South LA community emissions reduction plan
South Los Angeles Community Emissions Reduction Plan; can be useful for pointers when building the AB617 case for Santa Ana
Fieldnote Mar 20 2023 - 6:18am
AB617 meeting
South LA
March 9th 2023
Asking community members about stories in south LA (SLA) and any initiatives they are taking
Air Pollution, human health and environmental injustice
Zotero bibliography: connecting pollution, health, and social Indicators as a measure of environmental injustice
Fieldnote Mar 10 2023 - 2:44pm
Jill started by discussing Environmental injustice
Envt equalities also stem from well-intended advocates in the non-profit sector
EiJ Interview with Naomi Yoder, 2.7.2023
EiJ Interview with Naomi Yoder, 2.7.2023
EiJ Santa Ana Stakeholder Meeting 1.31.23
Meeting notes:
Introductory remarks by Kim Fortun:
Fieldnote Jan 29 2023 - 8:21pm
AQMD Environmental Justice Advisory Group meeting
27th Jan 2023, 12:00 pm, Zoom
Elena Sobrino: anti-carceral anthropocenics
elenaWhy 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.
The literature presented here has tried to focus on impacts of human health owing to air pollution to better measure environmental injustice.