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Why 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.

My interest in NOLA anthropocenics pivots on water, and particularly the ways in which capitalist regimes of value and waste specify, appropriate, and/or externalize forms of water. My research is concerned with water crises more generally, and geographically situated in Flint, Michigan. I thought I could best illustrate these interests with a sampling of photographs from a summer visit to NOLA back in 2017. At the time, four major confederate monuments around the city had just been taken down. For supplemental reading, I'm including an essay from political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. (who grew up in NOLA) that meditates on the long anti-racist struggle that led to this possibility, and flags the wider set of interventions that are urgently required to abolish the landscape of white supremacy. 

Flooded street after heavy rains due to failures of city pumping infrastructure.

A headline from the same week in the local press.

Some statues are gone but other monuments remain (this one is annotated).

A Starbucks in Lakeview remembering Katrina--the line signifies the height of the water at the time.

Reading:

Adolph Reed Jr., “Monumental Rubbish” https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/06/25/monumental-rubbish-statues-torn-down-what-next-new-orleans

P.S. In case the photos don't show up in the post I'm attaching them in a PDF document as well! 

Scott Knowles is the Head of the Department of History at Drexel University in Pennsylvania. He specializes in the history of technology, disaster, and public policy. He has a number of other publications that are relevant to the DSTS Network including a book, The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America, and co-authored "Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster, and a volume on the Fukushima disasters. He is not professionally situated among emergency responders; however, he does conduct research on the subject.

This program is viewed as a novelty to the public, as it is the first college of its kind to offer a degree in homeland security and emergency preparedness. A number view it as a step in the right direction and an innovation. The program does not appear to have been around for long enough to yeild graduates, so those results are still unkown.

this report has spread to a number of academic institutions and their websites. This report seems to be relatively old, so I was unable to find any news reports that cited it. It appears that there are a number of other articles related to this topic; however, I was unable to find any direct connections between them and this report.

By examining the bibliography, it appears that this report was produced after the author conducted a great deal of research including interviewing other experts in the field and reading many other texts on the subject. One could also gather that the author examined publications by agencies relevant to the topic such as theIAEA and the US NRC.

This article didn't really have anything related to emergency response in it;however, I did look at how initial treatment following an exposure to HIV can decrease your chances of it taking hold in your body.

I could not find the answer to this prompt as there were not citations listed on the article.

This article discusses emergency response in the historical incidents and described why emergency responders had difficulty rescuing victims and why there were so many fatalities. The article did not, however, discuss the details of the emergency response, it focused much more on how the situation happened and the political and social aftermath.