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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 article was mainly backed by statistical evidence and cited other reesearch articles and studies. The authors, I assume, used their own extensive backgrounds in the field to support their arguments and views. 

The app was actually designed originally as an experiement by the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence. The members of their Affirmative Consent Division were given the app as an experiment on the context of discussion around cosent. The idea was to test how discussion about consent affects the consent itself and the acts following. The Institute page doesn't really say where the funding is from, though I'd say privately through members and sponsors.

This system definitely shouldnt be used as a means of diagnosis when a doctor is completely stumped for answers. Its a tool but not a reliable resource.

The purpose of this program is to educate students to become global leaders (dubbed Phoenix Leaders) in radiation disaster response. The program aims to use experience from the aftermath for Hiroshima to create an overarching program of “Radiation Disaster Recovery Studies”, with multiple disciplines of Medicine, Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sciences, Sociology, Education and Psychology. The eventual aim is to create a new and evolving system of response, safety, and security. 

There doesn’t seem to be much coverage for the program, and it is pretty obscure outside of academia.

The membership is mostly volunteers. Anyone who volunteers to donate blood, work at a center, or provide care is automatically a member of the organization as a whole. Of course, they have employees as well to provide professional care services and the organization is governed by a board as well as a CEO and President. 

"'In the globalized world of the 21st Century,'... simply stopping disease at national borders is not adequate"

"Early advocates of such [biodefense] efforts...argued that adequate preparation for a biological attack would require a massive infusion of resources into both biomedical research and public health response capacity" 

"Security experts and some life scientists worry that existing biosafety protocols focused on material controls in laboratories will not be sufficient as techniques of genetic manipulation become more powerful and routine, and as expertise in molecular biology becomes increasingly widespread."

"In all of them, we find that health experts, policy advocates, and politicians have competing visions about how to characterize the problem of biosecurity and about what constitutes the most appropriate response. Thus, the question is not just whether certain events (or potential events) have been characterized as "biosecurity" threats that require attention; we also need to ask what kind of biosecurity problem they are seen to pose, what techniques are used to assess them, and how certain kinds of responses to them are justified"