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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! 

The main argument was that there are "biosocial phenomena" or "structural violence" that lead to the tendency for certain diseases or lack of treatment in populations, particularly those in poverty. Their three major findings were: they can make structural interventions to "decrease the extent to which social inequities become embodied as health inequities", proximal interventions can reduce premature morbidity and mortality, and structural interventions "can have an enormous impact on outcomes.

Stephen Collier is an Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in NYC. He has a Ph.D in Anthropology from U.C. Berkeley and has conducted research in Russia, Georgia, and the U.S. His expertise is in political systems (post-socialism and neoliberalism), infrastructure, social welfare, and contemporary security. His knowledge in infrastructure and politics gives him a more top-down perspective of emergency response; Collier can assist with creation of organizations and groups for large scale emergencies that would require international collaboration. 

Andrew Lakoff is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, and is an anthropologist of science and medicine. He research is in globalization processes, human science, and the implications of biomedical technology. He has a similar position in emergency response as Collier, where he sees global, political, and technological interactions that would effect how we prepare and respond to international emergencies. He's written essays and other books on emergency preparedness such as "The Risks of Preparedness: Mutant Bird Flu" and "Disaster & the Politics of Intervention".