Thinking through this article and Vermeylen's, something we might consider in ATX is how we conceptualize community itself. It is so easy in EJ-contexts to make communities our object of study and analysis, which can erase identities and exclusions within them...
How is ecological harm and gentrification experienced by LGBTQ people in Austin? Women? Etcetera?
What is the energy sector's relationship to racial capitalism? How is its current configuration shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, state bureaucracy, and corporate investment?
Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.
For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city?
Providing a historical overview of EJ-related issues and organzing in Austin, Walsh's piece gestures to the need for deep engagement with those already doing what we might consider 'quotidian anthropocenic' work in our field campus locations. What are our ethical relationships and obligations to those we collaborate with during our time physically in the city? What should they be after? How can our analytical contributions help organizations like PODER and other local activists fighting gentrification and biased zoning laws?
It has become a common refrain to ask how the Anthropocene is experienced locally, but what about corporeally? A growing body of evidence (such as this report from the APA) demonstrates that climate change and its effects are linked to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, PTSD, and a host of emotions including anger, hopelessness, and despair. After Hurricane Katrina, it was estimated that 1 in 6 survivors experienced PTSD, and Harvard researchers found that suicidal ideation heavily spiked. While discussions of these forms of ecological grief (or "ecoanxiety" by psychologists) have largely focused on mental health, economic impacts, and big storms rather than less spectacular forms of ecological change (especially in New Orleans), I am particularly interested in finding how embodied apprehensions of human vulnerability are experienced within the city, and how these have affected approaches to mortality and practices around death and dying.
Aside from talking to more deathcare professionals in the area (something I hope to do once we arrive), I have found rather robust evidence that there is increased engagement with mortality in New Orleans. Death Cafes, which are community gatherings to discuss death and combat taboos that make it an inappropriate topic of conversation, have regularly met for the past two years. Furthermore, preliminary research on funeral homes in NOLA seems to indicate increased interest in green internment options, with multiple organizations framing green/natural burial as a gentle option that "returns the body to nature." While means of casket burial and cremation have historically worked to “correctly” order death and the dead through preservation or means of obliterating the body as quickly as possible (organizing principles that have that rendered death as an interruption rather than a natural process), these endeavors seem to accept to the pressing realities of individual and earthly mortality by framing death as an opportunity for renewal - a sort of "circle of life."
Although it is less related to my own area of expertise, one of most surprising discoveries I made was that New Orleans was home to the original "Before I Die" wall. In 2013, artist Connie Chung created a participatory chalkboard in an abandoned house with a fill-in-the-blank question of “Before I die, I want to ______.” (The next day, the wall was completely filled with responses.) Iterations of this project are now in over 75 countries. While Chung does not specifically cite anthropogenics as a source of interest or inspiration, its original placement on a building that stood as a sort of monument to ecological devastation makes me strongly think that there are broader connections to be made here about somatic attunements to climate change.
Based on what I have found thus far regarding narratives surrounding the socioeconomic state of New Orleans, there are two predominant ones I have come across: New Orleans as the “laggard,” the city of play but not work, of poor educational quality, and the other of New Orleans as a "comeback" city shaping to a knowledge-based economy following Hurricane Katrina. The former reminds me of racist stereotypes typically used to describe groups of people deemed not to fit within the white supremacist narrative of progress. The other, post-Hurricane Katrina narrative, is portrayed in the media as a phoenix rising from the ashes, one of the “most rapid and dramatic economic turnarounds in recent American history.” I felt an almost visceral reaction to the assertion of one article that “It would be wrong to say the hurricane destroyed New Orleans public schools, because there was so little worth saving even before the storm hit.” I cannot help but be reminded of “terra nullius,” the “empty land” narrative implemented by colonial powers to seize and control land, dismissing the people residing on the land as insignificant to their broader aim of economic and political dominance. In place of public schools, charter schools are perceived as an improvement—but what of the people who were displaced due to the storm and long to return, yet cannot afford to send their children to a charter school and would be forced to bus their kids across the city? Many people end up not returning to New Orleans as a result. I find it interesting to compare these pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina narratives of New Orleans with the information I find from sources such as this one: a shrinking African American population, fewer young people, less affordable housing, increased segregation, etcetera. What do these demographic changes in the city imply for the “ecosystem” deemed ideal for Innovation hubs? As this article asserts, “New Orleans is making a big name for itself among innovative industries and entrepreneurs and the city’s unique vibe plays a big role in that.” On the other hand, City Councilmember Kristen Palmer asserts that “People have been consistently pushed out…If we lose our people and our culture, we lose our city.” What implication does this “burst” in innovation in New Orleans have for both the Anthropocenics of the city as well as its culture, a culture that is stereotyped as one long “party” with intermittent “emptiness,” as opposed to the realities of the people who have resided in the city for generations, or even the people who moved away after the Hurricane and long to return but to no avail? I am curious to see how education, job training (or lack thereof), and issues of housing feed into the anthropocenics of the city. How do grassroots, social justice and environmentalist activists and organizations (such as this one) perceive the changes in the city following the Hurricane compared to innovation hub technicians and CEOs? How do the social and environmental outcomes of Hurricane Katrina fit within the history of "natural" disasters and climate change in New Orleans? I think it is important to keep articles such as this one central to our focus as we move forward with this project.
I’m interested in how universities, cities, and corporations develop the physical embodiment of the knowledge economy in U.S. city centers in an attempt to foster global connections, and the effect this tends to have on historically black and brown communities. What I find interesting about New Orleans is the manner in which following Hurricane Katrina (which some allege was a human-made disaster), gentrification of the city was spurred on, particularly as predominantly young, white people seeking to work in tech start-ups and corporations moved in to what is deemed yet another potential site for “Innovation.” This made room for corporations and richer residents to move in at the expense of working-class neighborhoods . As council member James Gray argued, “The area desperately needs activity and development…if the city of New Orleans is going to recover, if the Lower Ninth is going to recover- we need development. We cannot turn it away.” I came across an advertisement for an event hosted by INNO that will be held in New Orleans for a “global innovation conference” whereby innovators can “forge the connections that matter.” While I am in the preliminary stages of my research in Houston regarding the Innovation District being built in Midtown Houston, I see astonishing parallels with New Orleans and similar questions arise. Many of the employees at tech companies I have interviewed thus far speak of the notion of the “ecosystem”: the confluence of higher educational institutions, cities, corporations, and start-ups that provides the ideal environment for businesses to thrive and innovation to flourish. However, who is included in this ecosystem and who is left out? What implications (if any) does the use of such environmental terms (ecosystem) to describe innovation economies have for the anthropocene? What does innovation mean and who does it benefit? How do these innovation districts and corridors potentially exacerbate racial inequity in the city, even as they claim to be working for the benefit of all? How do infrastructural neglect and gentrification contribute to health, educational, economic, and environmental disparities, and will innovation in any way seek to address these issues, or merely perpetuate the status quo?
I'm also interested in the narratives that arise surrounding natural disasters, particularly the linear fashion in which events are described. There is a beginning, middle, and end supposedly: but what about before and after, and what about the reoccurence of these disasters? In what ways do these narratives leave out the stories of people who did not get to see the "silver lining" of a disaster? Who did not get to witness the rebuilding of the city? Many of those people moved to Houston and went through another hurricane, Hurricane Harvey. It would be interesting to trace the connections between these two cities.
Finally, in relation to the topic of slavery, I am interested in the surge of conversations surrounding reparations, particularly in New Orleans and Houston in light of the uneven effects of hurricanes on certain populations. I am intrigued both by memorialization of slavery as well as attempts by elected officials such as Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston and celebrities such as Danny Glover to conduct research (bill H.R. 40) on how to compensate for the U.S.'s history and presence of slavery and racism.
As a researcher interested in the growing relationship between ecological grief and rituals surrounding death and dying, New Orleans has always been a place of special curiosity. The city’s historic cemeteries are arguably some of the most beautiful and certainly some of the most visited graveyards in the world. Since New Orleans lies below sea level and generally has soil too water-saturated for earth burial, the dead have historically been buried above ground in “Cities of the Dead,” where rows upon rows of mausoleums are designed to protect casketed bodies from the defilement of water, microbes, and ‘vermin’ as a means of warding off decay. Gesturing towards anxieties about the ontological pollution of the human subject, these structures often seem to be constituted through desires to remain intelligible after death and act to inhibit the incorporation of the corpse into subterranean, more-than-human worlds.
However, as anthropogenic climate change threatens these kinds of normative deathways, the sustainability of such practices have begun to be called into question. It is estimated that on average, burials in the United States annually use 30,000,000 board feet of wood, 104,000 tons of steel, 1,600,000 tons of concrete, and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid. (I'm interested in finding out about more specifics about material usage in NOLA, but am still searching for that information.) This becomes even more important when considering that cemeteries within the city have repeatedly been disturbed by hurricanes and floods in recent years, an issue that remains even further inland from Lake Pontchartrain due to now regular flooding. When a storm hits, it can wreak havoc by destroying or displacing mausoleums, buildings, signs, and decorations. Even more disturbingly, vaults and caskets buried below ground can surge to the surface and float away. This has become a macabre pattern across the South in recent years: the waters brought by Hurricanes Katrina, Gustav, Ike, Irma, and Harvey all washed away caskets, in some cases breaking them apart and leaving local medical examiners and federal mortuary response teams with the rather grim task of identifying remains and parsing the environmental damage caused by potential leakages and run-off.
This new normal has brought wider attention to how the ways we “do death” affect built and natural environments, enmeshing funeral practices in broader questions of ecologically responsible citizenship and collaborative survival with nonhuman life. How has New Orleans responded to these crises, both materially and existentially? Is there growing recognition of individual and earthly mortality, and how is that reflected in mortuary practice? What options best attend to these forms of climatic upheaval?
