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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! 

Since the system itself is open sourced, there are code libraries to enhance the work piece and modelling it.

“The stack”

Back-end: Linux, PHP, Apache/Nginx, MySQL or PostgreSQL

Front-end: AngularJS, Javascript, Html, CSS. Built with NodeJS and Browserify. Using Leaflet for mapping, and a collection of other frontend libraries”

Due to the trust crisis between the groups, public health cannot be improved via the service from the medical centers. General publics are refused to get into contacts with aid workers.

Under OSHA Law, the employers must ensure their workers are in a safe workplace that does not contain any serious hazards according to the OSHA safety and health standards.

With the employers’ rights and responsibilities, OSHA has provided a list of methods to maximize the safe conditions within the workplace. For example, they have provided free Law Poster relevant to OSH Act for download and posting.

“Notify OSHA within 8 hours of a workplace fatality or within 24 hours of any work-related inpatient hospitalization, amputation or loss of an eye (1-800-321-OSHA [6742]).”

The central argument of the film is about the choice that needs to made upon with the emergency responders in a complex situation such as the lack of medical service within the country. The choices include which patient gets helped and which one are not with the lack of material supplies and the medical technology available. Or making choices if MSF member continues to stay in such condition to assist the locals getting medical treatment.

1. Patients: to get access with digital and gamified mental health assessments to diagnose themselves and gain self-awareness. After assessment, the patient might want get to a talk with the health professionals to have an ideal solution to the problem. Even by not getting frequent contacts with health professionals, the patients still can track their own health status with the system.
2. Providers: will receive patients’ data and recorded into a dashboard data to view the profiles more efficiently. The dashboard function also allows the track on the history and current progress. Relevant assessment also can be send out to the patients regularly in order to assist both provider and patients to understand the situation more clearly.
3. Organizations: organizations might include from a range of primary care center to hospital emergency room, with the data obtained from the patient, coordinated care can be provided. It is also a great tool to analysis the patients and form a study.

The vulnerable populations have addressed in this policy are the populations affected by the environmental contamination. “While the actor-survivors were dying a slow, painful, convulsive death… The contaminated water was collected but the “victims” died.”

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The report is provided with both English and Japanese for the technical professionals to study.  For the general publics, this report summary (fact sheet) has provided in six major languages  to assist them to gained a broad understanding to the works.