surveillance by state and federal authorities. Much of this is bound by economic and administrative discourses.

Goals are set in this document—broken out by timelines, activities, priorities, and capabilities. Another expression is classification of anthropocenics by subfields and accounting metrics. How do we measure progress and what is deferred to the future, 5-10 years out from today, a goal that has no tangible accountability but is named and acknowledged. What are the practices of naming, responsibility, and making (in)visible in the Anthropocene?

BIO: One new initiative, Ready for Rain, in particular is of interest to me as it highlights the more neoliberal vision for how the public should self-regulate risk and mitigate harm. I hear this as an extension of a government agency program to make the nation Weather Ready. Other bullets highlight “green” buildings, energies, and infrastructures. These could be examples of how the city envisions the Anthropocene feedback loop of humans changing/planning for climate alterations, which is a fairly typical lens.

Some questions: What does the water do? What does the water know? If we trace water in all its instantiations (e.g. historical water, flow of water, chemistry of water, application of water, temperature of water), what do we learn about the future imaginaries of what NOLA will / could / ought to become?

I am currently at the Ecological Society of America annual conference, so I am a bit limited on time to dig into New Orleans. I want to share the link below to the NoLA Urban Water plan. Even the nomenclature of 'urban water' allows us to think a bit deeper about how natural resources take on new characteristics, transformations, and meanings based on the spaces they inhabit. For instance, what does it mean for water to be Urban and how might that designation change how it is governed or interpreted?  

Furthermore, in thinking through the Field School's call to investigate Slavery and Labor, what might be the work of creating specifically urban waters? What forms of scientific knowledge and technological devices make urban water legible?

In asking these questions I'm thinking through a recent presentation I saw by Billy Hall who called attention to the wedding of environment and race in Baltimore City as a mechanism to encourage policies of segregation. I'm inclined, as we move into New Orleans, to think further on this provocation to examine how powerful social perceptions are wedded to techniques of governance to achieve publicly oriented outcomes. 

https://livingwithwater.com/blog/urban_water_plan/about/

Resilience is a term that is widely embraced by many in city management and planning. It holds the positive gloss not just of recovery but bouncing back better. To my ears, it has become one of many anthems of the Anthropocene, a kind of restrained tempo thrumming along through communities that will adapt to climate change (or seasonal-to-subseasonal climate variability post Trump). They will mitigate, innovate, transform, strategize in order to endure unanticipated shocks, both chronic and acute.

NOLA is one of 100 Resilient Cities named by the Rockefeller Foundation sometime in 2013. Like others selected across the globe, the city of New Orleans would benefit from the resources of a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO), an expert in resilience to be hired to work within city governance to develop a strategic plan; NOLA's was published in 2015. Selection of the cities for the "100 Resilient Cities" initiative was difficult, a competitive bid for resources based primarily on a city's recent experience with disaster, usually connected to a weather or climate extreme (e.g. hurricane, flood, etc). Resources were provided via the hierarchy of the CRO, sometimes to hire staff, develop training for the community, and create working groups and to write the stratetic plan. As one former directer of NOLA RC said of this opportunity provided by Katrina, the disaster that qualified NOLA for Rockefeller monies, it demonstrates the need for an the age of resilience. In what ways is resilience measured, accounted for, adjudicated and managed through or in spite of this strategic document? 

The language of resilience includes many terms that I think of as a collective imaginary of utopian preparedness, a vision for a nation that is--in the parlance of the weather prediction community in which I work--weather ready. Through the filter of resilience, then, vulnerability (another problematic term) is eradicated through individual action, community engineering, and adherance to strategic policies like 100RC. Yet how does this image of NOLA, one of "mindful citizenry" engaged in "partnerships" around the city (terms used in their summary video), match with the realities of living in NOLA, today and in the everyday future?

Resilience is also a term widely critiqued in STS and the broader social science and humanistic disciplines. For good reason. Common questions in this literature: What counts as resilience? Who decides? At what costs? Resilience against what? What does resilience elide? How has the discourse of resilience reframed individual and community accountability? What is the political economy of resilience? I'm interested in the discourses of preparedness and planning, and "the eventness" of disaster, as Scott has highlighted many times. But my concern is not just to critique and tear down concepts like resilence (or vulnerability). I worry that we then evicerate common lexicons of hope and imaginaries of the future that do some good. How are we as field campus participants and those who re-envision or reveal the quotidian reflexive? How do we triage the Anthropocene amid our own state of compromise--as scholars, participants in Capitalism, in post colonialism, humans? What are our ethical commitments? How do we make good?