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Environmental Injustice Concepts

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Digital collection of resources for understanding and using critical concepts to characterize and respond to environmental injustice. 

Luísa Reis-Castro: mosquitoes, race, and class

LuisaReisCastro
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As a researcher, I’m interested in the political, ecological, and cultural debates around mosquito-borne diseases and the solutions proposed to mitigate them.

When we received the task, my first impulse was to investigate about the contemporary effects of anthropogenic climate change in mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans. But I was afraid to make the same mistake that I did in my PhD research. I wrote my PhD proposal while based in the US, more specifically in New England, during the Zika epidemic, and proposed to understand how scientists were studying ecological climate change and mosquitoes in Brazil. However, once I arrived in the country the political climate was a much more pressing issue, with the dismantling of health and scientific institutions.

Thus, after our meeting yesterday, and Jason Ludwig’s reminder that the theme of our Field Campus is the plantation, I decided to focus on how it related to mosquitoes in New Orleans.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the yellow fever virus it can transmit are imbricated in the violent histories of settler-colonialism and slavery that define the plantation economy. The mosquito and the virus arrived in the Americas in the same ships that brought enslaved peoples from Africa. The city of New Orleans had its first yellow fever epidemic in 1796, with frequent epidemics happening between 1817 and 1905. What caused New Orleans to be the “City of the Dead,” as Kristin Gupta has indicated, was yellow fever. However, as historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby points out, the slave trade cannot explain alone the spread and persistance of the disease in the region: "Alterations to the landscape, combined with demographic changes resulting from the rise of sugar production, slavery, and urban growth all contributed to the region’s development as a yellow fever zone." For example, sugar cultivation created ideal conditions for mosquito proliferation because of the extensive landscape alteration and ecological instabilities, including heavy deforestation and the construction of drainage ditches and canals.

Historian Kathryn Olivarius examines how for whites "acclimatization" to the disease played a role in hierarchies with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people and how for black enslaved people "who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their white owners, strengthening the set of racialized assumptions about the black body bolstering racial slavery."

As I continue to think through these topics, I wonder how both the historical materialities of the plantation and the contemporary anthropogenic changes might be influencing mosquito-borne diseases in New Orleans nowadays? And more, how the regions’ histories of race and class might still be shaping the effects of these diseases and how debates about them are framed?

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michael.lee
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In this article, the author discusses the Chernobyl disaster and its impact on those who were exposed to the nuclear radiation. Moreover, she discusses the healthcare, disaster aid, and financial aid that were provided or withheld from those who survived and were affected by the disaster. The author highlights the interaction of emergency response, politics, healthcare, and economics.

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michael.lee
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The NYS Ebola Preparedness Plan was a multilateral set of guidelines and protocols set forth by the Office of the Governor of the State of New York in anticipation of a potential outbreak of the ebola virus disease, also known as ebola hemorrhagic fever, in the State of New York. The stated goal of the policy was to prevent the further transmission and spread of the disease in the event of a isolated cases. The policy included guidelines for isolation, quarantine, treatment, and transportation, and involved numerous organizations, including various hospitals, EMS agencies, public safety departments, and transportation authorities. 

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michael.lee
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The primary function of the US Department of Veterans Affairs is to provide benefits and support military veterans following their time in service. Although benefits have been provided to military veterans since the Revolutionary War, the VA administration was formally founded in 1930. The department now provides healthcare, insurance, education, financial assistance, and burial/memorial service to military veterans and their families.