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I hope to be involved in projects that aim to gather scientific evidence to inform environmental decision making and advocate for greater equity and justice in environmental governance. Through this work, I hope to learn the skills needed to engage in community based research and leverage community knowledge as expert knowledge. In my department, things are often siloed and issues are only seen through one perspective. I really want to gain more experience in collaborating with a wide array of stakeholders to come up with approaches to mitigate the environmental injustices experienced in under-resourced communities.

Thinking through this article and Vermeylen's, something we might consider in ATX is how we conceptualize community itself. It is so easy in EJ-contexts to make communities our object of study and analysis, which can erase identities and exclusions within them...

How is ecological harm and gentrification experienced by LGBTQ people in Austin? Women? Etcetera? 

What is the energy sector's relationship to racial capitalism? How is its current configuration shaped by legacies of settler colonialism, state bureaucracy, and corporate investment? 

Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.

For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city? 

Providing a historical overview of EJ-related issues and organzing in Austin, Walsh's piece gestures to the need for deep engagement with those already doing what we might consider 'quotidian anthropocenic' work in our field campus locations. What are our ethical relationships and obligations to those we collaborate with during our time physically in the city? What should they be after? How can our analytical contributions help organizations like PODER and other local activists fighting gentrification and biased zoning laws?

META: Water seems to be one important medium through which NOLA envisions the “impacts” of the Anthropocene—scarcity, abundance, temporalities and spatial distributions, management of, and hazards that emerge in its context. Less is said about the causal or attributional aspects of the Anthropocene. How might water function as an entry point into the assemblages of local anthropocenics?

I found the NOLA Hazard Mitigation Plan for 2018, which frames the impacts of the Anthropocene as an intersection of weather extremes amid climate change and evolving vulnerabilities of its people. Four of seven items in the executive summary note water as central to local interventions: flood awareness, flood repair, flood mitigation, flood infrastructure. Too much water or water in the wrong places and the aftereffect of water on infrastructure and lives. One expression, then, is preparedness.

MACRO: Mitigation is an interesting analytic for the Anthropocene. In the US mitigation plans are shaped by the 1988 Stafford Act (which amended the 1974 Disaster Relief Act). Constraints on communities come through rules, regulations, policies, (dis)incentives, and surveillance by state and federal authorities. Much of this is bound by economic and administrative discourses.

Goals are set in this document—broken out by timelines, activities, priorities, and capabilities. Another expression is classification of anthropocenics by subfields and accounting metrics. How do we measure progress and what is deferred to the future, 5-10 years out from today, a goal that has no tangible accountability but is named and acknowledged. What are the practices of naming, responsibility, and making (in)visible in the Anthropocene?

BIO: One new initiative, Ready for Rain, in particular is of interest to me as it highlights the more neoliberal vision for how the public should self-regulate risk and mitigate harm. I hear this as an extension of a government agency program to make the nation Weather Ready. Other bullets highlight “green” buildings, energies, and infrastructures. These could be examples of how the city envisions the Anthropocene feedback loop of humans changing/planning for climate alterations, which is a fairly typical lens.

Some questions: What does the water do? What does the water know? If we trace water in all its instantiations (e.g. historical water, flow of water, chemistry of water, application of water, temperature of water), what do we learn about the future imaginaries of what NOLA will / could / ought to become?

It has become a common refrain to ask how the Anthropocene is experienced locally, but what about corporeally? A growing body of evidence (such as this report from the APA) demonstrates that climate change and its effects are linked to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, PTSD, and a host of emotions including anger, hopelessness, and despair. After Hurricane Katrina, it was estimated that 1 in 6 survivors experienced PTSD, and Harvard researchers found that suicidal ideation heavily spiked. While discussions of these forms of ecological grief (or "ecoanxiety" by psychologists) have largely focused on mental health, economic impacts, and big storms rather than less spectacular forms of ecological change (especially in New Orleans), I am particularly interested in finding how embodied apprehensions of human vulnerability are experienced within the city, and how these have affected approaches to mortality and practices around death and dying.

Aside from talking to more deathcare professionals in the area (something I hope to do once we arrive), I have found rather robust evidence that there is increased engagement with mortality in New Orleans. Death Cafes, which are community gatherings to discuss death and combat taboos that make it an inappropriate topic of conversation, have regularly met for the past two years. Furthermore, preliminary research on funeral homes in NOLA seems to indicate increased interest in green internment options, with multiple organizations framing green/natural burial as a gentle option that "returns the body to nature." While means of casket burial and cremation have historically worked to “correctly” order death and the dead through preservation or means of obliterating the body as quickly as possible (organizing principles that have that rendered death as an interruption rather than a natural process), these endeavors seem to accept to the pressing realities of individual and earthly mortality by framing death as an opportunity for renewal - a sort of "circle of life." 

Although it is less related to my own area of expertise, one of most surprising discoveries I made was that New Orleans was home to the original "Before I Die" wall. In 2013, artist Connie Chung created a participatory chalkboard in an abandoned house with a fill-in-the-blank question of “Before I die, I want to ______.” (The next day, the wall was completely filled with responses.) Iterations of this project are now in over 75 countries. While Chung does not specifically cite anthropogenics as a source of interest or inspiration, its original placement on a building that stood as a sort of monument to ecological devastation makes me strongly think that there are broader connections to be made here about somatic attunements to climate change.